She's disgusted with herself at how predictable these situations have become, how the mere act of reciprocating a friendship could make her insides twist with such vile anger and sadness. He would always come to her in need, and she would take him in, soothe him and make him forget. He would leave the next morning a different man, and she would be left in the wreckage, a broken mess sprawled out across the floor, drowning in uncertainty and unanswered questions.
She wishes she could just succumb to the nausea, and regurgitate her feelings all over the cheap linoleum. Maybe then the horrid, sinking feeling inside her would be released.
But she can't, because that's not what friends do.
Roxy raises the bottle to her lips once more, her limbs the consistency of lead. The alcohol reeks of antiseptic, scorching flames through her nose, but it feels better than facing her own emotions. Her coughing sounds like weeping, and tears leak from the corners of her eyes, but she's not sure if they're from the drink or from her own weakness.
She passes the beverage to the other person on the couch, her breathing shaky as she attempts to regain control over herself.
Dirk grabs the bottle, his hands sticky with perspiration. He tries to take a sip, but his fingers, his arms, his body is quivering too badly, and he ends up spilling most of the contents over his already sweat-dampened shirt.
"Why am I so stupid, Rox. Why." He moans, his syllables broken.
The fine-tuned machine that is Dirk Strider, is slowly failing, crumbling away.
She can't see his expression behind his tinted glasses, and in a way, that makes it worse. It makes the hopelessness in his tone all that more potent.
"You're not stupid. You're just human." Roxy replied, her fingers finding their way to his leg, resting against the crumpled jean fabric in a show of comfort. Her words, she knew, were laced with lies and unspoken fury. She swore they tasted of battery acid against her tongue, each one more toxic than the last.
'You don't need English.' She wanted to insist, grasp the blonde man's shirt in her fists and press him into the couch. 'He's the stupid one. You don't need him because you have me.'
Dirk handed her back the bottle and she sucked down the last remnants of their makeshift concoction—rum and whiskey and tears and hurt. It was the least she could do to control herself, to endure the feeling of aging, of decaying, a hundred years between each individual moment.
"I just can't stop trying." He continued, voice dulled from drink.
Roxy wants him to stop talking. She's resting on unstable ground and if he says one more word, everything beneath her might shatter.
Talking had never done anything anyway—nothing besides inflict pain. If there was no talking, if there were no words or feelings, if there was no concept of love and all its sickly synonyms, this would never have happened. Jake wouldn't have been on the phone, mouthing the sounds, breathing the air, that would eventually rip Dirk apart from the inside-out.
"I'm sorry Dirk, but I just can't think of you that way. I hope you understand."
"I understand."
"You're still my best pal though, don't forget that."
"Yeah. Pals."
She liked that thought. Maybe if there was nothing at all, she wouldn't have to feel anymore.
Roxy was pulled from her reverie by Dirk's hands groping her lap trying to find the now-empty bottle. She hands it to him, watching his face contort with disappointment as he drops it to the floor with a thud. He gives a sort of masochistic chuckle-no more than a raspy noise, but enough to feel like claws, ripping away at her eardrums.
"God." He mutters, head rolling over the back of the couch. "Why does it always hurt so bad."
She watched him reach up with a single clammy hand, all parchment-thin flesh and thick chords of veins straining from beneath the surface, to tangle his fingers in his hair. He heaves a sigh that seems to rattle in the hollowness between his ribs, and drops his arm back to his side.
He turns his head, with an apparent amount of effort, towards her. Roxy can see how damp his cheeks are, stained-glass reflections of light dancing in the wake of his tears and sweat. He looks so fragile-a state that she'd honestly never seen him in before.
Tentatively, she shifted towards him on the couch and reached outwards. Her fingertips brushed the slick surface of his face for a mere moment, before she entwined them around the arms of his glasses. Nervousness swelled deep within her chest as she pulled them over his ears, down his nose, and placed them with careful precision on the side coffee table.
"Dirk." She said, her voice lucid even through the haze of rum and whiskey.
He blinked once, twice. His eyes, though red and swollen from grief, hazily focused on the petite blonde with as much intent as possible.
"Dirk. Just…"
And then somewhere in the space between his eyes and her voice and their mutually shared double vision, they came together, Roxy pulling at him with furious desperation and Dirk pressing against her, smearing her black lipstick across her chin. Even though they clung to each other with freed inhibition, all they could feel was the numbness that the physical contact left behind.
But it was like a drug, the sweetest of all narcotics. They couldn't stop.
Dirk pulled her against him, with fingers crushing her slender waist in their grip and leaving small ellipses of purple and blue against her skin. Roxy gasps against his lips, the sounds a muffled blend of pain and ecstasy. Her nails tore at his shoulders, catching in the seams of his shirt as she fumbled through the haze for something solid, something that could keep her rooted in reality as she lost herself in the swell of warmth and breathless utterances.
