"A Sanctuary Safe and Strong"(Marianas Trench)

Chapter 31

"Wait...how fuckin' stupid have I been?" Josh asked out loud, walking across the building to check the front door lock. He could sleep there in the studio. He didn't ever have to go home if he didn't want to. It seemed like a brilliant plan. Besides, he was the only one with keys to the building. Who would ever find out?  

By Saturday morning, Josh had managed to wiggle himself into real clothing - jeans and a tshirt, nothing fancy, but he felt better being dressed again. Really, he had no intentions of trying to dress himself in anything more than sweats for the next couple of weeks, but he'd run out of things to do. The fly and button on the jeans seemed like a challenge that would take up some time, so he'd attempted it. Lo and behold, he'd conquered it, much to his own amazement.  

The blond had spent the weekend holed up in the studio barely sleeping on the couch by night and eventually straightening up his office by day, managing to follow through with what he'd told the rest of the band he wanted to do. He couldn't come up with anything more to occupy his time by Sunday afternoon, and by Sunday night, he was only cleaning things out of pure boredom, not because he actually wanted to.  

"Argh...," Josh complained to the empty room, shoving the last stack of papers into the drawer at his left. He closed it roughly and leaned his hip against it, his hand flat on the surface of his office desk. Everything was as tidy as it ever would be in his world. There was officially nothing left to do in there. 

Wandering back out into the lobby, Josh fluffed a pillow on the couch, moved a stray pen into the holder in the center of the table, and tossed his recently emptied water bottle into the trash near the door. Checking the clock on the wall, he rolled his eyes when it only read seven p.m.. He could have sworn that it was at least midnight. Now what? 

The blond swallowed another mountain of medications and sunk down onto the couch, holding his hand protectively against his ribs. The bullet wound in his shoulder was causing him less trouble than it had been after about a little over a week, but his ribs still hurt like a bitch, just like he'd expected. He was sure that sleeping on an uncomfortable, lumpy sofa rather than in his own bed wasn't helping, but he'd be damned if he was going to go back to his house yet. He still wasn't ready. Not yet. 

The ringing of Josh's cell phone distracted him from dark thoughts of home and the current imminent tedium he knew he'd be facing at the studio until he finally forced himself to fall asleep. Scrambling to sit up, he reached over to the table in front of him and grabbed for the phone. "Ow! Fuck! H'lo?"  

Matt. The brunet was calling him to remind him that the next day, Monday, at eleven o'clock in the morning, was when Josh had to make a return trip to the doctor to have the sutures in the back of his head and the ones across his shoulder taken out. He'd known that Josh wouldn't have made the appointment, so he did it himself. Then Matt dropped another bombshell on the older man. Physical therapy. Josh was to go once tomorrow to be shown some exercises to get the strength in his right arm back, which he knew he desperately needed if he wanted the stamina to play guitars straight through live concerts again any time soon. Then he'd have to return again in a month to see how everything was progressing. 

"The doctor said you need to have someone drive you around for the next couple of days because apparently you're gonna be pretty fuckin' sore after all of that. So I'll pick you up at your place around ten a.m.. Be ready to go, okay?" The guitar player ended the conversation by saying goodbye and hanging up without giving the singer a chance to argue. 

Groaning, Josh tossed his phone across the couch to the other end and leaned his head back. Now, not only did he have to make it look like he wasn't practically living at the studio (forget practically; he was living there), he had to wake up, get cleaned up to the best of his ability and drive back to his house by nine-thirty the next morning in order to wait for Matt to pick him up. Staring up at the ceiling, the blond rolled his eyes. Life just loved to kick him in the ass, and it always seemed to happen when he wasn't looking.  

Ticking the hours off on his fingers as he lifted his head to read the clock, Josh figured that he had approximately twelve hours until he would most certainly find himself sitting on the curb outside his own condo, listening for the deep rumble of Matt's car before he could see it. If this was any other time in his life, he would have called up a bunch of friends and thrown an impromptu party with some stupid theme, but lately he was far from in the mood for that. In fact, he'd really done nothing but isolate himself from everyone since the whole... shooting...had happened.  

Josh cringed as he turned that word over in his head. Shooting. He had been gunned down in his own home and a goddamn bullet had forcibly entered his body, despite all the begging he'd done to try to avoid it. He'd been fucking shot. "Shot," he mumbled, hating the taste it left in his mouth. But, oddly, this time it didn't scare Josh nearly as much as it should have, as much as it had before. He could say the word without stuttering now. It didn't leave him shaking and shaken like it had each time he'd tried to talk about it before. The singer wasn't sure if he'd finally come to terms with everything that had happened, or whether he'd just repeated it so many times over the last week and a half that it just didn't mean as much to him.  

Even though fear didn't underline the word anymore, he couldn't deny that the way his tongue fit around the syllable was nearly enough to make him gag, speaking it out loud as he did and hearing it resound in the acoustic environment around him. Talking about it seemed easier when there was someone else around to take the impact, to force a joke with, or to allow him to call up every acting skill he had, brushing it off, telling others that he was fine, nothing to be concerned about. But in the solitude, surrounded by the things that, up until about forty-five minutes ago had offered him solace and comfort, that word looped around him, hanging heavy above his head as a harsh reminder of something he'd been doing everything to avoid thinking about. 

Shoving himself up from the sofa, Josh turned in a small circle where he stood, completely bored out of his mind, but also unnerved by the new thickness in the air that hadn't been there before he'd started talking to himself. Nothing he could think to do to get himself out of that frame of mind and away from the weight of residual agitation would have fixed the problem because it all seemed so fucking mundane and pointless. He was going stir-crazy and needed to do something before he wound up resorting to setting the building on fire just to watch it crumble. He'd previously felt a little less delusional when he'd confined himself to small spaces, but now that incessant burning in his bones had reignited, making itself known again. Small pinpricks of both frenzy and annoyance flittered under his skin, and Josh could almost swear that he could see the blue-green veins pulsating under his flesh with each wave of those feelings that hit him, pushing him forward, then dragging him under a little bit more with each ebb and flow.  

He had to get out. He didn't know where, but he had to get the fuck out of there, and now. He had to clear his head, had to try to make sense of everything the universe was doing to him. There would be no friends, no parties, no others to join him, but that was okay. That was fine. He had no idea what he needed to do to fix this, and having people around would just get in the way.