witness || h.s.|| ON HOLD

twenty-one || one night to play pretend

I think it was safe to say that I had definitely fucked up.

Something about the way she was speaking to me tonight, the way that she was so brutally honest and raw as she shared her pain with me, it made me want to just shut her up and kiss away all of her problems. But in doing that, I had created an even bigger problem.

I rubbed my thumbs gently across her face, and pulled my forehead away from hers, staring into those big hazel eyes of hers. To most people, they would say that her eyes were brown, but I always looked closer at my surroundings, and I had instantly picked up on the flecks of green dancing around in her irises. Her eyelashes were long and dark, wet with tears as she stared up at me, looking just as lost as I felt.

    I knew that if she hadn't had the alcohol in her system either, she wouldn't have let me kiss her, and she definitely wouldn't have kissed me back. I wished so desperately that I had never kissed those soft, plump lips of hers. Because now I knew what kissing her felt like, and I knew that I had to learn to live without it.

  I prayed silently that in the morning, my soberness would come paired with some revelation that this was all a drunken mistake. That it meant nothing. Because then I wouldn't have to pretend it didn't and continue to hurt her more than I already had.

I meant it when I said that we shouldn't have done this. I meant it with every fiber of my being, and I think Tate meant it too when she said that she knew we shouldn't have done it either.

But we did do it. And neither of us could take that back. We just had to go back to business as usual. But for tonight, for one night and one night only, we could play pretend.

She blinked up at me, her eyes red from crying, the tip of her nose a similar rosy shade. She still looked beautiful, she always did. Whether she was dressed up in her work clothes at the restaurant, or if she was in a t-shirt and shorts with no makeup and tears streaming down her face and bourbon on her breath. She was beautiful, down to her very core.

  I cleared my throat and took a deep breath.

"It's getting late," I mumbled, and she nodded her head at me.

"It is, we better go to sleep before the morning catches up with us," she whispered back, and I knew what she really meant. She meant before we sobered up and were forced to go back to the way things were. Back to the reality that we had temporarily escaped.

I placed my hand on the small of her back and turned her towards the stairs. We were silent as we walked to them, although this silence was different than it usually was. The silence we were used to was because neither of us wanted to actually talk about what was going through our heads. We were silent now because we knew what was going through our heads, and neither of us could take it back.

    We went up the stairs and into my room, the bed still unmade from this morning, the pillow wall I had placed between us last night to block both physical and emotional contact from Tate right where I had left it.

   Tate began walking to her side of the bed. It felt so weird to even think of it like that. It was my bed, and she was only sleeping in here with me because she had tried to escape. But in my mind, under the influence of my emotions and the bourbon, it was her side of the bed now.

  She moved the cushion off the middle of the bed to the floor, reaching under the covers and pulling the sheets that we had both kicked down to the end of the bed back up. She pulled the duvet up farther and smoothed it out a bit with her hands, and I couldn't help but laugh that even as inebriated as she was, she still took the time to make the bed before getting into it.

  She perked up at the sound of my laughter, and even in the faint moonlight streaming in through the window, I could tell she was blushing. I loved that I had that effect on her. I loved watching her cheeks flush whenever I made an inappropriate comment, or if I was sitting too close to her or poking fun at her.