North & West

Fifteen

West and I were completely smashed, drunk as hell.

Not slight tipsy and not a bit like a swaying sailboat – we were about as drunk as was possible in order to stay alive and mobile. If we were a ship, we'd not only be the sunken ship at the bottom of the sea, but we'd have been the storm that caused the sinking.

It'd been kind of funny. After things had gotten a bit rocky – admittedly, my fault again, but then again, when wasn't I the one fucking up? - West and I had still talked, but it'd been off and it had almost felt wrong.

So I'd invited him to the beach with me and he'd come along, a brown paper bag that I knew all too well clutched in his hand and a pile of random blankets in the backseat of his car. It'd been weeks, almost a month since I'd bought anything from Kevin, but that certainly didn't mean I hadn't had anything to drink.

I lost track of all the alcohol I'd drank, ranging from cheap beer to a cursive handwritten bottle of wine who's title I couldn't read and then to finally, my favorite: whiskey, from my good old friend Jack Daniel.

West and I sat on the beach, a few of the blankets from his car piled beneath us. It was around six pm and the sky was slowly growing dark, my mind taking in the change of color and wondering if I could somehow simply change that way and make myself better, more beautiful.

I always hated the part of being intoxicated where I thought about everything beyond any point of reason. I wondered about the beginning of the earth and everything in between heaven and hell – if that even existed – and I wondered when it'd all began. But on the worst days –the one's where my thoughts seemed to sound like an alarm in my head, ricocheting around in my head until I was sober like a sick reminder that I'd made yet another mistake – I thought about who I was.

And I knew, without an ounce of disbelief, that I had no clue who that person was, who North Hill was, and that little thought scared me more than any horror film I'd ever seen combined altogether.

“West?” My voice sounded far away.

“You know, I think we should go do something,” He paused, spotting a couple with tattoos lining almost every inch of their skin. “Let's go do that.”

“Do what?” I briefly wondered if my words were slurred and if West was wondering the same.

“Get tattoos.”

I stood up, either because my mind was too fogged up and muddled to make a coherent decision or because I just really wanted to do something, heading for the nearest stand. Rationally, I knew that I'd either regret my decision later or just blow it off entirely – the latter was more likely, really – but I wanted to do it.

For fucks sake, my lungs and my liver were going to give out any day if I continued filling them with the toxins that I was – and as I'd proved to not only everyone around me, but myself, too – I couldn't change.

West grabbed my hand, threading our fingers together and swinging our clasped hands between us. I'd never want to admit it out loud, but his hands were just the right size for mine and when he grabbed my hands without asking, brushing his thumb against the back of my palm in the way that he always did, I couldn't get enough.

Everything about being with him felt so right and it just made me feel absolutely disgusting to be taking something, even something as minor as what could potentially be a summer fling, from someone who deserved more than what he believed.

My thoughts seemed to be loosing their muddled appeal – the one thing I loved the most – so I reached across West and I and grabbed the bottle of Jack Daniel's that he was holding loosely between the fingers of his other hand.