0.2 [Leave my body glowing]
When Adam wakes the next morning, it's close to noon and there's a raging headache that's pounding at the front of his skull. Grimacing at the light streaming in through his window, he drapes an arm over his face, rolling onto his side and curling towards the wall beside his bed. His head is screaming with pain and his ears are ringing, and the only thing that makes sense in his head is that someone must have found a way to drug him last night.
Even so, that doesn't make much sense to him. He didn't really touch anyone last night, and he drank his own soda that he'd brought to the party. So unless someone breathed on him, he couldn't have gotten high. Still, though, the pounding in his head feels like a sledgehammer to his poor brain, and it takes all of Adam's willpower not to whine in misery and self-pity.
Tucking his pillow over his head, Adam lets out a heavy breath as his eyes slip shut again, his jaw clenched in agony. The grinding of his teeth really isn't helping any, but at least it's giving him something to do other than thinking. Thinking hurts, as he learns rather quickly, and he tries to do anything minimal that doesn't require brain function. Sadly enough, it's futile, because everything requires brain function.
Sighing heavily, Adam lets his eyes slip back open, staring at the patterns of the plaster on the wall, taking note to the curves and jagged lines. Strangely enough, staring with a glaze over his eyes at the wall makes him feel a little better. The pounding isn't going away, but the staring-contest he's ensued with the curves and jagged lines is making it a little more bearable. But he becomes bored all too soon and looks away from it, biting his bottom lip.
By chance his headache is caused from sleeping for too long. It's possible; it's happened to him before, unfortunately enough. When he was a teenager, his sleeping patterns were so outrageously abnormal that it was uncommon for him to wake up in the early afternoon without some form of a headache. Of course, these sleeping habits haven't gotten much better over the years, but at least this is only the first time he's woken up with a sleep-induced headache in the last six months.
Eyes fluttering, Adam mentally shakes away the thoughts of sleeping and headaches before slowly pulling himself up to a sitting position, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. The light of the late-morning streams across the floor and to the opposing wall, lighting up posters of eighties movies, David Bowie and Queen. He smiles a little to himself, yawning loudly before scratching his hairline at the back of his neck. He discovered quickly that it's always beneficial to become good friends with the ladies who manage dorm room assignments, for he's had a room all to himself this year, and he really wouldn't want it any other way.
Swinging his legs off of the edge of the bed, Adam rests his hands in his lap, staring over at the pile of books resting neatly beside his desk across the room. Textbooks and novels that he still needs to return to the school library. Unessential to his daily life, and thus often forgotten about. Clothes are scattered here and there, mostly in corners. There are a few piles that he's forgotten about entirely whether or not they're clean or dirty. If he remembers, he'll probably just take it all down to the laundry room at the end of the week.
By no means is Adam a neat, organized person. However, he is the kind of person that can find just about anything in the pandemonium of his room. Just as long as no one else tries to clean it or rearrange it for him.
Yawning again, Adam pulls himself from the bed and onto his feet, slowly shuffling across to his dresser. He's still in his leather pants and loose-fitting black shirt from last night. Most days, Adam will take the time to strip of his clothing and dress in more appropriate attire for sleeping. But right now his only assumption is that he dragged his exhausted ass back here and slumped into bed without changing.
Reaching forward, he curls his fingers around the handles of the top dresser, pulling it out a little. He snatches a pair of cotton boxer-briefs, half-hazardly tossing them behind him and towards his bed. Shutting the top drawer, he opens the second for a clean Queen tee-shirt and the third for a pair of black jeans. Shutting the drawers, he strips of his leather pants and shirt, redressing in the briefs and casual wear.
Rubbing at his jaw, Adam slumps over to his bed again, sitting down on the edge as he snatches his phone from the side table, flipping through the messages. A frown pulls at his lips when he reads a few from Brad. Apparently he wandered off last night and disappeared? Disappeared where? He doesn't recall leaving the party at all. And, yet, there's a strange fuzziness in his memory for last night. He's damn sure that nothing was slipped to him, so he couldn't have hallucinated or blanked on anything. Yet there's something missing.
Scrolling through more messages, he comes across another one from Brad, reading about how at eight o'clock this morning the brunette twink tried to wake him up for breakfast and found him face down in his bed with rose petals clutched in his hand. Biting his lip, Adam glances around his bed, seeing no rose petals what so ever. Either his friends are on crack or they're playing a joke with him, because Adam's confused as all hell.
Setting his phone aside, Adam chews a little on his lip as he stands from his bed. Rose petals? Disappearing last night? None of this makes sense to him, and it's not helping with the blank in his memory or the headache that's raging between his eyes. Squinting a little, he glances out of the window, staring across the campus and to the trees beyond the soccer fields. He disappeared? Where did he—
The trees.
