SOBER FEELINGS - Joonas Porko

19 - guilty

Joonas and I were standing in the hallway, our arms wrapped around each other. His face was still buried in the crook of my neck and I could feel how the regular breaths he let out hit my skin. It was a calming feeling in a sense being so tightly embraced by the guitarist but suddenly I noticed how his fingers were curling up against my hip, his breathing suddenly becoming a lot more rapid than before.

"Joonas?" I whispered, instinctively grabbing the man's curly hair which allowed me to pull his head back. I couldn't see much of his face through the darkness but I could sense that his lips were slightly parted and that his eyes were closed.

Immediately I had a bad feeling. I had seen Joonas like this before, I had seen him in this state the night we met.

"Fuck. Oh no." Quickly I tried to reach behind me and after a few missed attempts my fingers finally found the door handle to grab. I managed to push it down and open the door. The blonde one let out a few single coughs and I knew I had to act quick.

"Just a few more seconds Joonas please!" I flipped the switch to my right. Once again the light shining down on us from above was way too bright for my sensitive eyes but the only thing that mattered right now was that I could somehow drag Joonas' body to the toilet before the inevitable happened.

I didn't have to think twice about what to do in this kind of situation. With all the power I had left in my numbed muscles I managed to lay the guitarist down carefully. His fingers instinctively grabbed the edge of the toilet seat.

I saw it coming but I still winced when he coughed. First only a single cough escaped his lungs, then the coughs became more regular and eventually he did what I had feared all along. Joonas threw up.

"Oh god. No, no, no. What have I done?" For one moment I thought I had to throw up right then and there next to him, the gurgling sound of him emptying his stomach alone made me feel sick but somehow I managed to pull myself together.

"Shit. I'm so sorry. This is all my fault." I fell down to my knees, my right hand now entangled in his blonde locks, softly stroking his scalp to calm him down.

"No Lyra you-" Before Joonas could bring up a full sentence his body convulsed again. By now I was at the verge of a full on breakdown. No matter how much the blonde one wanted to reassure me that it wasn't my fault he found himself being in such a miserable state he couldn't deny that it was the second time he threw up while we were drinking together. It was my fault and I felt guilty to the bone.

What exactly had I been thinking when I told myself that getting him even more drunk than he already had been was a good idea? One single bit of common sense would have been enough to realize that this plan was absolutely absurd.

"Joonas, I'm so sorry." Tears were starting to fill my eyes, making my vision go sligtly blurry. I pushed myself up from the ground and stumbled back a few steps which turned out to be a big mistake. From a few meters away the guitarist looked even more miserabe as the upper half of his body was dangling over the toilet seat, his face pale, marked by little drops of cold sweat.

"D-Don't move okay. J-just don't go anywhere." I stuttered and rushed out of the bathroom. "Where are you going?" I heard the curly-haired one mumble weakly, his voice barely audible in my ears.

"Just stay there Joonas, please." I scanned the cabinet in the hallway for Joonas' keys and luckily my fingers could get a hold of them. I opened the front door and stumbled outside. When I shut the door behind me I realized that I forgot to put on shoes but that was not important right now.

I stumbled down the stairs and soon I found myself running towards the house across the street. My almost bare feet hurt at the contact with the cold and hard concrete but my journey luckily wasn't exactly long and if I was going to catch a cold I deserved it.