Under the Influence ✔

12.

"Looking for something?" 

The unexpected voice causes me to jump and drop the contents from my hands. Pens, change, and half empty lotion bottles fall to the hardwood floor of my bedroom and I mumble a curse under my breath as I bend down to pick them up. 

I've only been home for a little over an hour, and already I feel like a stranger invading someone else's personal space. This doesn't feel like my room, my bed, my belongings. There are a hundred little details scattered across this apartment that say it's mine - this is where Luna lives - but somehow they don't seem to fit me anymore. Maybe they never did. 

"You're a little jumpy." His voice floats into the room again and I bite my tongue, having decided on the hour and a half drive here that ignoring him will be my best plan for the duration of his stay. Which reminds me, I should really ask my mom how long this ridiculous sleepover has to go on for.

"Luna, what are you looking for?"  

I throw the items back in my bedside drawer and walk over to my dresser, pulling out the top drawer and looking under everything inside of it, ignoring Wes. 

"Luna." 

"Luna, what are you doing?" 

"LunaLunaLunaLunaLunaLu-" 

"WHERE THE HELL IS IT?" I shout, cutting off his insistent chatter and finally turning to face him. He's standing in my doorway, leaning against the frame with his arms crossed. Amusement dances in his brown eyes as he watches me frantically search my room. He always loved it when I would get annoyed and yell at him, and here I am, falling in his trap. His hair is still damp from the shower he just took and a smirk pulls at his lips as my eyes helplessly roam over his body, taking in every inch of inked skin as if it's not burned into my memory. "Put on a shirt." I mumble, all the anger and annoyance drained from my tone as I tear my eyes away from him and walk back towards my nightstand.

Wes ignores me and enters my room, making himself at home on the corner of my bed, so close that with the slightest movement of my hand, I could be touching him. I almost do it, I almost stretch my fingers and feel the familiar softness of his skin. I almost allow myself to forget that he turned my world upside down - twice, in two very different ways. I almost go back on everything I swore to myself that I wouldn't do. "Leave." 

"Tell me what you were looking for." I can feel his eyes on me, but I don't dare meet them. I can hear the concern, the regret, the love in his voice and I don't want to see it in his eyes too. 

"You know what I'm looking for, Wes." This is why he's here, because I am a creature of habit and I can't be trusted to be alone. Maybe my parents are right, I mean look at me, I've barely been home a minute and I'm already relapsing. Although, is it really a relapse if you never really recovered? I was forced into sobriety, starved of a fix, so does it count? Am I recovered? 

No. 

I'll never be recovered. Not from the drugs, not from the alcohol, not from the gaping black void in my life that I can't put a name to, and not of Wes. 

Because when my eyes finally do meet his, I see it all - I see what we were and I see what we could have been. 

That's what scares me. 

It scares me that Wes was able to change everything about himself all for me and a future he wanted so badly for us to have. Wes got clean, he dropped the filth and the dirt from his life and he became a better version of himself. Wes is strong and brave, he's more than he ever thought of himself to be and I'm incredibly proud of him. 

I just wish he hadn't done it all for us, because there is no us. There is Wes and there is Luna, but there is no Wes and Luna. 

I know that he knows I was looking for the bottle of prescriptions pills I still kept in my room, just in case I ever needed them, but he doesn't say anything as his eyes stay locked onto mine. I can tell he's searching for something he won't find - a glimmer of hope that I'll become the girl he wants me to be.