Chapter Text
Everything is wrong and it hits Shane Hollander like a ton of bricks.
Sugar.
There’s sugar on his teeth, and the curtains are closed, and his room is dark, and his head hurts and—he always leaves them open because waking up to natural light is crucial for his circadian rhythm—and he never goes to sleep without brushing his teeth, and at the club he had three ginger ales and he always always rinses once, then twice, swishing with water first before brushing—he has to or he’ll get a cavity, and then a filling, and if the dentist doesn’t file the glue down right his bite will be weird inside his mouth guard and he won’t be able to play with it on and—
Shane shakes his head.
He tries to breathe.
He needs to gargle from the tap. First, before he deals with the rest. It’s what’s closest. He’ll double the duration; he’ll do it twice—no, twice won’t cut it—then he’ll—
Start to feel strange, dizzy almost, when he tries to get up, like the daze that sometimes comes when he’s been slammed against the boards or closelined by a high stick, an extra blink, a split-second blackout, locked knees in a hot auditorium.
Because his feet feel heavy when he tries to get up, and that, in turn, makes his limbs feel heavier.
Because he’s wearing shoes.
Inside.
In bed.
All wrong. All wrong. All wrong.
Shane’s hands are shaking as he tries to unlace them—he'll carry them from his bedroom down into the foyer, then, no, he’ll grab a mineral water from the fridge, he’ll rinse with that.
The knot is too tight for his trembling fingers to undo, and if he peels his shoe off without unlacing it, he’ll warp the topline.
He kicks it off, the one then the other one, and they both flop down on the sheet that’s half-draped on the floor.
He’s going to have to clean the whole house now, but god does his head hurt when he touches it—it throbs, a tender spot bowing across the back of it from ear to ear.
By the time Shane realises that there are two buttons undone on his shirt, not three—that he does not know where he is or how he got there—he has already picked his jacket up off a floor that he knows is not mahogany, folded it, and let it slip out of his hands because he stopped being able to feel them.
He couldn’t find his keys.
He said he didn’t think it was all that safe to go out.
Lighten up, Hollander. You stress yourself out too much.
He’s right, Shane. Nothing bad is gonna happen. We’ll just sip some cold drinks, dance to a few good songs, and call it a night, okay. No, no ‘buts’.
Okay, he said. He remembers saying it as he presses his forehead against a soft rug on a floor that he doesn’t know is clean. He said, Yeah, no—you're right. I’ll go, I’m just—
You don’t have to explain yourself, Shane.
I’m not. I’m—I’m good. Okay, yeah. Okay. I’ll come.
And he remembers throwing up afterwards and then feeling just a little bit better.
It was only a night out.
Nothing bad was going to happen...
‘Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck—’
Shane knows when he sees the door that it will be locked if he tries the handle, and he does, and it is, and he can’t breathe past the tears in his eyes and his tongue in his throat.