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sheepsandcattle · 5 years

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Chapter 6

Sometimes Curly wishes the world would just slow down around him.

It’s been a year and a half since he moved away and he feels like he’s been far far away from home forever but like he’s been in his new home for no time at all. He measures time by his highs and his come-downs and (occasionally, when he opens his curtains or leaves his room in the daytime) the way the world looks outside.

It’s not intentional, and he checks back in when he remembers to, but it’s just a nasty habit he’s formed -- one of many nasty habits.

He doesn’t know how he’s still paying his bills but he is (just about) and he doesn’t know how he keeps managing to pull himself together before he sees his mum again but he does. Just about. He doesn’t really even know how he’s awake or even alive honestly, because he only seems to eat when he’s high and only sleeps when he’s facedown on the carpet or on someone’s lawn or in his own sick that one time (two times).

Some days he wakes up missing money he doesn’t remember spending, and others he wakes up and finds notes he doesn’t remember making. He goes to parties and is rarely sure that he leaves the same house he’d entered, or if he’s lost time again - stepped into a house, got wasted, closed his eyes, signed out, then signed back in again in a whole other location. Hours and sometimes days slip away from him.

The days get so bloody blurry and he only has a few fond memories (and some not so fond) to show for the last couple of months. He just feels a bit like he’s paralysed, trying his best to come to grips with what’s happening around him before it races right past, all blurred lights and high pitches.

Then it’s March. March is a new beginning.

“I know you.”

That solar eclipse comes to mind, the one he saw from Cornwall in ’99. The man reminds him of freckles, laugh lines and off-coloured roots. That kind of expression that, in the way it rests, could be a smile or a scowl simultaneously.

He can’t see any of that from his spot on the kitchen floor though, sat with Jules under the table, but he sees the back of the distressed denim jacket drowning the man’s short frame -- sees the words ‘HOAX’ printed on the back, and it brings him back to a party that is otherwise quite forgettable.

The man can’t hear him, not from down here, but something in his gut swears that his acknowledgment will pull some invisible tether in the stranger’s chest and have his body turning, his eyes meeting Curly’s across the room, dragging him over like some kind of Donnie Darko space-time continuum shit.

That doesn’t happen.

What happens is Curly winces when a needle slides beneath his skin, as another boy presses his mouth to Freckles’ ear, smiling about whatever it is he’s whispering.

A swarm of leather, denim and tattoo-clad arms engulf Freckles and his boy then. Soon there’s not an inch of Freckles left in Curly’s view, now blocked by chanting and cheering men. He’s sure he hears a litter of "happy birthday!”s as he waits restlessly for them to slowly break away, allowing the man to come up for air, grin and all.

He sees Jeff ruffle Freckle’s hair before he’s shoved away playfully, further than Freckles looks like he has the strength to push, met shortly after with the blond’s middle finger.

“‘Kay Curls, you’re good,” Jules says with a nudge.

He’s warm all over; that good kind of ache that comes right before a shiver. He hums as he falls back onto the ground, thick, tight curls not quite cushioning his fall as effectively as he’d expected. He blames the Christmas haircut, not even close to grown out yet.

He knows it isn’t the time or place to be doing this.

He listens to Jules talk for a while, to him and to other people whose voices Curls doesn’t recognise. Time flies as he stares up at the underside of the kitchen table, breathing steady as Jules make deals beside him between conversations. It’s not until around an hour later, when his high is finally easing that he stops drawing shapes with his fingers on the wood above his head and crawls out from beneath the table.

Jules has disappeared. The kitchen is busy, the noise suddenly apparent now that he’s emerged from his hiding spot.

He loves all of the songs at this party and whispers the lyrics to himself as he bobs about the house, weaving through the crowds contently. Nobody really talks to him tonight because anyone that would usually buy from him has already brought from Jules. He’s not really sticking to any one place for long enough for anybody to spark up a conversation anyway.

He watches his mucky white trainers shuffle between boots and shoes, careful not to step or trip over anyone as he keeps himself busy exploring. He gets locked onto an ornament of a hippopotamus in the lounge for a while, before he drags himself away, forces himself to move on. Curls promises himself that he’ll be allowed to inspect the intricate details of the wooden carving later on, when he’s not seeing doubles and blurs.

Jules is probably elsewhere by now and Curly is bored and alone, stood in the corner of the kitchen with scissors in-hand. He’s busy watching a pair of black Dr Martens shuffling about a few feet away.

The scissors prod his belly as he snips at the front of the shirt he forgot he was trimming - remembers thinking about it but doesn’t remember starting. “Woops,” he whispers.

He only blinks and then black boots are right beside his trainers and suddenly there’s a hand covering his own.

“Hey- Hey!” Fingers wrap around Curly’s, tattooed knuckles stilling him as a voice asks, “what’re you doing, champ?”

He looks up and Freckles -oh, it’s Freckles- is frowning, even when Curly explains, “crop tops are back in. Just cuttin’ it.”

Freckles jacket’s gone now. He’s wearing a plain white shirt but it’s ripped on the shoulder and near the bottom and he’s got tattoos peeking out from the sleeves but they’re nothing like Curly’s; they’re large, flowing pieces that interlink as opposed to his own sticker-book skin.

Freckles huffs with a nod, humouring him and snapping him out of his daze in the process as he pries the scissors from his hands.

He suggests, “alright, well how about I do it for you, hm?”

