Hangover

A Story by Hope

I met him in the summer of last year.

Maybe that doesn’t mean all that much to you, but that was an interesting time in my life. My best friend tried to kill herself and then moved nineteen hours away. My mother looked into my eyes and said she couldn’t recognize me anymore, that I was a stranger that had inhabited the body of her little girl. I was dating a boy I didn’t like all that much because I was the type of person who couldn’t break people’s hearts.

That’s something that is no longer the same, because breaking hearts is something I became very skilled at, very quickly.

They say the quickest way to kill someone is to kiss them once and never speak to them again. If that’s true then homicide runs in my veins.

The thing is, though, he was both the person who set me on this course and the person who could pull me from it.

He had a girlfriend, I had a boyfriend. But that night, when we met, we danced. We danced in the dark room with bouncing lights and music turned up so loud it soaked into your skin. His hands left bruises on my waist and the smell of my hair is permanently branded in his mind. All night we pressed closer and harder and forgot the world outside of our crowded room imprisoned by black doors and a velvet rope. If you imagine the burning in your lungs when you hold your breath for too long and amplify it by twenty, that’s how it felt moving in sync with contours of his muscle and ferocity of his desire. But it felt good, so good that neither of us could have stopped even if we’d wanted to. Sometime between one a.m. and two he had shifted me so we were face to face, chest to chest, heart to heart. His eyes stroked my neck while his hands did the same to my back, smoldering with everything I had never experienced before. Every second brought us closer and closer to the edge of danger, we danced along the line between right and wrong and flirted with the dark desire growing in both of us.

It was wrong, so wrong, but we finally kissed, and feeling his lips drag me into oblivion was all it took for me to know that I would gladly drown in his embrace. Separated by nothing but the knowledge that the moment anyone found out would be the moment it would all be over, we tested and tempted each other in the center of the floor, prying eyes staring at me with jealousy and him with longing. He was a dark prince, the center of the room, intoxicating in every way. He was magnetic, my polar opposite cut from the same cloth, designed to pull me towards him and never let me go, his lips my own personal brand of alcohol, crafted to inebriate me and no one else.

I drank him in that night, became drunk on the taste of his skin and high on the cinnamon smell radiating from him.

It was animalistic, carnal, inevitable. And while on the surface it was wrong, nothing had ever felt to right, and he felt it, too.

We were one soul, one mind, and for that one night only, one body.

I’ve been hungover ever since.