I was fucking exhausted.
The joint felt wrong in my hand for half a second. And then it didn’t. It felt familiar, comfortable. Muscle memory kicked in as I lifted it to my lips and inhaled deeply, holding the smoke in my lungs like I’d done a hundred times before. My body sank into the mattress almost immediately, muscles loosened. The tight coil inside my chest unwound. There was the familiar burn at the back of my throat, deep in my lungs, just unpleasant enough to remind me it was real. The dopamine rush made it worth it.
When my chest started to ache, I exhaled slowly, letting the smoke spill from my mouth in a lazy cloud. And just like I’d hoped, everything heavy drifted away.
“Fuck,” I whispered.
My head tipped back, suddenly too heavy to hold upright.
Trix slipped the joint from my fingers and took another drag. Her free hand traced absent shapes on my thigh, my bare skin tingling under the lightest touch. It felt amplified, like every nerve ending had been turned up a notch, and my mind betrayed me by drifting to the way Bodhi touched me.
Bodhi.
Guilt stirred, sharp and ugly, threatening to sour the high and tip me straight into paranoia. But before it could take hold, Trix was offering the joint back again.
I took another drag, and the guilt dissolved with the smoke.
“It’s good shit, right?” Trix asked, her voice sounding far away despite the fact she was only inches from my face.
I nodded. At least, I think I did. My lips felt too clumsy to bother with actual words.
Something landed on my stomach. I blinked, only then realising my eyes had drifted shut, and found a packet of German sweets sitting there like it had magically appeared. Trix giggled, and when I looked up, she was grinning.
“You look sooo high,” she mused.
Seeing her smile made me smile, and suddenly we were both laughing. Then Bella joined in, and whatever fragile grip I had on my composure snapped completely. Giggles turned into full-blown belly laughs, my stomach aching as tears slipped from the corners of our bloodshot eyes. I didn’t know what we were laughing at. I wasn’t even sure there was a reason. But it didn’t matter. We were happy, and that shared joy felt like it was lifting me clean off the mattress.
When the joint Trix and I were sharing burned down to nothing, Bella lobbed a fresh one our way. Soon there was a thick haze hanging over the room, smoke softening the edges of everything, colours dulling and blurring together. I must’ve mumbled something about the smoke alarm, because Bella waved it off and told us she’d taken the batteries out earlier that morning.
A chime cut through the haze, and Trix tapped my thigh.
“Time to wash off the dye,” she announced brightly, crawling off the bed.
She wobbled when she stood, and Bella reached out to steady her. It probably wouldn’t have helped much, given how little she’d moved, but the gesture was there. And that was nice.
I followed them towards the bathroom at a much slowerpace, my limbs feeling too long for my body. Like they belonged to me but were being operated by someone else. There was a lag between thinking about moving and actually doing it. I started imagining tiny people inside my brain, manning levers and buttons like it was some kind of control room, and that thought sent me into another fit of laughter.
I tried to explain it to Trix, but what came out was a garbled, incoherent mess. She didn’t even try to decipher it. Just grabbed my shoulders, steered me into the bathroom, and gently shoved my head over the bath.
Washing hair dye out while high was chaotic. Pink-tinged water splashed everywhere, streaks of dye smeared across the porcelain, and while Trix focused on my hair, I made a very half-hearted attempt to clean the tub. Mostly I just made more mess. Water soaked straight through my T-shirt and shorts. Trix’s clothes didn’t fare much better.
By the time we were done, both sets of hair rinsed and any trace of dye gone, we were both completely naked and sprawled in an undignified heap on the bathroom floor, limbs tangled together.
Our laughter bounced off the tiled walls until it faded into breathless chuckles. Eventually we rolled apart, propping ourselves on our sides and casually taking each other in. I was firmly, unapologetically gay, but even I could admit that Trix was attractive.
“Dicks look so weird,” Trix murmured, mostly to herself.
She reached out and poked my cock where it lay soft against my thigh. “Does it feel weird, like... holding it to piss?”
“It’s all I’ve ever known,” I chuckled. “Sometimes I sit down like a girl, though. As a treat.”
Trix snorted and flopped onto her back, staring up at the ceiling. “Are you gay?”
“Absofuckinglutely,” I replied without hesitation. “Pussies scare me.”
“You’ve just gotta be gentle with them,” she said, like she was explaining basic science, patting her freshly shaved mound. “Some guys use their fingers like a jackhammer. They couldn’t find the clit even if a map led them straight to it.”
“Oh, I’ve slept with people like that,” I said with a grimace. “Except they’re jabbing your prostate like they’re hammering in a nail.”