Curly grins. “Well, how about that?”

Freckles chuckles a little, at him rather than with him, but it looks so nice on his face, like he’s been saving it for a special occasion.

Freckles says, “I’ve seen you drink more than you’ve breathed tonight, and weren’t you smoking with Dean before you set up shop under the table?” Oh yeah, he forgot about all that. He wants to defy the man’s judgement, say that skin popping is really nothing, and that they shared the hit under the table so he’s at no risk really, but Freckles has more to say. “You’re definitely not in the right state to be tailoring your own shirts, Curly.”

“I’m Curly.” He watches Freckles cut nice, straight lines through the grey fabric of his shirt. “I mean— How did you know that?”

“Jeff told me about your X? I saw you at—“

“I remember. You were there and then you weren’t.”

Freckles looks like he’s trying to de-riddle this. “Glad to know one of us was there,” he says, but Curly forgets to react because he doesn’t get it. “… Cool. So, yeah. And Dean was just telling me how you’re a pro at blackjack. Says I absolutely should not agree to play against you.”

He laughs and Freckles stops trimming the shirt until Curly’s belly is still again. When he continues, the man mumbles, “I’m Jordan, anyway.”

“Jordan,” he echoes and hopes he doesn’t sound as wasted as he is.

Curly’s always been bad with names, either too quick to forget or too unsure to dare call anyone by their name for a long while. He’s not sure he’ll forget Jordan’s though, because everybody seems to know who he is, patting his shoulder as they pass and telling him happy— “Oh,” Curly pipes up again. “Your birthday.”

“Yeah, it’s tomorrow. Twenty-two,” Jordan supplies with a nod, and he’s opening the drawer now and putting the scissors back. “Looks good. A little wonky at the sides, but it kinda adds character.”

“I’m shit at cutting. M’left handed,” Curly explains, waving his hand as if it proves the fact.

The man nods again, pulling loose thread from the new raw edge of Curly’s shirt. “Take it the new hair cut wasn’t your own doing, then,” he says as he steps back, assessing the man’s hair. He’s just reaching out to touch. “I like—“

“Jordan!” A man that Curly doesn’t know throws his entire body weight onto the blond, sending him stumbling half-way across the room as he says “man, you look ancient.”

“Hey, fuck you,” Jordan grumbles as they half hug, half wrestle across the room.

Curly manages to push himself up onto the counter, leaning back against the cupboard behind his head as he watches them muck about, knocking beer and kicking stools. He’s left feeling smug as he scratches his head because Freckles was absolutely about to say he likes his barnet.

“You wouldn’t believe he’s twenty-two, would you?” A soft voice steals his attention, and he turns his head to his side where a young man rolls blue-grey eyes before he smiles up at him. “Such a kid.”

He recognises him from earlier, whispering something to Jordan that made them both smile. He wonders what it was. He wonders if Jordan felt the man’s lip ring when it was pressed to his ear.

“He’s funny,” he replies simply, not sure what the stranger is looking for. He doesn’t really know much more about Jordan than that, and he’s pretty sure the guy’s not actually tried to be funny yet.

This new pretty boy with golden hair has warm skin that glows under the bulb hanging from the ceiling of the kitchen. His face is all soft angles and smooth skin and Curly wonders how the fuck someone his age (presuming this bloke is around his own age) manages that, because his own skin is covered in small scars from old nicks and break-outs and fuck knows what else.

“Funny,” Goldie repeats as he flicks his hair out of his face - it falls in glossy waves, just brushing over his ears. He looks a bit like one of those fit modern-day vampires, Curls thinks, except instead of drinking blood, he probably drinks eight pints of mineral water and eats his five-a-day. “Is he?”

He squeezes his eyes shut ‘cause maybe he’s just seeing this guy through beer goggles, but nah. He’s pure beautiful. Pretty is a good word for it... Pretty bloody annoying. Especially when Curly’s sat in a DIY’d crop top with eyeliner smudged over his cheek and rum soaking into his jeans.

Curls forgets again to respond but the man laughs anyway and Curly wishes it was a nasty sort of laugh, just so he had a valid reason to dislike him - a reason that wasn’t jealousy.

“Anyway, this is my cue.”

He watches Jordan’s boy cross the room to pull the man from his friend, and Jordan ends the scuffle with a fond shove and a “see you later,” as he’s lead towards the door by Goldie. He manages to call out, “see you around, Curly,” as he’s lead out of the room.

It’s a shame really that Curly didn’t get to speak to Jordan until so late on in the night because that happens to be around the time things start to get hazy for him. If he did bump into him again, he can’t recall.

In the taxi home (because that’s all he can really attest for, memory wise, after Jordan slipped away) Jeff’s saying something to Dean along the lines off “shame Curly thinks he’s too good to come out with us properly,” and says Jordan’s name somewhere in the blur of words that follow.

Curly says “he’s my mate, he is,” turning in his own seat at the front to face his friends. He hugs the headrest as he smiles dopily into the back on the car.

Dean says “you only met him tonight, Curls.”

Jokes on him, Curly thinks, because they met before tonight, and that’s got to count for something.

He sleeps on their couch again that night, because they can’t be arsed with doing the maths for the split taxi fare. That and Curly thinks he might have dropped the key to the flat down the kitchen sink at the party.

#ch #ch6 #writing #!!!!!! Finally He is here #Fs in the chat for Curly's flat key

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