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I'D HATE TO TELL YOU I'M FULL OF LIES
CW: A touch of blood and gore, strangulation, alcoholism and its woes, and very mild interalized homophobia.
"You met somebody?" Mary Shepherd-Sunderland's voice was inquisitive as she rested her chin on folded hands, looking over her plate of food over at James; he was in the middle of biting down on a sandwich.
They were alone out on the balcony of a small restaurant near a lake. The scenery was usually beautiful, but it was tainted by the clouds above, as they decided to block out the sun. James insisted that they bring umbrellas so they don't catch any colds if it starts to rain. As well as staying dry, of course.
"Mmm," James made an affirmative noise and nodded as he chewed. He swallowed and continued, "I did, yeah."
"Well, what's their name? Every person's gotta have a name, right?" The glow of her smile was bright as always, and her head playfully bobbed to the side as she asked the question. James took another bite.
"Chris," he responded mid-chew. "His name is Chris."
"Is it short for Christopher?"
"Yes, it's short for Christopher." James brought up a hand, ghosting around his mouth. "He actually introduced himself as Christopher and I just ended up calling him Chris, anyways. He doesn't seem to take issue with it." James explained between bites and Mary nodded thoughtfully.
"He seems like a really great guy, hun." She readjusted her posture and held a hand that was loosely closed in the air, still smiling and staring at James. He caught her unwavering gaze and swallowed the rest of his bite with something of a hitch, as a bit of it got caught in his throat. He started to cough and Mary was quick to offer her napkin.
"Here, James," she said, the tone of her voice shifting cleanly into concern, and James graciously took the napkin and cupped it over his mouth in full. Whatever lodged its way in his throat was really putting him through the wringer, as tears were forming in his eyes when he finally brought up what was irritating his windpipe.
What he saw in the napkin, though, made his eyes bulge out of their sockets.
It was a small, bloody mound of gore, pulsating like a heart. James' stomach dropped to his feet and he jolted up from the chair, feeling his face burn with terror. Mary looked up at him with wide eyes and knit brows.
"Honey, is something wrong?"
"It- it's blood, I- I coughed up blood…" James stammered as he practically shoved the napkin in Mary's face to show her. She jolted back at the gesture and then pulled back in to scrutinize the crumpled linen in James' hand.
"I don't see anything but some lettuce, sweetheart. Are you okay? You've been… acting weird all day." James saw Mary's expression grow uneasy and he grit his teeth, shaking his head profusely.
"Mary, I swear I'm not crazy, I saw it with my own two-" James pulled the napkin away from Mary's face and stared back into it. "My own two eyes…"
There was nothing there. Nothing but a piece of coughed up lettuce. James suddenly felt a rise in his stomach that threaded through his spine, but Mary was quick to reorient,
"Please sit down, James. You don't want to make a scene, do you?" She waved her hand at him and placed her chin on her knuckles once more. James looked between her and the napkin balled in his fist and he sighed, heeding her request and scooting the chair back in when he sat back down. He tossed it aside from his plate and massaged the bridge of his nose.
Mary was right. She was always right. He was acting weird today. Between the drive here and the dangerously overcast weather, James has felt nothing but incredibly off. His joints always felt sore when he felt rain coming on, but… the blood? The twitching mound of flesh that he saw so clearly in the napkin? That wasn't right. None of this was right. He could've sworn that he saw it, he could've sworn he tasted the iron that spilled from his mouth, but-
"James." Mary's voice was sharp and it pierced his hammering heart like an arrow. His head snapped up to meet her gaze, and what he saw was a vacant expression.
Hollow.
Empty.
James sucked in a quiet, shaky breath and blinked a few times at his wife before the warmth quickly flowed back into her face. She smiled at him gently.
Too gently.
"Tell me more about Chris."
"Oh, Chris? Um… He's… a- a single dad of one. A daughter. I don’t know her name, admittedly. Chris is, um, the secretive type…" James nervously rode a clammy palm up and down his neck, trying to soothe his screaming nerves.
"Is he afraid?" The tilt of Mary's head was almost robotic and it sent a shot of chills throughout James' body.
"Wh… what?" James asked weakly.
"Is he afraid, James?" Mary's tone grew increasingly hostile. Her eyes spoke of the disgust that coated her words with such vicious poison. James gripped the edges of his seat and clenched his jaw.
He wanted to jump out of the chair and off the balcony into the nothingness below, but his legs wouldn't give way. They were useless.
"I really don't understand the question, honey… Why- why does that matter to you?" James made the mistake of averting his eyes when he responded, because what followed next was the loud clattering of plates and cutlery and a thin, nimble hand snapping around his jaw and wrenching it back up so James could look Mary in the face.
She was brimming with rage.
"It matters to me because I'm your wife, James! You can't even answer a simple fucking question properly! What, am I not good enough for you anymore?! Is that why you killed me?! Is that why?!"
James felt the familiar pinprick of wetness forming in the corners of his eyes as he stared helplessly into Mary's fiery brown.
They were terrifying.
They were beautiful.
All that escaped his mouth was a quiet whimper. He couldn't even manage an apology. How pathetic was he? Mary's lips grew thin and taut for a moment before her furious expression withdrew. It morphed into something unreadable. Something sinister.
Suddenly, they were on a bed. Mary's bed. Where she lay sick and dying. Where he smothered her to death. James was sprawled beneath his wife and she had her hands around his neck. He looked into her eyes for something, for anything, but saw nothing behind them.
"I'll give you something to cry about."
She then began to clamp around his throat. Tighter and tighter and tighter yet, James felt the flesh and bone in his neck crumple like tissue paper. It was like she was trying to squeeze the head off from his body. He tried to scream, kicking and flailing his limbs about.
