The Taste of Silver | Fortune's Fool #2

15 | the morning after

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♥ gabriel ♥

WHEN I WOKE up, I was laying with my long legs awkwardly bent in front of me in those black sweatpants that had passed their best but I didn't care enough to replace them.

Eyebrows furrowed, I squinted my cloudy grey eyes to shield them from the blinding sun that was shining in through the crack of the door and coughed. Realising that wasn't doing the job, I held my hand out in front of me to cover my taut face from its pungent bright rays.

"Where the fuck am I?" I mumbled under my breath, patting down my dark brown hair that was disastrously splayed around in a mess. The room was tiny for my towering self, probably a mere two by two metres.

Pressing my hand against the floor, I tried to use my bicep to lift myself from the floor but came crashing down when my hand buckled beneath me. I grunted in a low voice as I hit the laminate flooring.

Hard.

A few hollow yet high pitched clinks filled the small room as my foot accidentally kicked something.

Around a dozen - give or take a few - empty glass bottles were scattered everywhere, giving me company on the ground.

The one I had hit slowly rolled against the floor and hit another which then hit another. They all scraped against the floor tiles like dominoes, the chain reaction eventually coming to an end when a wide spirit bottle made contact with a cigarette pack.

It took me a good few minutes to recognise that I had passed out on the floor of my flat's laundry room.

The morning after was always a struggle but today was particularly difficult. Groaning, I blinked hard trying to remember how I ended up here.

Nothing.

Ever since I bought this apartment, I'd always drank clean. By that, I meant ensuring that bottles were precisely lined up my strength and organised upon the table and that I was either in my room or seated on the sofa, and most importantly, making sure I had pulled myself together.

After all, there was a difference between drinking not to remember and drinking to forget.

For months it had consistency been the former which had rather worked out well for me; less tidying up the next morning. Yet judging by my current situation, last night had certainly been the latter. The first in a very long time.

The next few minutes were torture as everything from two days ago came back to me.

I clenched my jaw with my eyes pressed shut and my head resting against the wall. Was I angry? I was nothing short of furious. It had been a day since I'd seen her but it felt as if it had only been mere seconds since I was drawn out like cloth and had my blood squeezed out of me without any warning.

My heart began bounding faster as my hands pressed tighter together. The rays of sunlight landing right in my eyes seemed to suddenly get to me and I slammed the laundry room door shut in irritation, sending two beer cans flying in the process.

A thousand emotions were roaring within me and the feeling of anger and frustration was certainly at the top.

But there was a third too.

Confusion.

What the fuck was going on? It was like the world was spinning in a rapid orbit around me, so fast that it was all a blur.

Painfully strong confusion was pushing me into a dark pit of even more agonising bewilderment. And there was a branch growing from the abyss of confusion exploding within me. It was as simple as a three-letter word.