So He Went Straight Down The White Line, Let A Good Thing Down, It Wasn't Driving Her Crazy
Chapter: 16/?
Song: Where Happiness Lives- Magnet
Word Count: 2,899
Summary: "there’s a million miles to go, to where happiness lives…."
This is where the short chapter that I wrote awhile ago to set this whole story up kicks in. I had to change it a little bit which is kind of a bummer because I kind of adored that chapter. But it’s still okay.
When she gets back to her place she slams the door and then immediately cringes because she knows that everyone around her is sleeping and just because she’s pissed and probably won’t get any sleep tonight doesn’t mean that they should suffer as well.
So she overcompensates for that by tiptoeing through her apartment, gently setting down her clutch on the kitchen table and slowly sliding off her shoes by her closet in her room.
She’s starting to feel the anger subside, but just barely. She should’ve listened when Shannon told her that this would all blow up in her face because that’s exactly what happened. She pushed him away when he wanted her and now he’s changed and she doesn’t see the old Lee ever coming back. At least not to her. He’ll be perfect for someone else and a few months ago, that was the plan. He was supposed to find someone else and she would’ve been thrilled because that meant that two people would be happy and her theory of falling in love only once
would be true. But now the thought of him with someone else makes her burn. Makes her want to throw her clutch and her shoes against the wall and slam every door in her apartment so the people sleeping peacefully with their uncomplicated lives around her would feel, only for a moment, the kind of frustration she’s been going through.
It has to come to an end sometime. She can’t keep doing this. He’s been out and drunk for the past four nights and her mind and body can’t and won’t keep up with that. She may not get love again but she doesn’t deserve this.
She’s dreading that conversation, that confrontation. He’ll probably beg her to stay and tell her he loves her a few more dozen times and she’ll have to refuse and walk away; leaving him broken and hurt and he’ll write a bunch of sad songs about her. Or, given the unpredictable way he’s been acting lately he could be cool with it and walk away leaving her staring after him.
She doesn’t like not knowing what’s going to happen. She would like to be in control.
She gets into bed with a sigh. Her hair is wet from the shower she took and she’s got a slight stress and alcohol induced headache that will keep her up for awhile but at least she’s alone and it’s quiet. Her eyes are only closed for a second when her phone rings and she pinches the bridge of her nose as she reaches blindly with her other hand onto her nightstand feeling around for her phone. She should’ve put it on silent. She would have if her mind wasn’t going a mile a minute trying to figure out how he was going to act.
“Hello?”
“Molly, hey!” A slurred but recognizable voice yells into her ear and she moves the phone away from her ear and then back.
“Andy, I’m hanging up.”
“No, no, no, no.”
“Andy.”
“You have his keys.” He manages to say, his voice breaking off into a laugh at something that may or may not be funny on his end.
“Whose keys?”
“Lee’s. He gave you his keys and now he can’t get into his apartment and he needs to get into his apartment. Unless of course you want him going home with this girl that he’s talking to now. I’m sure she’d take him home.”
She doesn’t want that.
“You better make up your mind, Molly; I can predict that his tongue will be firmly in this chick’s mouth if you don’t say something in five seconds.”
“I’ll go to his place and unlock the door.” She rushes out and rolls her eyes when Andy laughs at her. “Are you taking him home now?”
“We’re going to start heading that way.”
“Alone?”
“What?”
“Are you bringing him home alone?” She says in an annoyed tone which goes unnoticed by drunken Andy.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll get the hose out and break those two up, he’ll be all yours.”
“I don’t want him to be all….” She trails off when her phone beeps, letting her know that the call has been disconnected.
She tosses the phone onto the bed and gets up, pulls on a pair of jeans and slips on some flip flops and a straightens the tank top she had been wearing and grabs her clutch that has his keys in it off the kitchen table and she’s back out the door, slamming it again, not giving a damn about her neighbors.
She gets to his place before they do and the plan was to open the door, chuck the keys inside and take back off but that all changes when the door swings open. It’s like something inside of her was switched on. She’s suddenly overly curious about everything. She’s been to his place a lot but she’s never really looked around. She’s never lingered.
She slowly creeps inside; she’s got sometime before they get here. She can take a quick peek and be out before anyone notices and makes a big deal about it.
The living room and kitchen are pretty familiar to her but the bedroom; his bedroom, is her main focus. She’s never spent much time in it really. In bed with him doesn’t count.
