Skin and Bones (boyxboy) ✓

Chapter Two

[A/N] It's near the beginning of the month, time to flog my patreon! Even on small books like this one. The external link at the bottom of the chapter takes you there if you're curious. Hugs all around.

Mark was definitely annoyed with me, but probably not nearly as annoyed at me as I was with him... Still I wasn't unhappy, but then again I also wasn't flying off of the walls in glee or shouting, red-faced and getting really invested in Mario kart with the others. Maybe this was just because I was drinking the non-alcoholic punch, the punch they had coloured a very appealing green brown, it looked like mulch and tasted just as shitty as the mixed one which was a jelly shade of red. 

It made absolutely no sense for me to me thinking about Zackary tonight.

Aside from Mark being a dick to me this whole thing didn't matter. Tonight I would scope around for some buddies to hang out with, get all festive with the lads and enjoy myself, and really that was more likely to piss Zack off than me getting irritated over Mark all night.

It was time to forget it, forget that I would be going home tonight on my own for the first time in a long time without at least the knowledge that there was someone else coming home eventually, someone else that I shared the large apartment with that I had never particularly wanted to move into anyway. For once I would return and see more than half the possessions, which were his, in the house missing, and my lamp. For once the light in the kitchen would be off, which it never was, even when Zack wasn't home because he always left it on. 

But like I said. Time to forget it, time to invest myself in the people around me rather than my own life, and the slight niggling thought at the back of my mind that reminded me that a failed relationship was a great indication that my life was falling to pieces around me without me caring or noticing. 

I headed towards the lads in the corner and chugged the rest of the punch down as I walked. They were laughing between then, red in the face and cackling, they looked like they were fun. I liked fun.

~⌣︵⌣︵⌣︵⌣︵⌣︵⌣~

It was thoughts like that, that landed me in confusing situations like this.

As I was sitting there on the slab of stone that was sticking out from the grass beneath me and I looked around, hearing the quickly fading laughter of some guys off in the distance, who I couldn't even discern from my friends or some random blokes, that I realised I maybe wasn't as sober as I had initially thought.

It was a weird blur, remembering how I got there, but the memories hadn't yet gone... it was more like they had been misplaced, shuffled out of order.

First I had been in the party, I'd drunken punch and I remembered laughing about something or other with a bunch of guys there. We'd resolved to go trick or treating at some point, I think, which I had agreed to for no other reason then I was very blatantly drunk.

Looking back I thought perhaps the clear red punch had probably been the non-alcoholic one, and not the other way around. That made more sense, it hadn't tasted great.

We had knocked on a couple houses and two houses hadn't come to the door, a lady had come and laughed and given us sweets from the bowl she had prepared for the kids and... I wasn't sure... I think there was a fourth house we went to where an older lady threatened to call the police or something, considering we were drunk I wouldn't have blamed her as a sober man.