High Life | ✔️

21

The boy shrugged. "I'm wearing a black tie, Ma."

"I'm talking about your fiancée."

Before they could descend down the path of an imminent fight, I stepped in.

"Sorry but who's getting married again?"

My question seemed to throw her off. "What?" She asked.

"Isn't this like a wedding dinner?"

"No, it's Maxime's birthday..." Elias said under his breath.

I feigned realization. "Oh. My bad."

I spent the rest of the dinner using all the wrong cutleries, taking pictures of everything and of course drowning my sorrows in red wine. Needless to say, I was more than drunk towards the end and... I can't be sure how I ended up twerking on the stage but my next moment of sobriety came at 1am.

I was on a bed, not the one in the third guest room. This room had darker, cooler tones. I was cocooned in dark gray sheets, upon an empty bed. The only source of light came from the lighting fixture on the bed stand. I was still dressed in my hooker dress.

The place was silent, save for the sound of my own breathing. There was a beauty attached to the silence within this magazine-esque bedroom. The doorknob turned, and in stepped Elias with a glass of water.

"You're awake," he said at the same time I asked, "what the fuck happened?"

He handed me the glass of water. I proceeded to take grateful gulps out of it. I placed the empty class on the bedstand as I watched Elias gingerly take a seat on his desk chair. He was too far away. Too many metres between us. I chewed on my inner cheeks until pain overtook my inappropriate thoughts.

"You got so drunk you passed out," Elias shrugged where he sat.

"Jesus, I must have been embarrassing."

"Nothing I couldn't handle," he returned.

The next five seconds was silent and crackling with an ever-present sexual tension that I'd successfully ignored until this very second. My heartbeat was deafening in my own ears, punctuated with heightened breathing on my end.

Like clockwork, our bodies met in the middle. Elias was built, and he showed this off in the form fitting shirts he wore. His hands encircled my waist, drawing my body against his, tangling two peoples' bodies into one. His face was breathtaking, even up close. Then I kissed him. And it was an amalgamation of lust and excitement that possessed my form.

We made guttural noises, a primal, absolutely animalistic instinct took over as we tore through each others' clothes. But I couldn't reconcile what I did to Patrick and I couldn't conflate good grades with promiscuity. The thoughts fired one after another. They were intrusive. Jarring in comparison to the very images that filled my mind moments prior. I pushed Elias away.

Our breathing was shallow, Elias had a 5 o'clock shadow, but Patrick had no right to do what he did to me. It was rape. And Marc had every right to want to kill him. It made me wonder why the fuck my mind decided to bring the cunt up. It made me realize I was fucked up in every sense of the word and -

And I was in no state of mind to indulge in matters of the flesh. I sighed.

Elias quickly noticed something was off. He inched back, with furrowed eyebrows, he demanded an explanation.

"I wanna go somewhere," I said. "Anywhere."

"Now?"

"Why not?"

"Sure, you gave me blue balls, but sure. Where do you wanna go?" Elias seemed down, and it showed in how quickly he put his shirt back on.

"Not completely sure," I said as I struggled back into my tight dress.

✖️✖️✖️

I couldn't remember the last time I went to a beach. I'd ditched my shoes for the sensation of sand against my bare feet.

It was close to 3am, we had a full moon that cast a warm illumination on the beach tonight. The stars were beautiful, everything was beautiful except for the thoughts within my head. They were like white noise, I couldn't silence them no matter what I did. I could only make them more dim less roaring.

"What's a weekend getaway in Cali without the beach, right?" Elias's voice came from beside me.

I offered him no reply. Our hands would brush occasionally, neither of us seemed to mind though.

We finally settled on a smattering of rocks, a vantage point seemingly, one that boasted a vista that did not disappoint.

"Do you know what it feels like to be helpless?" I asked the sound of waves crashing against the shore, I asked the stars that glimmered ahead, I asked the smell of brine that I breathed in, I asked the boy beside me.

But he didn't know, not really.

"Helpless in what sense?"

"To feel so helpless that you can only resort to doing things in hopes that it would elevate you from the symptoms of trauma and, to come to terms with the fact that life is ugly and we're all trapped here. I don't think you've felt truly helpless, Elias."

There was a silence that ensued.

"Trauma?" He finally returned. "What happened?"

"No use talking about the past," I admonished instead. I removed the diamond ring on my middle finger to hold it against the faint illumination of moonlight. "Do I get to keep the ring?"

"Sure," he said. "You can keep mine too, if you want."

A bitter laugh escaped my lips. "I'm not that poor, Elias."

"I never said you were."

I turned my head to take him in. His gaze was planted on the sea, focused on something that I could not see. I took his hands in mine, removing his ring as I did to mine earlier. Holding both rings against the moonlight, I couldn't help but smile.

"Thanks for the weekend, Elias," I said earnestly. "Thanks for giving me the experience to be someone's fiancée and to live in absolute fucking grandeur for two days."

"No," he dragged the word out. He'd turned his neck so he was staring at me now. "Thank you for helping me out. Hopefully my parents realize that marrying at 21 is ridiculous because I'm just too young to make sound decisions."

I gave both rings back to him. "Keep them for your real fiancée."

"Honestly, I'm probably never going to marry."

"Why not?"

"So many beautiful girls, man," Elias said jokingly. "With a face like this, how could I confine myself to one wife for the rest of my life?"

"That's not a self-absorbed thing to say at all."

"Don't confuse 'self-absorbed' and 'self aware'," Elias bumped me with his shoulders.

I laughed. And I revelled in the moment. If only things were this simple and this beautiful all the time.