She walks over to the window, past the unmade bed and pulls back the curtain. The view of the city is pretty spectacular and if they were different people and were in a normal relationship that would allow them to lie in bed together and watch the sun come up that’s what she would like to do. She drops the curtain and turns her attention to the guitars resting against the wall in the corner. There’s an old acoustic one that looks like it’s been used more times than anyone can count, a new, shiny one, and an electric one. She knows nothing about this side to him; the musician side. She simply didn’t care to learn about it. That was something a girlfriend, or hell, even a friend would talk about and get to know about and in her mind, she really wasn’t either of those. She runs her fingers across the strings, making a sad, hollow sound. She wonders if this will be the kind of sound that they’ll make when she tell him they’re over and he takes the first route. There’s probably a song book in the apartment somewhere. She vaguely remembers him telling her that he wrote his own songs and she’s overcome with the desire to find it. Maybe her wrote something that was so obviously about her? Would it be happy and loving or sad or angry? Would it basically tell her to fuck off in pretty poetic language that could be set to a haunting acoustic melody?
She’s got the drawer open in his nightstand, snooping around for it when she hears a loud bang on the apartment door. She sighs and closes the drawer and straightens up, hurrying her way to the door.
When she opens it Lee and Andy are leaning against the opposite wall in a fit of giggles.
“Molly!” Lee’s voice is pure drunken joy as he runs into her not open arms and she has no choice but to catch him.
“Thanks for coming over, Molly.” Andy tells her as he starts to stumble down the hallway.
“Where are you going?”
“I have a lovely lady waiting for me downstairs.”
“You’re just going to leave me with him?”
“He’s not a stranger, Molly. From what I hear you know him pretty intimately. Like, six nights a week. Sometimes more than that. I know about the day of five times.”
Molly blushes furiously. Apparently Lee’s also a chatty drunk.
“Andy…”
“You’ll be fine. Just do what you always do with him, if you know what I mean?” He laughs at himself and at Molly’s dirty look as he gets into the elevator and Molly is left alone with a severely intoxicated yet happy man in her arms.
“You’re so pretty.” He tells her and she sighs and helps him into the apartment, his hands groping at her, looking for any available skin that he can brush his fingertips and normally, if he were sober and she wasn’t annoyed that this is the fifth night in a row that he’s come home from some random, dirty bar, completely drunk, she probably would’ve been groping right back, had his shirt off and pulling his zipper down by now.
He clumsily falls onto the couch after she basically drops him there and starts to kick off his shoes while she moves away, but he reaches after her.
“Baby.”
She rolls her eyes. The pet names always pick up when he’s like this and she never believes that he means any of them.
“Where are you going, come back?” He relaxes on the couch, feet crosses at the ankles and arms over the back. “You can’t just leave me here, I’ve been thinking about you all night.”
She narrows her eyes at him from where she’s standing in the kitchen, an empty glass in her hand.”I’m sure you have.” She says sarcastically. Were you thinking about me while you were about to make out with that girl while Andy was on the phone with me, she thinks in her head.
“What are you doing? Come sit with me.” He pats the seat next to him.
“I’m getting you some water.” She says flatly, her voice bordering on cold. She hates repeating herself and they’ve been repeating the same stupid script over for the past four nights.
“Oh.” He laughs and she rolls her eyes again. If she does that anymore they’re going to get stuck like that. “Can you get me some aspirin too? Advil…something?”
“We’re all out of that?” She used the last four last night. Two for him to aid the inevitable hangover and two of her to soothe her tired mind.
“No.” He mumbles and she turns on the tap to pour him some water. “There are in the guest bathroom. In the medicine cabinet in the guest bathroom.” He clarifies and she turns off the faucet and walks over to him and places the glass into his hand that was actually reaching out to touch her in some way.
She exhales heavily when she gets out of earshot of him, not that he would notice anyways. His head is pretty foggy right now and he tends to only process what he wants to. She sighs again as she opens the cabinet door and starts to look for aspirin. She finds the clear bottle on the top shelf and pulls it down, a small plastic bag filled with white power coming down with it, dropping into the sink.
She stares at it for a long time. She’s not even sure that she understands what she’s seeing for the first few seconds. But then the bitter reality hits her and she tosses the aspirin to the side, bouncing off the wall near the showers and skidding onto the ground and snatches the bag and with tears or anger stinging at her eyes and runs back out into the living room.
