Shut Your Eyes - Chapter 8
Title: Shut Your Eyes
Authors: goten0040 and garnetice
Chapter: 8
Rating: M
Ship(s): Kendall/James, Carlos/Stephanie, maybe more.
Summary: Future!Fic. Kendall returns to L.A. six years after Big Time Rush disbanded. James has been missing for years. Imagine how things change when James reappears in his life. And he needs help.
Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
---
Drugs always seemed pointless.
Even when Big Time Rush was in its prime and wide-eyed groupies and big muscled roadies were trying to slip us anything and everything, I just didn’t get it. It wasn’t about morals, or being straightedge, or true to myself or whatever. It was about control.
I’d never been a perfectionist, like Logan. I’d never had obsessive compulsive desires or a nervous breakdown when I didn’t get my way. Most people told me I was laid back. Chill.
But at the same time, I liked knowing where I stood. I liked being the one people looked to for a solution when there was a problem. I didn’t mind taking the edge off every once in a while with some Jack on the rocks, but drugs? They’d always seemed so…permanent.
I got it, logically. Thing about control was that it felt nice at first, giving it up.
With drinking, there were levels. Buzzed, trashed, blackout wasted. The few times the last one had happened to me were accompanied by hangovers so severe I puked for hours and then curled up beneath my comforter waiting for blessed darkness. Praying for the sick feeling in my stomach and the persistent, electric pain in my head to pass. Then I swore I’d never party that hard again, and the memory of it all kept me from ever even thinking about making a career out of alcoholism. Eventually the memories would recede and I’d start the cycle all over again, but it never got out of hand.
With drugs, I knew I wouldn’t get that choice. No matter how hard the day after hit me, I’d want more. I’d think I could handle it, but I wouldn’t have been able to. That kind of chemical shit fucked people smarter than me over on a daily basis. It wrested their control away, forced them to wave the white flag.
That’s the other thing about control. Once you surrender it completely, I knew you never got it back.
I’d always been too scared to let go like that.
It was kind of hilarious that my own weakness, the niggling fear that nobody ever guessed I had was what kept me from giving in. I mean, at the time BTR’s fame spiked, I was already beginning to realize that I was too fucked up to function. I’d figured, why add to the pile?
But I won’t lie. I came close to experimenting, once. It was towards the end of our fifth national tour. The last show was back home, in LA. My sexual revelation had hit hard and fast about two years prior, and the media was starting to hound me about my complete lack of interest in female-kind. Plus, I was getting older. Playing for the Wild was starting to feel like it might be a pipe dream. And I guess the weight on my shoulders got to be too much. It was starting to show.
We were playing at some shady little bar that was kind of way below our pay-grade. It was a special favor to Kelly, who was dating a guy that was, well, frankly, way below her class. But she wanted to give him and his friends a taste of fame, so she booked us at his favorite bar. Never mind that the guy was edgy and hated boy bands. She was convinced the whole gig was a good idea, and bullied Gustavo into agreeing.
So anyway, we paid our dues and played the show to the smallest amount of applause I’d heard during the course of our entire career. Afterwards, we were milling around, being social with Kelly’s skeezy boyfriend’s skeezy friends. I had to piss. In the dank, dimly lit bathroom, I went about my business, examining the faded, ripped stickers of bands long ago on the walls. Neon, bold, big letters, small letters. They were hypnotizing.
While I was washing up, kind of lost for soap but knowing Logan would chew me out if my hands weren’t sanitary, some scraggly guy I recognized from the band that had gone on before us entered. He seemed alright. We talked. He offered me LA Turnaround, which I later found out was a stupid street name for amphetamines. Which isn’t the point, but I always found that name ironic. LA Turnaround. Like you come out here and lose your soul.
Maybe you do. Look at the way James slipped through the cracks.
Anyway. I nearly took it. My hand reached out, and I nearly had the pills in my mouth before I stopped and turned around. I never could say what made me stop. My friends. My future. The realization that it would’ve been a poor coping mechanism.
My preferred poor coping mechanism was obviously attempting to outrun the world.
