In His Arms - Wonheon ( Wonho x Jooheon )

Chapter 11 : New Home

Behind pale eyelids, his eyes began to flutter.

Consciousness was something that dripped slowly into Jooheon. Painfully slow; drip by drip, like his body was fighting desperately for him to wake up yet his actual mind couldn’t understand the urgency or the need.

There was a thick fog clouding his skull that even as his body tried to ease itself slowly awake, his head felt too heavy and the room felt like it was spinning too fast. He felt horrible. Like his head wanted to split in half at any given second. There was a pounding too, constant and strong, like a pulse that drummed from one ear to the other, then back again to repeat the endless painstaking cycle.

A heartbeat, he realized. His heartbeat.

Jooheon groaned as he felt the sleep leak from his body, making him that much more aware of the throbbing in his head. He pressed his skull further into the pillow beneath him and gently shook his head, trying and failing to get rid of the ache. It was too strong.

God, what had he done last night?

But as he thought about it, even in his half asleep form, he knew he hadn’t had a drink the night prior and if he had, it was certainly not enough to result in this current state. Because he was utterly fucked up. Like disasterly. This was so much worse that the night of his twenty-first and that night had been so bad that just thinking about it made him want to throw up with the pungent taste of alcohol on his tongue. But this… this was like someone had a jackhammer inside his skull and was busy drilling away without any mercy on his behalf.

Jooheon groaned again and instead of trying to fool himself into keeping his eyes closed for a moment longer, he slowly cracked them open. At first everything was blurry. His vision was so fuzzy that for a few unsettling seconds he couldn’t even recognize his own bedroom. But then, as Jooheon squeezed his eyes shut to fight against the spinning room and re-opened them less than a second later, that unsettling feeling blossomed into something so much worse when he realized that the room he was in was most definitely not his own.

He blinked again, harder this time as if he could will the illusion away.

The room hadn’t changed. The walls were still an unrecognizable dark shade of taupe and the furnishing was all wrong and the curtains on the windows were pulled wide open and letting the sunlight flood in, which was something Jooheon never did.

He turned his head to the left, then the right and eyed two doors that faced each other from across the room; one showed him the outside world and the other seemed to be the entrance of the bedroom he was currently in. Jooheon stared hard at the door where the sunlight pooled. It wasn’t the light that left him staring in disbelief. No, it was much worse. Unlike his apartment, or anywhere remotely close to it, here there was no city skyline. There were no skyscrapers in the distance or brownstone apartments lined up like dominoes, not even a single billboard.

His brows furrowed. Just where the hell was he?

Jooheon picked his head up from the pillow and squinted as if he was seeing it wrong but no, all there was were tall green trees and light blue skies that seemed to stretch on for miles and miles on end. He tried to wrack his brain in order to remember what the fuck he had done the night before but it was all too cloudy when he tried to pinpoint the hours. He remembered being at the apartment, eating take out and watching that documentary Blackfish on Netflix that made him cry, but after that? After that it was like a black hole that churned endlessly and only got larger the more he tried to think.  

Which meant wherever he was, he had no fucking idea how he got here. What he did know, however, was that he needed to get the fuck out. Like pronto.