♔ Chapter Six ♔
When I came to university, the first thing I did was drink - and I drank a lot. I drank so much that I couldn't walk, I couldn't see straight. I'd stumble into the beds of strangers, the parties of people I barely even knew, and I couldn't remember anything the next day.
It was a lifestyle I'd always had. Getting smashed, fucking some nobody I doubt I'd remember, and waking up the next day ready to do it all again. Rinse and repeat. Then I started doing drugs.
They're so available, at uni. Everyone does it a couple times, and that made me think - it'll be alright. If everyone else was doing them, it'll be fine. First, it was just a couple joints with random stoners at the back of a party, and then it was sniffing lines of coke off the table, swallowing pills, tabs of acid, and after that, it spun out of control. It was always easy for me to spin critically out of control.
Licking the empty baggies of ketamine in the washroom of the club, sniffing piles of ecstasy off of my thigh in back alleys, and spiralling away from the real world. It helped, at first - to lose control, to take in some random fucked up substance and let it fill me up. To let it take me, and own me, and save me.
It helped more than being sober, anyway. And then it didn't help at all.
It hit me all at once, and I couldn't bare it.
I'd left my hometown, I'd left behind everything that I knew, and I ran away. I came to university, I was actually trying. But it can't ever fucking last, can it? That feeling, that fake lie that you keep telling yourself over and over again - you're fine, you're okay, you're great. It never lasts. It always crumbles away, and it always takes you back to where you started.
And that was what it felt like, like I'd been whisked back into my childhood, and I couldn't get out of my own head. I felt like a kid again, terrified of my own shadow, and so fucking alone. In that big house, after they all died, stuck there with him. My fucking dad.
I'd been running for so long. I didn't want to be lonely, I didn't want to feel like that again, I wanted to be free. But I never would be. I'd always be haunted by them, by the people I couldn't save.
Everything seemed so much more simple when I was younger. It seemed like the world was so much easier to navigate, like I'd spent the better half of my life trapped inside a cosy bubble. I couldn't even remember what it used to feel like, anymore, being happy. It seemed too far away for me to reach, like I could feel it at the very edge of my fingertips, and then it would vanish, and I'd remember - I didn't deserve to be happy anyway.
I couldn't remember a time when I felt like everything was right, like I couldn't be held down. Most people look back on their childhood, and they remember being happy. They remember the crazy, toothy smiles. They remember playing in the garden, rolling around in the gorgeous green grass or staring up at the unending blue sky. They remember the street they grew up in, drowning in nostalgia, in the lost freedom of childhood. They remember the freedom they once had, before the world tied them down and fucked them up.
When I remembered back to my childhood, I always tried my hardest to smile. Even now, the first thing I did when I jammed my bedroom door shut was stand in front of a mirror. Every time I remembered my childhood, I'd stand in front of a mirror as I did it, and every time, I'd stare straight at my smiling face, like I was even trying to convince myself.
I was standing and staring gormlessly at my own grinning reflection, and even a smile looked ridiculous on my face, like I was never meant to be happy. It looked wrong, like a big, fucked up lie, and the smile would twist and my head would hurt and suddenly I was crying. Remembering how it used to be, before he died.
We were happy, in the beginning. But even then, I couldn't remember how it felt, what it was like, what he was like. I swear, if we didn't have the same face, I'd have forgotten what he looked like a long time ago. My own twin, and I could barely remember him.
I stopped myself. I didn't want to sink that deep. I couldn't handle it.
So I reached into my pocket and texted Hedley:
come over. now.
I sent it quickly.
yes yes yes omw hottie x
He replied faster than I thought he would, and the next thing I knew, he was knocking on my door. When I heard it, I opened the door and dragged him inside without saying a single word. I grabbed him by his shoulders and tossed him against the nearest wall.
"Is daddy horny?" Hedley joked.
"Never call me that again," I demanded, slamming him against the wall another time. He looked a little shaken, but the smirk I noticed twinging on the side of his face let me know he liked it. And even if he didn't, I doubt I would have cared.
Sometimes, during sex, I'd completely forget about the other person, their pleasure or pain. Sometimes, I'd enter a world where I was the only person that ever existed. Four white walls, I'd imagine myself within. Trapped, eyes closed, feeling all the pleasure overwhelm me. But I'd open my eyes again and I'd see the other person there with me, and then I'd remember, and I'd get bored.
But in that moment, Hedley was right there with me, in our own little world, in my fucked up four walls. I knew that Hedley was mine, or more mine than anyone else had ever been. But I couldn't tell him. I couldn't show him. Not yet. So I forced my lips over his, my hands in his hair and up and along his body. He reacted to me quickly, pressing his tongue into my mouth, his hands drifting down my back to cup my butt and reach around to the hem of my trousers.
Suddenly, I yanked him off me and threw him down to the floor.
"You're really into this kinda stuff, aren't you?" he asked, sitting up on the floor. He looked a little pissed off, but I didn't care.
"What stuff?"
"Throwing me around like a rag doll, being all rough and rapey. It gets you going, doesn't it?"
"So what if it does?"
"You can hit me if you want," he suggested. "It kinda turned me on, last time you did."