Whatever. That’s the closest I’d ever gotten to fucking around with drugs. Well, the hardcore shit, anyway.
Meaning my knowledge was kind of limited. So, after leaving the coffeehouse, I went straight back to my apartment. It was a tiny place; I’d picked it up with the intention of using it whenever I came back to Hollywood, but in all actuality, I’d barely ever spent more than a few days there. It was dusty and unfamiliar, and I had to strip the sheets off the mattress before I could find somewhere clean to sit down. I firmly resolved that I’d either have to sell it when I headed back out to Minnesota or shell out the cash to pay somebody to upkeep the place.
And then I pulled my laptop out of my suitcase and wikipediad addiction.
I knew it was stupid; consulting Dr. Internet when I had Dr. Mitchell and about a million other MDs right in my backyard. I’d heard that the web creates hypochondriacs, but I never understood why until I did my own google search. Wikipedia wasn’t much help, but Google Images? Man, that shit is frightening.
I didn’t know what James was on. Heroin or crack or fucking LA Turnaround. He hadn’t exactly been holding out his arms so I could scour them for needle marks. But none of the drugs I looked up were exactly shiny happy examples of a fun time. The withdrawal symptoms looked even worse.
I was scared. For James, and for myself. I didn’t know how to help him.
But I wasn’t willing to call Logan and Carlos and recruit them into ganging up on our friend, either. I didn’t know why, but I wanted to keep him for myself for a little while.
Maybe I thought I could save him all by myself.
I’d always been good at being a hero. My friends had always expected it of me. I knew their expectations had fallen a lot in the past few years, and there was a big chance that I just wanted to show them up. To show them I still could be the guy they remembered.
Or maybe I was just trying to confront my abandonment issues head on, and I didn’t want them to see how weak all of it made me.
Either way, I didn’t pick up the phone and tell them that James and I had a dinner date.
Which I still had a few hours to kill before attending.
Mostly I pandered about the apartment, cleaning off whatever surfaces I could with paper towels and water. It was busy work. Made it easy not to think.
Except, like I said, the place was tiny. I was finished soon enough, and I had nothing better to do than lie back on the bare mattress and reminisce about the good old days.
It killed me.
I remembered the first acting job Big Time Rush scored. A commercial, to sponsor some ridiculous sports drink that Gustavo was addicted to. James marathoned like, a full day of TV and then stood in front of the mirror for hours, practicing facial expressions he’d stolen from sitcoms and dramas. Like he had to practice how to crinkle his eyes and laugh, like emotions were something he didn’t actually know how to feel.
The commercial was horrible. We were all corny and awkward and our grins were a little maniacal, but the thing I remembered most was watching it air a few weeks later.
James had the smile of a stranger.
It wasn’t on the air anymore. BTR was way past its prime. But even so, every once in a while I’d look it up, on YouTube, for chuckles or nostalgia or to show a casual fuck what my life used to be like before hockey took over.
And every time I did, I’d remember him standing there, in front of the mirror, rehearsing how to be human.
I bit my lip and wondered, there in my empty apartment, if that was some kind of warning sign that I’d missed. I re-catalogued every single interaction James and I had ever had, poring over it all for- I don’t even fucking know. An early indicator?
James wasn’t the kind of person who just- gave up on life. He used to be vibrant. Fucking high on life. And yeah, he’d been a little ethereal, untouchable, to some people. I’d heard friends call him aloof. Most people interpreted it as arrogance, and some of it was. But anyone who really knew him knew that underneath the façade of vanity and ambition was a sweet, vulnerable guy. As a kid, he’d even been shy. Guarded.
Like he’d always known that a heart was something a person had to protect. Like he hadn’t learned it as he grew, like the rest of us.
By the time I was supposed to meet James, I was freaking out. I worried so much that I didn’t realize I’d bitten through the skin of my lip until blood blossomed, tangy and metallic in my mouth.
I cursed quietly to myself, just as the buzzer rang.
