He has a hole in the left side of his face.
Half of the dark flesh that was there last night is now missing; torn by some invisible force that looks like the piss-yellow colored glass of a bottle you may or may not have thrown.
It's so bright in here—a dizzyingly blurred kind that accompanies the darkest of nights spent running from the nightmare playing behind your closed eyelids like a broken movie reel, over and over and over again—you can't seem to focus on anything else besides the shriveled red blood cells and exposed white tendons of bone glaring at you.
He has removed his hands from your shoulders and sunk back into the corner of the room where he slumps against the edge of the dresser in some kind of exhausted defeat from fighting off all the inner demons you can't find the strength to do, his head leaning back on the rotting wooden wall. Cautious, he watches your every move through his right eye, the other swollen shut by popped blood cells and glued eyelashes laced together like the stitches you know he'll need. Bruise-like shadows, a sickening purple-black tint, crowd around the remaining flesh and taunt your empty stomach.
You look away, then, fidgeting, more so horrified by the knowledge that he's still in the same goddamned room as you rather than uncomfortable at the ghastly sight.
You know that he knows that he has nowhere else to go but down the same rabbit hole as you, though some long lost part of you still aches for him to grasp onto the realization that he can run but he can't hide. Because no matter how many miles he puts between you and him you know he'll come crawling back the first chance he gets and that's the worst part about all of this.
Living with the constant worry that, if you decided to drop off the face of the earth tomorrow morning, he would follow you to the fucking edge and not ask a single question. It's the one relationship in your life that never seems to stay constant, predictable—an hour or two in your presence on a bad night could leave you seeing red and him shoved against the bathroom door, your knee between his to hold him there, your elbow in his chest to keep him from shoving you away as you tried to clean up the mess you didn't mean to cause. He's the only thing holding you down to this bumblefuck town in the middle of the American desert—if he wasn't so motherfucking pathetic you would've hopped a train back to New York a long time ago and never looked back, not even once.
You open your mouth and try to say his name, though your tongue doesn't know how to roll over your teeth and your spit doesn't know how to collect on the back of your canines and your gums don't know how to smack together and say Johnny because Johnny is all you know how to say and it's not like you can just form a fucking sentence with just Johnny, anyways.
Your brain is about to ooze out through your eyeballs, it is pounding so hard against your skull and eardrums and your blood is pulsing under your skin, so fast, fast, fast you're surprised you don't get lost in the swish-swish motion, hums like the song he sang in your nightmare—and then his lips are moving and so are yours and your mouth is drier than the cold December air rushing in through the cracked window—and he's whispering about he doesn't have a ride home and you're asking him why he's still here in a voice that's loud even to your own deaf ears, because, really, why the fuck is he still fucking here! You both know it'll be either you or someone else who kills him one day but at least he'll let you help him clean himself up first, it's only fair, right—
"I'm fine" rushes out in one syllable and you want to laugh but your chest is on fire—did you swallow a lit cigarette or are you actually sliced straight down the middle?—nope, you're not, there isn't a lick of a blade or blood from your collarbone to your belly button thank god—and within all this heated exchange of a conversation you won't remember this afternoon he's limped across the room and is staring at the door in pity, his last attempt to escape, fingers reaching for the knob that will lead him down the hall and then the stairs and then through the empty bar and outside into the parking lot and then the outside world if he looks for it hard enough.
You want him to stay. You want him to leave.
This is when you realize that you know and don't know what you want and don't want.
You sit up and the room spins at an odd angle, all colors and blurred shadows and the wheezing-sound his throat makes when he exhales your name.
"No, Dally."
Fuck.
Your insides are going to fall out. There's a hole in your chest and your insides are going to fall out onto the floor like they did last night and Johnny will pick them up for you and rearrange them back in your body so that they fit.
No. No. No
He doesn't understand how much you fucking need him. How, if he turns away, if he won't let you clean up the mess you made, you'll…you'll break…you'll track him down and kill him with your own fucking hands and wish you hadn't…
"Please. Don't go."
But you don't know how to say that.