Blinking once, Adam feels a soft tug that turns his head away from the window and down to the floor beneath his bed. At first he's not sure what he's supposed to be looking at, but the more he stares at the dusty-darkness of the hardwood floor, the more he can make out the wrinkled shapes of dried rose petals. Gasping softly, he turns and drops to his knees, reaching out for them. He scoops them up into his palm, pulling them close and staring at them as the light washes over them.
They're a little roughed up from being handled, but the crimson color is all too familiar and there's a faint sheen of what reminds him of glitter in the crevices and curves. His heart gives a wild kick in his chest as flashes of glowing blue rose petals and a beautiful naked boy fills his head.
Trembling a little, Adam's fingers close around the crushed rose petals, his eyes wide but seeing nothing in front of him. Instead he sees the briefest flashes of the night before; of the naked man with dark tattoos and burnt orange and gold eyes. He takes a shaky breath inward, remembering the trail of glowing rose petals that led to the ring of trees. The soft blue light and the way those eyes drew him in.
"Adam?" is followed by a knock at his dorm room door and Adam practically jumps out of his skin, his breath coming out in a startled gasp. His heart races in his chest as he lifts his pillow, dumping the flower petals onto the mattress before setting the cushion back down, hiding them. He's not sure what he's going to do, but he knows he's got to do something.
"Y-yeah?" Adam calls back to the speaker, recognizing it after a moment as Drake. He sighs heavily as the lock clicks and the brunette steps in, pulling the key from the knob. Adam had gotten a copy of his key illegally made for Drake in the event that Drake needed a place to crash. The brunette was unfortunate enough to have been assigned a room with a rather douchebag of a roommate and is often in need of alternative sleeping arrangements.
"You okay?" Drake asks, shutting the door. His blue eyes are concerned and Adam runs a hand through his hair, smiling as best as he can.
"Yeah, I'm great. Why do you ask?" Drake bites his lip for a moment before speaking quietly.
"Do you remember anything about last night, by chance?" Adam swallows the lump in his throat. He could be honest and say yes, but there's something twisting his gut and squeezing his throat, and he frowns.
"What do you mean?" Drake looks wary but presses further.
"Like… Did you leave the dorm party? Did you wander around or anything?" Adam hesitates for a moment before shaking his head. He's not particularly comfortable with the idea of lying, especially to Drake, but there's really not much else he can do. The pounding in his head is screaming not to say anything about the roses or the light or the beautiful naked boy, and he's afraid that if he lets it slip his head will explode.
"No. I mean, I hung around the party and then I came back here and crashed. Why would you think I wandered off?" Drake sighs softly, crossing closer to Adam with his arm folded around his stomach, the fabric of his denim jacket stretching a little tighter around his arms.
"Brad said that he saw you leave the building. That you cut across campus and disappeared into the woods behind the bleachers by the soccer fields. He says he didn't see you come back. He borrowed my key to check on your and said you were clutching these, like, glittery roses in your hands while you slept…" Adam bites the inside of his cheek, glancing away to hide the truth in his eyes. He thought he'd dropped the rose petals when he saw the boy, but he must have held on to a few of them…
"I didn't wander off to the woods. And I didn't have any rose petals last night," Adam says with a soft smile, shaking his head a little. "I don't know what Brad is smoking, but I didn't go anywhere."
A frown plucks at Drake's lips and he looks away, clearly embarrassed for being the messenger with false details. Adam smiles a little more, palming a hand onto the brunette's shoulder. "Hey, don't worry, okay? I'm fine and Brad's just probably coming down from being high last night. You know how he is." The frown twists into a half smile and Drake nods once, laughing a little.
"So, what say you and I go and get some early lunch or something, yeah?" Adam suggests and Drake nods again, smiling a little more. Chuckling a little, Adam leans down and presses a soft kiss to the brunette's cheek, earning a soft blush from the smaller male. "Go ahead and wait outside for me, okay?" Expecting a curious eye and receiving none, Adam watches with a smile as Drake nods again, retreating to the door and leaving him in silence.
Turning on his heel, Adam lifts the pillow and scoops the petals into his hand, glancing around before finding a small jar holding a few pencils on his desk. Crossing the short distance, he snatches up the jar and dumps out the pencils, carefully sliding the petals into the glass container. They fall flat to the bottom without a sound, shining in the afternoon light. Grabbing the lid from beside his laptop, he screws the jar shut and stares at the rose petals, watching in awe as they twinkle with the faintest cobalt blue in the light.