James was downstairs. The whole elevator ride to the ground floor, I sucked on my own blood the entire way down, the sharp taste keeping me in real-time, reminding me that I was stuck in some sick nightmare.
He was sitting on the concrete wall outside my place, pulling a cigarette from a pack.
Black was always the color I wore when I hadn’t done the wash in weeks and wanted to hide the dirt, but James’s shirt was so grimy it was brown in parts, so worn that it was gray in others. I could see it in the filth lining the creases of his fingers, the way his hands trembled when he struggled with the lighter.
This was not the boy I’d always known.
My lips thinned in a line I couldn’t help as I approached. He looked up, his expression blank. His eyes were haunted, like I was a ghost he could see through, and he was both awed and terrified by my presence. I felt like he was hoping I’d walk on by, while simultaneously hoping I’d stay. Cigarette smoke spiraled towards the clouds until the two were indistinguishable.
“Hey,” I said.
He nodded, “You ready?”
“As I’ll ever be,” I offered him a weak grin, and I felt like blood still stained my teeth, “Where do you want to eat?”
James hesitated, and I could smell nicotine and cheap cologne on his fingers, his hair, “Let’s get out of this town. Somewhere far away.”
So we hitched a cab to the Crab Cooker in Newport Beach. It was kind of a long haul, and the fare was a ripoff, but James seemed content to spend the hour’s ride staring out the window like it was his first glimpse of the world.
The restaurant smelled like spicy chowder, barbecue, and their trademark breadsticks. James scooped up a handful of saltwater taffy from the glass bowl that stood near the entry way and chewed his way through half of it while we were waiting to give our order. His gaze darted from the stuffed sharks and swordfish that hung overhead to the other diners, unwilling to settle on any one thing. He seemed so distracted.
I, on the other hand, was hyper-vigilant. The chair beneath me, the hardness of the table and the texture of the paper placemat, the sweating plastic glass of water beneath my hands; it was all there.
And James’s eyes. I’d never realized how much I’d missed them. I’d never seen their exact color anywhere else in my travels. Other people’s stares had never held the same weight.
He caught me looking, “What?”
“Just- I was just thinking about when we were in first grade, and Jenny Tinkler asked you out.”
A smile curved James’s mouth, just for a second, “Before she tried to burn my face off?”
“Yeah, that,” I smiled back, “And then you turned her down, and she poured the class aquarium over your head.”
“Poor Goldie the goldfish was never the same, after that,” James mourned, “And then she went after you.”
“I ran like hell,” I said.
James agreed, eyes drifting again, “You always were a runner.”
It felt like an accusation. He’d always been like that. He could see the easiest way to cut a person down without even trying. They always said the best offense was a good defense, but I knew better. The best offense was a good fucking offense. James had that down.
He was trying to ward off our impending conversation.
I kind of wanted to let him. We could’ve spent the rest of the night talking about the good old days, about being kids back in Minnesota.
Back when people and movies and stories told us things would get simpler when we grew up.
But fairytales lied, apparently.
Our waitress arrived. We ordered. She left.
I took a deep breath, determined not to wimp out, “James.”
His head snapped up from studiously examining his torn cuticles.
“I know.”
“Know what?”
“That you’re on- something.”
James’s gaze went steady, his hands stilling from where he’d been drumming on the table, his expression measured.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
That’s the other thing I never liked about drugs. Shit got scary. It wasn’t just the actual symptoms, or how addicts become a ghost of their former selves. It was about how an addict was willing to cheat and lie, to betray a friend at the drop of a hat.
Although, I supposed I hadn’t exactly been a very good friend.
“Right,” I lifted an eyebrow and tried to look wiser than I actually was, “You’re still a really terrible liar.”
“I’ve never been a terrible liar,” he replied, not looking fooled, “That was you.”
True enough.
“Nice scar, by the way,” he commented idly, pointing to my forehead, “Did you get it by making wild accusations towards someone else who didn’t appreciate it?”
Wow. I’d forgotten how good he was at redirection. My hands twitched, and I wanted to cover up the evidence of everything I’d been going through, but I stood my ground, “Don’t change the subject.”