Suddenly, they are no longer Dirk Strider and Roxy Lalonde. They are something more barbaric, completely feral and untamed. They are one being that is faceless and nameless and inflicts the most painful sort of pleasure conceivable. He is tearing at her clothing, finding solace in the popping of thread and fabric. She is writhing beneath him, arching her back and locking her legs around his hips. Together they are no more than empty bodies, trying with violent desperation to fill the hollowness within themselves.
They part with ragged pants and flushed faces to match their tear-stained eyes. There's smeared makeup and quivering bodies and a thin trail of blood that falls from a kiss-swollen lip.
"God dammit Roxy." Dirk swears, his hands still fisted in her wrinkled sweater.
"Stop talking."
They are a straining, squirming mass, where every breath reeks of alcohol and burns twice as bad. They lose track of who is who, and the only discernible forms are taunt muscles, a tangle of legs and mouths parted in silent moans. Time has become an insignificant luxury. One moment bleeds into the next until she is only bare porcelain skin, face pressed into the whiskey-stained sofa and he is bare-chested, zipper undone, hovering over her.
Her legs are parted, and he cradles himself between her thighs, thumbs digging into the fleshy part of her back. He doesn't even bother taking his jeans off. He just enters her in a single fluid motion. Her jaw hinges open, lips forming a perfect circle as she writhes beneath him, relishing in the ache of being filled.
There is no noise between them-only the lonely sound of skin against skin and the radiator humming in the corner. When she begins to cry, Dirk can't take it. He tangles her perfect golden hair in his fist and presses her deeper against the cushions, just enough so that he can't hear her. The wet heat of each thrust is like glass shards at the base of his brain, and it makes him feel like scum, but he needs that. He needed to take control and lose himself and try to feel something, because he's so sick of feeling nothing.
When he sees her curl her nails into the arm of the couch, all slender wrists and white knuckles, he goes harder. His eyes squeeze shut and he counts the stars that explode from inside the blackness. He feels everything-her clenching around him, the slickness of his own sweat, the coil of tension building-and bites his lip until it bleeds, tasting only metal and rust and the still lingering alcohol.
Roxy's thighs tense against him, and he knows that she's close. He tightens his grip with one hand on her waist, feeling the sensitive flesh bruise beneath his hold. He is relentless, every movement ricocheting through his body and jarring him down to his very bones. Her gasps are a mixture of pain and pleasure and sobbing, but who he hears isn't Roxy.
He gets louder as he feels the pressure building, cussing and panting. His whole body feels numb. Only the throbbing of his own heartbeat is audible, thrumming against his eardrums. All he feels is sadness and guilt and deep-seated rage, and he thrusts, harder, faster, colliding with Roxy with an almost savage determination. He barely notices it when she comes, howling like an animal and arching against him, desperate for him to satiate her.
He can't seem to stop, as if the only thing rooting him to this earth, to this life that he's been living, to his own humanity, is the gyration of his own hips and the fever that floods his veins with each pulse of contact.
Dirk comes soon after in a flurry of profane language and the deep gasping of a single name.
Jake English.
They lie there together, on the sofa, reeking of sex and sweat and booze. Their bodies are slick and shiny in the dimmed light, and their limbs still entangled. Roxy collapses onto her side, keeping her face buried in the pillows. Her whole being was deadened, emotionless, as if she were incapable of feeling anything. She was surprised at how horrible it felt, as if somebody had opened her up from the inside out and left her lying there in her own entrails. She had never felt more violated, more exposed.
"Roxy. I'm sorry."
She spares him a glance, and she knows from the glazed look that engulfs him, and the way every muscle in his arms constrict, that Dirk understands. And in a way, that's all that matters-if this will make him happy, she'll be willing to follow through. He shifts toward her once more, this time with a heightened degree of sensitivity, cupping her face with his calloused palm as though her body was shaped from fracture glass. He's nervous now, and she knows it-she knows because he keeps his eyes squeezed shut, and his lips quiver as they touch hers and his heart seems to beat straight out of his chest.
He buries his head in the crook of her neck, and his breath feels hot against her throat, unbearable heat mounting from just beneath the surface of her skin, trapped beneath a layer of sweat and spilt whiskey. Roxy's breath quickens, and she fights the urge to tremble, to whimper, as his fingertips skimmed her flat stomach, counting each one of her ribs as they protruded from beneath her thin flesh. She raises one hand, laying it on the nape of his neck and stroking the thin blonde hairs.
Neither of them speak. There is nothing more to say.
In the morning, he will have left before her, and she will be alone to clean up empty bottles and dry-clean the couch cushions and tend to her bruises. They won't talk for a while, and when they do, it will be curt and polite, full of socially acceptable banter and topics. It will be a while before they open up to each other again, but when it does happen, they'll no doubt feel even emptier than before.