She took another hit, passing the bowl to the man on her left. An hour ago, she knew his name. And she was pretty sure she had fucked him, too. But that was before the pot, and before the crack, and before the mescaline.
A beer was passed to her on her right, and she took a swig, wincing at the lukewarm taste. She knew if she had been sober, she would have bitched about the beer being warm, but she no longer new what sober felt like.
Hell, for all she knew, this was sober.
The girl sitting across from her had taken off her shirt after her first pass on the bowl, and now the guys on either side of her were groping, biting, drawing blood, leaving bruises. That girl would be raped tonight, and not a single person in this room had enough brain cells left to stop it.
She felt a hand slip between her legs, and somewhere, deep inside her subconscious, alarms went off, but she couldn't distinguish between that and the loud music anymore. There was no protesting when the button was popped on her jeans, and her moan may very well have been a no, as the garment was pushed hastily over her hips. But no one paid them any mind.
When she was tossed over the back of the couch, ass in the air, there were a few mildly excited whistles, and a woman's screams from down the hall. He impaled her, making her cry out in pain, and as he moved in and out of her, tears ran down her face, dropping to the carpet. They disappeared, like he would, when he was done with her.
No more, she thought, never again. I'll never take another hit. I'll never swallow another pill. Never.
She felt him explode inside of her, and then she was alone, draped over the couch like the slut she had allowed herself to become. The embarrassment came and went quickly, as it always did after these things. It was nothing for her to pull her jeans back up and turn around for another hit.
It was life.
But as that joint came around again, she heard that small voice, the one she recognized as her own, beckoning from deep inside.
Never again.
----
"Witter," a deep voice called, grabbing his attention, giving him ample time to catch the envelope that was tossed at his head. "Room four."
Pacey shook his head. When he had decided to become a drug counselor, he never counted on his days being spent in his father's precinct, preaching to the drug addicts of Metro Detroit. "Who is it this time, Mark?"
"I don't want to ruin the surprise." Mark waggled his eyebrows at him, which immediately told Pacey it was a female.
"Whatever." He tossed his cell phone at the man he shared a desk with. "Answer that if it rings, Doug. Dad's on his way back from Flint, he said he was going to call before he came in."
Doug simply nodded at him, his attention focused on the computer screen. Pacey shook his head again, not knowing if he should be worried his brother invested so much in his job, or if he should be proud.
He walked down the long hallway, immediately blocking out the eerie flickering halogen light effect that one usually sees in the movies. Pacey often wondered if the department bought defective lights on purpose, in order to give the 'criminals' an even greater sense of foreboding.
Pacey slipped the file folder out of the envelope, but didn't look at it before stepping into the room.
When he had a chance to look back on all of this later, he would tell himself he should have looked at that file before going through that door. But as they say, hindsight is twenty-twenty, and once it's done, you can't take it back.
His first thought when he entered the room was that it was empty. But then he heard the quiet sound of restrained sobs. He'd been forced to endure that sound more times than he'd ever be able to count, but it never got any less heartbreaking.
People developed habits for different reasons. Low self-esteem, the need to belong, the need for something to hold on to, to replace something they thought they'd lost, to give them courage, to give them peace. The list could go on for hours, but to Pacey, it always came down to one thing. The addicts he'd worked with, the people that he'd tried to help, the souls he'd tried to help mend, they wanted love. Craved it, desired it, hungered for it. Some of his patients were loved beyond rhyme or reason, the people in their lives would have crawled to the moon and back for them, but for whatever reason, they couldn't see it.
And others... It broke his heart just to think about them. The ones that showed up in this room, lying broken and battered in the corner on the floor, making that noise that could literally tear your heart to pieces...
Those were the ones that Pacey fought for. They were the people that Pacey longed to give second chances to.
And when he looked at that girl, cowered in the corner, shaking uncontrollably, her tears forming a puddle on the floor, all he wanted to do was bundle her up, stick her in his pocket and shield her from everything.
But then she looked at him, and his heart, which was already lying bloody at his feet, shattered into a million and one pieces.
"Potter."