James slumped back in his chair, “I’m fucking starving.”
Understatement of the year. I could see his ribs through his threadbare shirt.
“Otherwise,” he continued, “I’d get a cab back to LA right now.”
We both knew he wouldn’t have been able to afford it.
Our food arrived at the table, steaming hot. It smelled delicious. My stomach felt like it might revolt.
I used to be blunt. The old James would’ve expected it from the old Kendall.
So I tried being blunt, “Have you tried rehab?”
James sighed.
For a long, long time, I didn’t think he was going to answer.
Then, finally, painstakingly, he spoke.
“I went to the methadone clinic. Twice. It’s not the same. They discontinued my treatment for,” he made air quotes with his fingers, “Noncompliance.”
I knew fuck-all about methadone clinics, or if they were a Good Thing. I thought I might’ve read something during my exploration of Google that they used it to treat heroin. Which made my gut clench and my throat squeeze closed and my jaw stiffen, because I was really hoping it wasn’t- well.
Heroin had been of the most frightening searches I’d done.
But I didn’t comment on it, just nodded my head and said, “Oh.”
“What? Nothing judgey to say?” he snorted, “You’re not going to preach?”
“What do you want me to say, dude?”
“I don’t want you to say anything,” he replied, almost violently, “I didn’t ask you to come back into my life and babysit me.”
“I’m not trying to do that,” I told him, trying to control my voice, “You were the one who called me and asked for money.”
“I figured you owed me that much,” he muttered.
He’d been kinder this afternoon. Now he was different. More in command of his faculties, but somehow wilder. Less inhibited.
Even knowing what had contributed to it, to his spacey eyes and his mood swings, didn’t make me feel better.
“How about we save the talking until- until we get back to my place. Get you cleaned up.”
James glared at me.
“Not- that way. Just- you know. Showered. Rested. Like we talked about this afternoon?” I reminded him.
“Whatever,” James said, ignoring me in favor of his food.
Only, by the end of the meal, all he’d done was shift it around on his plate.
---
Chapter Nine
Authors: goten0040 and garnetice
Chapter: 8
Rating: M
Ship(s): Kendall/James, Carlos/Stephanie, maybe more.
Summary: Future!Fic. Kendall returns to L.A. six years after Big Time Rush disbanded. James has been missing for years. Imagine how things change when James reappears in his life. And he needs help.
Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
---
Drugs always seemed pointless.
Even when Big Time Rush was in its prime and wide-eyed groupies and big muscled roadies were trying to slip us anything and everything, I just didn’t get it. It wasn’t about morals, or being straightedge, or true to myself or whatever. It was about control.
I’d never been a perfectionist, like Logan. I’d never had obsessive compulsive desires or a nervous breakdown when I didn’t get my way. Most people told me I was laid back. Chill.
But at the same time, I liked knowing where I stood. I liked being the one people looked to for a solution when there was a problem. I didn’t mind taking the edge off every once in a while with some Jack on the rocks, but drugs? They’d always seemed so…permanent.
I got it, logically. Thing about control was that it felt nice at first, giving it up.
With drinking, there were levels. Buzzed, trashed, blackout wasted. The few times the last one had happened to me were accompanied by hangovers so severe I puked for hours and then curled up beneath my comforter waiting for blessed darkness. Praying for the sick feeling in my stomach and the persistent, electric pain in my head to pass. Then I swore I’d never party that hard again, and the memory of it all kept me from ever even thinking about making a career out of alcoholism. Eventually the memories would recede and I’d start the cycle all over again, but it never got out of hand.
With drugs, I knew I wouldn’t get that choice. No matter how hard the day after hit me, I’d want more. I’d think I could handle it, but I wouldn’t have been able to. That kind of chemical shit fucked people smarter than me over on a daily basis. It wrested their control away, forced them to wave the white flag.
That’s the other thing about control. Once you surrender it completely, I knew you never got it back.
I’d always been too scared to let go like that.