“What the hell is this?” She yells at him and he sits up, shocked that this is happening, and really, she’s shocked too. She holds up the bag so he can see it, her fingernails, painted a bubblegum pink grip into it, threatening to tear it. The innocent shade is a sharp contrast to the danger of what she’s holding. “Hey.” She snaps at him when he doesn’t answer and he knows that she’s not fooling around.
“Baby…”
“Stop that.” She says through clenched teeth. “Just answer the fucking question.”
“You clearly know what it is.”
“Then why do you have it?” Her voice breaks and he looks down at his feet, wishing he had kept his shoes on because he can feel that she’s going to end up running out of here and he’d rather not have to chase her in bare feet.
“It’s not…it’s…”
“What? It’s not yours?”
“No, it’s mine but I don’t use that, I don’t do that anymore and you know that.”
“Then why do you still have it?”
“I don’t know. It was left over.” He lies. “Andy get it to me I didn’t know what to do with it.”
“It’s left over or Andy gave it to you?”
“I….”
“What Lee?”
“I didn’t know what to do with it.” He repeats. He’s way too drunk to come up with a good argument.
“Get rid of it, toss it, flush it, you’ve seen movies, you know what they do with this shit. You don’t keep it tucked away in the guest bathroom.”
“I know, it was stupid…”
“And I don’t believe you.”
“What? You don’t think that it’s mine?”
“No, I don’t think you’ve stopped.” She’s so serious it makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up and he moves his foot into his shoe, starting to put it on because he can feel her slipping away.
“You know that I’ve stopped.”
“I don’t know that. You’re out with your friends every night coming home drunk and who knows what else.”
“They’re my friends…”
“They’re the ones that got you into this to start with. You hanging out with them and just keeping this around the house is like an alcoholic with a fully stocked wine cellar.”
“Hey, don’t act so surprised.” Now he starts to yell, the alcohol taking over. “You knew what you were getting into when you started this with me, I told you everything. You knew about this.”
“You told me you were done, you promised me that. And I told you that I wasn’t going to put up with that.”
“So what are you going to do now? What are you going to do about it?”
That’s the wrong thing to say and judging by the way his eyes widen as soon as it leaves his lips she knows that he knows that.
“I’m leaving, that’s what I’m going to do. For good.” She frantically looks around the room for her clutch. She can’t remember where she put it down and she needs it to get back into her place. Her keys are in it.
“I’m sorry, okay?” He pleads and she shakes her head. “I’m sorry I fucked this up, I’m sorry I fucked all this up, it’s my fault, I love you and you don’t love me and I hate that and I don’t deal with that kind of rejection very well.”
“I don’t care.” Where the fuck is her fucking bag?
“Molly.” He says her name softly and touches her wrist and she rips her hand away.
“Don’t you dare touch me.”
“Why? What the fuck are you so afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid of anything.”
“Bullshit. I am asking you to love me and that terrifies you.”
“You’re drunk and probably high or some shit.”
“I’m drunk but I know that I’m right. I love you and you’re scared. Why won’t you love me?”
She stares at him hard. “I won’t love you because I don’t love you. I could never love someone like you, you’re pathetic, and you have nothing.”
“C’mon, Molly.”
She’s clearly hurt him but she doesn’t care. She wants to dig the wound a little deeper. Maybe rub a little salt in there too.
“No, you’re living off your Daddy’s money and you say that you’re going to have a career as a musician or some shit like that but how long have you been trying to make that work and how many people know who you are? What have you done? No one. Nothing. No one cares about you. I don’t care about you. I made a huge mistake when I agreed to go out with you that first time. I should’ve ignored you and listened to my instincts when they told me you were a dead end street with nothing on it. You’re a drunk and an addict and you’re never going to amount to anything and I should’ve ended this a lot sooner.”
He leans back on the couch, chewing on his lip trying to formulate a response.
“I’m real sorry, Molly. I’m sorry I’m not like your precious Brad.” He wants to bring his name up, bring some pain to her for all that she’s caused him.
But instead she just laughs bitterly, like she knew that he was going to go there. “You are nothing like my husband.”
“Your dead husband.” He mumbles but it’s loud enough for her to hear because she gasps and he sets his jaw, preparing for the blow.
She doesn’t disappoint. It’s more like a punch, an open handed punch that will definitely leave a mark on the side of his face, it’s already making his eyes water as he desperately clutches at it, trying to comfort it and protect himself for the possibility of another hit.
“Fuck you Lee.” She throws the bag at him and it falls to the floor. “I’m sorry I ever wasted my time on you.”
By the time he peels his hand away from his face and blinks out the tears the door is closing behind her.