Arriving in Munich, we’d stayed in our own rooms after last night’s... whatever that was. Not because we’d talked it through or come to some mutual understanding. We’d just avoided each other. Carefully and deliberately. Like two people circling a crack in the ice, pretending it wasn’t there in the hope it wouldn’t split open beneath our feet.
Because it had been a mess. I knew that.
Bodhi had come too close to a truth I hadn’t been ready to say out loud since the first pill Ghost handed me. Since the moment pain management stopped being a necessity and started becoming an excuse. Since relief blurred into something greedier, something familiar and dangerous, something I’d already fought once before.
A voice in my head, quiet and poisonous, whispered that Iwas already slipping. That I was one bad day away from saying fuck it and diving straight back into the cesspit I’d once barely crawled out of alive.
I didn’t want to hear it.
So I wrapped myself in a blanket of denial and refused to see the truth for what it was. That the real reason I’d acted the way I had with Bodhi was because he’d seen too much. He’d been standing right there, close enough to peel back the layers and see the cracks forming underneath.
He’d only ever known me in rehab. In the aftermath of my bad decisions. The version of me already trying to be better. He hadn’t seen me before. Hadn’t seen how good I was at hiding the high. At smiling through the withdrawal. Laughing too loud. Using sex and charm and chaos as distractions. The old habits I’d sworn I was done with, resurfacing like muscle memory.
Realising I’d used those same tricks on him made bile rise in my throat.
The shame sat heavy and sour, so thick I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me whole. Because Bodhi didn’t deserve that. Not when he was working so hard on his own journey. He deserved someone solid, steady. Not someone balanced on the knife-edge between recovery and relapse, waiting to see which way they’d fall when a strong wind blew.
So, I avoided him.
I avoided him when I climbed onto the bus at the last possible second and disappeared into my bunk without even saying goodnight. I avoided him again when I slipped off the bus without looking his way, terrified of what I might see in his face. Anger, hurt, pity, worry. Any of it would’ve broken me.
I’d hidden in my room like a coward ever since.
Now it was five o’clock in the evening on our one day off, and Bodhi hadn’t knocked. Hadn’t tried to talk to me or checkin. Not that I deserved it. It should have been me at his door, begging forgiveness. Begging him not to stop worrying about me, because somehow he’d become the only person who ever really had. More than my parents. More than the “friends” who were supposed to care. I should’ve been on my knees, asking him to stay. To hold me and kiss me. To not let me do this alone.
Most of all, I should have told him the truth. About how close I was to cracking. About how scared I was of myself. About how badly I needed his help.
But I didn’t.
And Bodhi didn’t come.
He sent one message. Just one, telling me he loved me. And then he let me sit alone with my guilt, licking my wounds in the quiet.
The light outside the room was fading, and I was still curled up in bed, staring at the crumpled box of co-codamol I’d bought in Zurich. A two-week supply that was already far emptier than it should’ve been. I watched it like it might speak to me. Weighed it in my mind. Wondered if it would be safe to take more, just enough to slip back into sleep and disappear for a while. To close my eyes and simply exist until tomorrow, until we had to go to the arena.
The knock at the door startled me out of it.
A quicktaptaptapthat had me peeling back the sheets and hurrying across the room, my heart kicking up as I reached for the handle. For one stupid, hopeful second, I thought it might be Bodhi on the other side.
But it wasn’t.
It was Trix, lead singer of Noctis’s support band, Half Life.
We hadn’t really talked much. Not since the first group lunch in Amsterdam weeks ago. Mostly we’d just passed each other in corridors and backstage, exchanged smiles and quick hellos.Both bands had their own rhythms, their own chaos. And I’d been far too wrapped up in Bodhi to pay much attention to what anyone else was doing offstage.
“Hey!”
Her greeting cut through the silence like a firecracker, and I had to fight the urge to flinch. She leaned against the doorframe, grinning far too brightly for the doom cloud I’d been marinating in all day.
“How’re you doing?” she asked.
“Okay, I guess.”
Her eyebrow arched as she looked me up and down, silently calling bullshit.
“Yeah,” she said dryly. “Sure.”
She straightened and shoved her hands into the pockets of her joggers. Pastel blue, patterned with white Hello Kitty faces. She wore a pink cotton bralette that somehow counted as a top, and her aqua-blue hair was piled into messy space buns, silver glitter clips keeping stray strands out of her face.