It was kind of hilarious that my own weakness, the niggling fear that nobody ever guessed I had was what kept me from giving in. I mean, at the time BTR’s fame spiked, I was already beginning to realize that I was too fucked up to function. I’d figured, why add to the pile?
But I won’t lie. I came close to experimenting, once. It was towards the end of our fifth national tour. The last show was back home, in LA. My sexual revelation had hit hard and fast about two years prior, and the media was starting to hound me about my complete lack of interest in female-kind. Plus, I was getting older. Playing for the Wild was starting to feel like it might be a pipe dream. And I guess the weight on my shoulders got to be too much. It was starting to show.
We were playing at some shady little bar that was kind of way below our pay-grade. It was a special favor to Kelly, who was dating a guy that was, well, frankly, way below her class. But she wanted to give him and his friends a taste of fame, so she booked us at his favorite bar. Never mind that the guy was edgy and hated boy bands. She was convinced the whole gig was a good idea, and bullied Gustavo into agreeing.
So anyway, we paid our dues and played the show to the smallest amount of applause I’d heard during the course of our entire career. Afterwards, we were milling around, being social with Kelly’s skeezy boyfriend’s skeezy friends. I had to piss. In the dank, dimly lit bathroom, I went about my business, examining the faded, ripped stickers of bands long ago on the walls. Neon, bold, big letters, small letters. They were hypnotizing.
While I was washing up, kind of lost for soap but knowing Logan would chew me out if my hands weren’t sanitary, some scraggly guy I recognized from the band that had gone on before us entered. He seemed alright. We talked. He offered me LA Turnaround, which I later found out was a stupid street name for amphetamines. Which isn’t the point, but I always found that name ironic. LA Turnaround. Like you come out here and lose your soul.
Maybe you do. Look at the way James slipped through the cracks.
Anyway. I nearly took it. My hand reached out, and I nearly had the pills in my mouth before I stopped and turned around. I never could say what made me stop. My friends. My future. The realization that it would’ve been a poor coping mechanism.
My preferred poor coping mechanism was obviously attempting to outrun the world.
Whatever. That’s the closest I’d ever gotten to fucking around with drugs. Well, the hardcore shit, anyway.
Meaning my knowledge was kind of limited. So, after leaving the coffeehouse, I went straight back to my apartment. It was a tiny place; I’d picked it up with the intention of using it whenever I came back to Hollywood, but in all actuality, I’d barely ever spent more than a few days there. It was dusty and unfamiliar, and I had to strip the sheets off the mattress before I could find somewhere clean to sit down. I firmly resolved that I’d either have to sell it when I headed back out to Minnesota or shell out the cash to pay somebody to upkeep the place.
And then I pulled my laptop out of my suitcase and wikipediad addiction.
I knew it was stupid; consulting Dr. Internet when I had Dr. Mitchell and about a million other MDs right in my backyard. I’d heard that the web creates hypochondriacs, but I never understood why until I did my own google search. Wikipedia wasn’t much help, but Google Images? Man, that shit is frightening.
I didn’t know what James was on. Heroin or crack or fucking LA Turnaround. He hadn’t exactly been holding out his arms so I could scour them for needle marks. But none of the drugs I looked up were exactly shiny happy examples of a fun time. The withdrawal symptoms looked even worse.
I was scared. For James, and for myself. I didn’t know how to help him.
But I wasn’t willing to call Logan and Carlos and recruit them into ganging up on our friend, either. I didn’t know why, but I wanted to keep him for myself for a little while.
Maybe I thought I could save him all by myself.
I’d always been good at being a hero. My friends had always expected it of me. I knew their expectations had fallen a lot in the past few years, and there was a big chance that I just wanted to show them up. To show them I still could be the guy they remembered.
Or maybe I was just trying to confront my abandonment issues head on, and I didn’t want them to see how weak all of it made me.
Either way, I didn’t pick up the phone and tell them that James and I had a dinner date.
Which I still had a few hours to kill before attending.
Mostly I pandered about the apartment, cleaning off whatever surfaces I could with paper towels and water. It was busy work. Made it easy not to think.
