Smoke in the snowfall (con't.)

picks up from here the "smoke in the snowfall" entry left off...

He didn’t think they had meant to do it, no one could mean to do that. But all of it looked so planned. He could see her face now, paler than usual, her eyes wide, pupils overcoming her soft blue irises until her eyes looked black. Blood in her hair, all over her hands, smeared on her face and she was screaming, begging for help. He just stood there. Looking around the room, watching them, his brain trying to process it all… the way they were dancing, touching each other, as if they were at some frat party somewhere, but not her. She was scared, she was screaming, and no one noticed.

He stopped, looking into his own eyes in the mirror. He refused to think about what happened next. He was already a mess, he didn’t even know where he was, let alone how he got there. He looked at his hands, scrubbed almost raw, then to his clothes, he couldn’t see any blood. He walked into the bar, sat down, ordered a shot and lit a cigarette. He was cold, scared, and had no idea what to do next. He guessed he should go to the police ,tell them everything, but would they believe him? Would anyone believe him?

He ordered a straight shot of tequila, threw it back and ordered another. The bartender hesitated for a moment when he ordered his third, looking him up and down, as if trying to decide if the man in front of him needed a third shot or not, then, the bartender poured two, and pushed them both to the man in black. He downed them both gratefully.

At a point too drunk to walk, let alone find his car and drive home, he had the tender call him a cab. He noticed, as did the cabbie, that his hands still shook as he pulled some crumpled bills from his pocket. He looked at them as if they were the hands of another man, and in many ways, they were. He was not the man he was when he left home that afternoon to go see his long time girlfriend, meet some of her new friends, and hopefully get lucky. No, he was no that man, and a part of him wondered if he ever would be that man again. What was left of the young, successful and only slightly careless man he had been shouted for that other part of him to shut the fuck up.

He got himself out of the cab gracefully enough, but upon turning to face his apartment building, he noticed that everything else was turning, too. It had been a long time since he had been this drunk, he wondered out loud how many shots of tequila he had drained at that bar, wondered idly what bar he had ended up at, the cab fare had been too high for it to be Fells, hadn’t it? Of course, he realized, there was no unspoken code amongst cab drivers to not cheat the drunk.

He could fake sober well enough, so he decided to fake it at least until he got up the elevator and into his apartment. Just. Don’t. Look. Up. He walked, eyes straight ahead, ignoring the swimming in his stomach and the turning of the ground beneath him, he got to the lobby and prayed the night desk clerk had gone into the mailroom or to the bathroom, or was anywhere but the desk, and his prayers were answered. The rise of the elevator that usually only lifted his stomach enough for him to know it was moving, almost made him throw up. Again. He got to his apartment, finally, fumbling with his keys and leaning hard on the doorjamb for support, he heard movement inside, and the knob turn, he looked up at the ceiling as if looking beyond it and mouthed “Thank you.”

When the door opened he started to fall in, slowly, but unable to right himself, he needed to vomit again. Charlie, thank God for Charlie, caught him with a dip of the knee and righted him against the doorjamb.

“Whoa, there, Wesley! What the hell happened to you tonight?” Charlie still spoke with a Tennessee drawl as thick as it had been the day they had left their hometown to go to college.

Wesley thought he said “I don’t wanna talk about it,” but to Charlie it sounded more like “dun unnah alk bow ihk” and then he burped the kind of burp one only knows if one has had too much tequila on an empty stomach and needs to release it post haste.