tiny voices

“Collin? Buddy, are you there? Man, I could really use your advice right now.”

Today was fucking awful, had been since the moment Doug woke up this morning, but he had been thrown one single, solitary bone in the form of his roommate being out. Doug could do and say whatever, unobserved.

“Collin?”

He was desperate, but not quite panicking. Desperation, tragically, made him feel more confident in this. This could take a little bit of a time; Collin was hard to get a hold of sometimes.

Minutes passed. Nothing. Doug’s hands shook as he wiped his sweaty palms onto the denim of his jeans. “Collin, please,” he tried again.

His roommate’s clock tick-tocked incessantly on his desk. Doug sat down and reached for the half-empty bottle of water on his own desk and took a pull to ease his drying throat. Halfway through this, Collin picked up. A healthy, startled mouthful of water erupted back out of Doug’s throat, and he spent a moment sputtering and coughing all of it into his lap.

“H-hey, man, fuck, you spooked me. You’re too good at that.” Doug paused to cough a bit more, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “Good to hear from you. It’s— I know it’s been a while, I’m sorry. It’s been a fucking rough couple weeks, you know that. Sorry.”

Collin went on, and Doug listened. With Collin on the line, he felt a little better. Emotionally. Physically he was still fucked, but that mattered less. “Yeah, I really appreciate it. Listen, listen, I need to know something. I’m hoping you can find out.” Doug cleared his throat, suddenly nervous. “Collin, um… is Yena cheating on me?”

The subsequent pause wasn’t long. It wasn’t even 30 tick-tocks on that damn clock. But all the same, Doug’s heart was racing. He clacked his teeth together, and he hated that he did that. Collin hadn’t liked it when he did it when they were kids, but he couldn’t help it right now. When Doug swallowed a swig of water it felt like dull needles in his throat, and his skin felt like it didn’t fit his body properly.

“...She is.”

Doug rose from his chair in increments. First his left foot pressing against the floor, then his right. He leaned forward and shifted his weight as though he were in a film that was missing every third frame. At least he didn’t puke this time.

“Yena’s cheating on me.” Only four words, but how expensive they were. “I knew it. That’s the sick thing about it, Collin. I knew something was wrong, and I think I knew what it was, but I just had to be sure. I just… needed to hear it from you. Gods.”

He ran a hand through his hair. It was greasy and made his palm tingle strangely, as though he had pinched his ulnar nerve.

“Fuck! Fuck, man. I can’t believe she’d— wait. No, stop— the rest of you, don’t, please—”

Doug grabbed at his head— more tingles— before covering his ears. This was fruitless, of course, but he hadn’t ever figured out how to fight the instinct in times like this. He regretted standing now but didn’t trust himself to move back down to the chair.

“There’s too many of you, it’s too loud. Please stop. Collin, can you— can you make them go away? It’s not personal, you guys, it’s not, but— so loud… Don’t say that. Shut up!”

Doug staggered to his bed, hurting his shins as he bumped them into the wooden frame and fell forward. He burned from the inside out. “I know I should’ve been better, but that doesn’t mean— I could have been, but she didn’t— No, I’m not trying to make excuses— listen to me, just bring Collin back, he’ll get it, he can explain—”

He whipped onto his back, catching rug burn on his arm for it, and stared unseeing at the underside of his roommate’s bed. “Shut up! This isn’t my fault, she’s the one that cheated! Please stop, please stop screaming.”

Tears trickled down Doug’s face. One track even made it to his ear. Doug wrapped his arms around his torso, feeling too tight in his bones and yet loose enough to make him worry he would detach from himself at any moment. That scared him more than anything. He knew where he would go if that happened.

“Okay, okay, maybe I was kind of pathetic,” he managed after writhing on the bed for a few minutes. The noise was incessant. “Yena— she deserves more than me. I get it, I know. I’m sorry. Collin, if you had been here, man, you would’ve known what to do. You were always better with girls than me.”

His throat clicked when he swallowed. He dared to reach up and press a finger to his pulse. It was a rabbit’s BPM. He almost laughed at it. They wanted what he had so badly. It was sad, really, since they had had it before. They ought to have known it was a little overrated. They ought to have known better, seeing him as he was now, and every other day of his fucking life.

Doug’s voice came in a hoarse whisper, “is she happier with him?”

The answer was immediate. It hit him like a sucker punch. Doug flinched into sitting upright, blood seeping from his nose. He coughed around it as he scrambled for the box of tissues on his desk. He sputtered and cried into a fist full of tissues for a while. The sole relief was that his head was quiet now; the voices had flowed into silence along with the blood.

Once he had steadied himself somewhat, Doug slinked off to the bathroom and washed his face. He watched the last traces of blood run down the drain before glancing up at the mirror. His own reflection was thoroughly regrettable, but Collin hovered just behind his shoulder. Concern sat heavy on his brow, which was shaded by the bill of his old baseball cap. He wordlessly, heavily, patted Doug’s shoulder. Doug recoiled from it, just slightly.

And to an empty and silent room, Doug murmured, “thanks, buddy.”