Except, like I said, the place was tiny. I was finished soon enough, and I had nothing better to do than lie back on the bare mattress and reminisce about the good old days.
It killed me.
I remembered the first acting job Big Time Rush scored. A commercial, to sponsor some ridiculous sports drink that Gustavo was addicted to. James marathoned like, a full day of TV and then stood in front of the mirror for hours, practicing facial expressions he’d stolen from sitcoms and dramas. Like he had to practice how to crinkle his eyes and laugh, like emotions were something he didn’t actually know how to feel.
The commercial was horrible. We were all corny and awkward and our grins were a little maniacal, but the thing I remembered most was watching it air a few weeks later.
James had the smile of a stranger.
It wasn’t on the air anymore. BTR was way past its prime. But even so, every once in a while I’d look it up, on YouTube, for chuckles or nostalgia or to show a casual fuck what my life used to be like before hockey took over.
And every time I did, I’d remember him standing there, in front of the mirror, rehearsing how to be human.
I bit my lip and wondered, there in my empty apartment, if that was some kind of warning sign that I’d missed. I re-catalogued every single interaction James and I had ever had, poring over it all for- I don’t even fucking know. An early indicator?
James wasn’t the kind of person who just- gave up on life. He used to be vibrant. Fucking high on life. And yeah, he’d been a little ethereal, untouchable, to some people. I’d heard friends call him aloof. Most people interpreted it as arrogance, and some of it was. But anyone who really knew him knew that underneath the façade of vanity and ambition was a sweet, vulnerable guy. As a kid, he’d even been shy. Guarded.
Like he’d always known that a heart was something a person had to protect. Like he hadn’t learned it as he grew, like the rest of us.
By the time I was supposed to meet James, I was freaking out. I worried so much that I didn’t realize I’d bitten through the skin of my lip until blood blossomed, tangy and metallic in my mouth.
I cursed quietly to myself, just as the buzzer rang.
James was downstairs. The whole elevator ride to the ground floor, I sucked on my own blood the entire way down, the sharp taste keeping me in real-time, reminding me that I was stuck in some sick nightmare.
He was sitting on the concrete wall outside my place, pulling a cigarette from a pack.
Black was always the color I wore when I hadn’t done the wash in weeks and wanted to hide the dirt, but James’s shirt was so grimy it was brown in parts, so worn that it was gray in others. I could see it in the filth lining the creases of his fingers, the way his hands trembled when he struggled with the lighter.
This was not the boy I’d always known.
My lips thinned in a line I couldn’t help as I approached. He looked up, his expression blank. His eyes were haunted, like I was a ghost he could see through, and he was both awed and terrified by my presence. I felt like he was hoping I’d walk on by, while simultaneously hoping I’d stay. Cigarette smoke spiraled towards the clouds until the two were indistinguishable.
“Hey,” I said.
He nodded, “You ready?”
“As I’ll ever be,” I offered him a weak grin, and I felt like blood still stained my teeth, “Where do you want to eat?”
James hesitated, and I could smell nicotine and cheap cologne on his fingers, his hair, “Let’s get out of this town. Somewhere far away.”
So we hitched a cab to the Crab Cooker in Newport Beach. It was kind of a long haul, and the fare was a ripoff, but James seemed content to spend the hour’s ride staring out the window like it was his first glimpse of the world.
The restaurant smelled like spicy chowder, barbecue, and their trademark breadsticks. James scooped up a handful of saltwater taffy from the glass bowl that stood near the entry way and chewed his way through half of it while we were waiting to give our order. His gaze darted from the stuffed sharks and swordfish that hung overhead to the other diners, unwilling to settle on any one thing. He seemed so distracted.
I, on the other hand, was hyper-vigilant. The chair beneath me, the hardness of the table and the texture of the paper placemat, the sweating plastic glass of water beneath my hands; it was all there.
And James’s eyes. I’d never realized how much I’d missed them. I’d never seen their exact color anywhere else in my travels. Other people’s stares had never held the same weight.
He caught me looking, “What?”