"You weren't expecting it last time."
"Then wait until I'm not expecti-"
I kicked him in the waist, just as he was speaking. He squirmed over onto his stomach, still spread out across the floor, and coughed. When he climbed onto all fours, I grabbed his shirt by the back of his neck and threw him around. He stumbled and hit my dresser, before climbing back onto his feet.
He ran straight for me, after that, thumping me right in the chest. My legs caved and I collapsed onto my bed, feeling Hedley's weight press down on me as he straddled me. He wasted no time in lifting me up by the scruff of my neck, just so our lips could meet once again. I propped myself up with my arms and forced my tongue into his mouth. His body was grinding its way over mine, his hands tightly caressing my body, writhing up and down my chest, under my shirt, along my back, and groping my crotch. His breath fanned my face like a warm autumn breeze, and his hands slid into my briefs like fresh air. Excitement filled me all over my body, like Hedley being there with me made my entire past melt away, like none of it even mattered.
I couldn't remember much, after that. Flashes of Hedley's sweating, tanned body underneath mine, and the creased sheets. His moans and cries sounded so far away, like a dull echo from worlds away. The way his body worked with mine, it was like we were meant to fuck. Our clothes were on the floor, our dicks were in each-other's mouths, and then he was riding my dick, and he was riding it good, and hard, and fucking fast.
I felt his wet, sticky cum spit out suddenly. It splattered over my face and down my chest, and I smiled without even realising it. But when I looked up at his face, my heart sank, and I panicked. Instead of seeing Hedley Haynes, the glorious sex monster, I saw something else.
Only for a second, I saw the face of my brother, young and dead and gorgeous. Nine years old, riding my dick, and he hadn't changed since the day he died. I heard his voice, or maybe I was remembering it, somewhere in the room. My entire body convulsed when I realised, and I threw him off of me and dove back, feeling the nearest wall hit me.
"What the fuck?" Hedley asked, getting up off the floor. The light of my room made his sweaty skin shine like a glowing Greek god.
"Sorry," I breathed, one breath at a time. "You hit me in the eye, when you came," I lied, wiping at my eye. My eyes flew around the room for a second, half-expecting to find a nine year old boy somewhere. But I didn't. It was just the two of us, panting, sweating, naked.
For a moment, I looked over at my bedside table, and there I saw his face. My twin, Wilfred. Right next to me, in an old family photo - the only one I had of us together.
"Do you wanna keep going then?" he asked. "'Cos, I mean, the mood's dead now."
I shook my head and watched him slide back into my bed, with the sheets thrown halfway onto the floor and the duvet clumped into a giant pile. He reached into his discarded jeans and pulled out a box of fags, sparking one up. Watching him for a second managed to calm me down enough to lie back in bed with him.
I caught Hedley looking at the photo a couple times, sitting on my bedside table in my university room. It was the only real thing in my room that gave anything away. Everything else was bland and bare, but that photo, it was real.
"I didn't know you're a twin," Hedley said, slowly lifting himself off of my bed to take a closer look. He took another lazy drag of his post-sex cigarette.
"I'm not," I brushed off, not wanting to remember.
"Really? You're the spitting image of each-other in this," he said, picking up the photo to take a closer look. It was a family portrait - the typical two parents at the back, and the kids in the front, smiling.
Everything about that photo was a lie. I didn't really know why I kept it around. It was the only photo I had of him, I suppose. Sometimes, I'd catch myself looking at it, wondering how things could have turned out, how he would have turned out. He was always the happier one.
"We're not twins anymore," I admitted, stealing the cigarette from in between his fingers.
"How can you stop being twins?" Hedley asked, turning to face me on the bed. His eyes flipped me up and down as I stole drag after drag of his cigarette.
"He's dead, that's how."
"Oh," was all he managed to say, gently putting the photo back where he found it. There was a brief silence after that. But, knowing Hedley, he broke that silence pretty quickly. "Well that sucks, doesn't it?"
"Yeah," I said, forcing myself to sound disinterested. The last thing I wanted was Hedley getting a whiff of my weaknesses, or finding out that I actually had feelings.
"And I was about to suggest a threesome. That would have been tragic."
"Nice save," I breathed out.
"So how did he die?"
"Car accident," I explained. "Killed my mum too."
"I couldn't live without my mum," Hedley admitted. "I mean, even though we haven't been on good terms lately, she's like my best friend. I wouldn't know how to live with that."
"I don't really remember either of them," I lied. "Besides, I still had my dad."
"My dad doesn't talk to me much," Hedley said, trying not to sound too upset, but I could tell. "How did your dad take it?"
"Take what?"
"Don't act oblivious - how'd he react to you being a woolly woofter?"
"A what?"
"A raging queerosexual, of course."
"Oh. We didn't really talk much, definitely not about that."
"Didn't?"
"He's dead too," I admitted.
"So you're all alone?"
"Pretty much. It's just me. Has been for a while."
"That's really sad."
"Yeah," I sighed. "I know."
Hedley took his cigarette and finished it. He went home after that, and left me in my four white walls, more lonely than I'd ever felt in my entire life.
And the worst part about it was, for the first time since I'd met him, I didn't want him to go.