“Just- I was just thinking about when we were in first grade, and Jenny Tinkler asked you out.”
A smile curved James’s mouth, just for a second, “Before she tried to burn my face off?”
“Yeah, that,” I smiled back, “And then you turned her down, and she poured the class aquarium over your head.”
“Poor Goldie the goldfish was never the same, after that,” James mourned, “And then she went after you.”
“I ran like hell,” I said.
James agreed, eyes drifting again, “You always were a runner.”
It felt like an accusation. He’d always been like that. He could see the easiest way to cut a person down without even trying. They always said the best offense was a good defense, but I knew better. The best offense was a good fucking offense. James had that down.
He was trying to ward off our impending conversation.
I kind of wanted to let him. We could’ve spent the rest of the night talking about the good old days, about being kids back in Minnesota.
Back when people and movies and stories told us things would get simpler when we grew up.
But fairytales lied, apparently.
Our waitress arrived. We ordered. She left.
I took a deep breath, determined not to wimp out, “James.”
His head snapped up from studiously examining his torn cuticles.
“I know.”
“Know what?”
“That you’re on- something.”
James’s gaze went steady, his hands stilling from where he’d been drumming on the table, his expression measured.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
That’s the other thing I never liked about drugs. Shit got scary. It wasn’t just the actual symptoms, or how addicts become a ghost of their former selves. It was about how an addict was willing to cheat and lie, to betray a friend at the drop of a hat.
Although, I supposed I hadn’t exactly been a very good friend.
“Right,” I lifted an eyebrow and tried to look wiser than I actually was, “You’re still a really terrible liar.”
“I’ve never been a terrible liar,” he replied, not looking fooled, “That was you.”
True enough.
“Nice scar, by the way,” he commented idly, pointing to my forehead, “Did you get it by making wild accusations towards someone else who didn’t appreciate it?”
Wow. I’d forgotten how good he was at redirection. My hands twitched, and I wanted to cover up the evidence of everything I’d been going through, but I stood my ground, “Don’t change the subject.”
James slumped back in his chair, “I’m fucking starving.”
Understatement of the year. I could see his ribs through his threadbare shirt.
“Otherwise,” he continued, “I’d get a cab back to LA right now.”
We both knew he wouldn’t have been able to afford it.
Our food arrived at the table, steaming hot. It smelled delicious. My stomach felt like it might revolt.
I used to be blunt. The old James would’ve expected it from the old Kendall.
So I tried being blunt, “Have you tried rehab?”
James sighed.
For a long, long time, I didn’t think he was going to answer.
Then, finally, painstakingly, he spoke.
“I went to the methadone clinic. Twice. It’s not the same. They discontinued my treatment for,” he made air quotes with his fingers, “Noncompliance.”
I knew fuck-all about methadone clinics, or if they were a Good Thing. I thought I might’ve read something during my exploration of Google that they used it to treat heroin. Which made my gut clench and my throat squeeze closed and my jaw stiffen, because I was really hoping it wasn’t- well.
Heroin had been of the most frightening searches I’d done.
But I didn’t comment on it, just nodded my head and said, “Oh.”
“What? Nothing judgey to say?” he snorted, “You’re not going to preach?”
“What do you want me to say, dude?”
“I don’t want you to say anything,” he replied, almost violently, “I didn’t ask you to come back into my life and babysit me.”
“I’m not trying to do that,” I told him, trying to control my voice, “You were the one who called me and asked for money.”
“I figured you owed me that much,” he muttered.
He’d been kinder this afternoon. Now he was different. More in command of his faculties, but somehow wilder. Less inhibited.
Even knowing what had contributed to it, to his spacey eyes and his mood swings, didn’t make me feel better.
“How about we save the talking until- until we get back to my place. Get you cleaned up.”
James glared at me.
“Not- that way. Just- you know. Showered. Rested. Like we talked about this afternoon?” I reminded him.
“Whatever,” James said, ignoring me in favor of his food.
Only, by the end of the meal, all he’d done was shift it around on his plate.
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Chapter Nine