He was going to die here.
He was going to die.
He was going to-
James then jolted upright in his bed with a shout, drenched in sweat with hands fluttering around his neck. He dragged them over his collarbone and then his sternum as he allowed himself as many ragged breaths as he needed to settle down.
Where was he? Was he back in… no, no this was his apartment. In Daisy Villa. This was his bed.
Not Mary's.
He smoothed out the wrinkles in the bedspread with his hands. James' eyes caught the cold light peeking in through the window blinds and he shakily threw the covers off of him to shamble towards it. Pulling down one of the slats, his face wilted at the assault of white barraging his view. When his eyes finally focused, what he saw was snowfall. Heavy snowfall. James sighed and shut his eyelids, rubbing the sleep out of one of them with the heel of his hand.
Damn, his head hurt. It really hurt. He looked over his shoulder at the alarm clock nestled on his nightstand. It politely stated that it was 6:21 in the morning. The nightmare he'd just had woken him up way earlier than he was supposed to, and it cleanly fit into the Mary murdering him category.
He remembered something about Chris in it, though… but it was quickly leaking out of his exhausted, aching brain. James didn't want to ruminate on it too long, either.
"Need some Advil in me…" He wandered around the foot of his bed and stopped in front of the nightstand, plucking the bottle sitting on top of it and spun on his heel to leave the bedroom.
The apartment interior was incredibly warm, James had found, and that perplexed him. Given the splitting headache and the nausea brewing thick and heavy in his stomach, it was clear as day to him that he had one too many drinks last night.
Peering over the edge of the couch said as much, as James was met with a litany of crushed beer cans strewn about on the cushions and the floor. His face flickered with contempt. Reaching over the backrest, James collected the cans, and paced around the armrest of the couch to pick up the rest on the carpet beneath his feet, grunting as he did.
"Jesus, if I can make it into an actual bed drunk off my ass, the least I can do is fucking… clean up after myself." He readily regarded his past self with such scorn that was seldom heard by anybody else, but he himself was all too acquainted within the haze of hangover.
The reason for his initial confusion was whenever he got hammered, he tended to overheat very easily. He'd pull off every top layer of clothing with every other two or three drinks he guzzled down.
Maybe that's why he had that nightmare; James cranked up the thermostat in his ever-bountiful wisdom before stumbling into bed, and succinctly cooked under his blankets like a chicken frying in oil.
He scratched under his chin as he stared at the temperature on said thermostat, having since walked over to where it was affixed on the wall. Yep, it was sitting at a generous 76°F, and he turned the dial counter-clockwise to settle at 68° instead.
"Fuckin’ idiot," he grumbled to himself as he entered the kitchen and dumped the cans into the recycling, wincing at the unwanted symphony of metal clattering against plastic. Seemed like everything around him was doing its damndest to make his head pound even harder, and it was working.
Wrenching open one of the cabinet doors and pulling out a glass, he stood in front of the sink and cranked the cold faucet as far as it would go. He stuck a lone finger in the stream after he tossed aside the bottle of pills on the counter, waiting for the drop in temperature. When it finally came, James couldn’t help a shudder, but he was quick to switch his finger for the glass and filled it up. He shut the faucet off and placed the glass of water next to the pills on the counter. He then grabbed the bottle and twisted the cap off…
At least, he would’ve liked to, but James found himself struggling to even move the damn plastic an inch to the left.
“Fucking- come on.” He hissed, pressing the small of his back into the counter to brace himself as he continued to wrestle with the bottle cap. James paused for a moment, tossing the bottle back on the counter and riding his palms against his boxer legs in a vain attempt to rid them of their moisture. He resumed the task at hand and, luckily, he finally succeeded this time around… but unluckily, not in the way he wanted.
The way he wrenched the cap off the bottle possessed such a ferocious magnitude of force that the hand he was gripping the bottle with snapped away from his chest, and a generous amount of pills shot out of said bottle and clattered onto the floor.
James stared in muted agony at the sorry scene and wordlessly set the bottle and cap back onto the counter and kneeled down onto the cold, unforgiving linoleum of his kitchen. He began to collect the pills one by one, pressing each one into the palm of his hand with purpose.
This day was turning out to be one of the shittier ones James has had in a long while, and he was in prison for six whole fucking years.
How unbelievable was it that he missed the damn place? That he missed being told what to do?
He placed the last fallen pill into his hand and sighed through his nose, rising to his feet and positioning himself against the counter once more. Looking between the bottle and the pills in deliberation, he sighed through his mouth this time and funneled them back into the opening and gently swirled the bottle around. Five second rule and all that. He finally ushered a couple of pills into his hand and shoved them into his mouth, grabbing the glass of water and taking a generous swig.
Once he washed them down, he pressed his hands against the edge of the counter and leaned forward, his eyes finding themselves drowning in the chaotic granite pattern it displayed.
He had shit to do today. Had to talk to his parole officer about potential job opportunities as well as about the dreaded court-mandated psychotherapy that loomed ever closer in date. He reasoned that the group therapy he was currently enrolled in was just a means to dip his toe into the the shaky waters of 'recovery', but full blown, one-on-one talk therapy? That was taking the plunge.
James rolled his lips inward. He was familiar with the concept as a whole, being that he was assigned a few shrinks back in prison, but they either had their hands full scheduling-wise, didn't see anything too wrong with him, or thought he'd be too much of a handful. He scoffed at the memories swirling in his head. James had found it astonishing that the scripts he ran daily had a 50/50 chance of fooling the people around him, and he wondered if it was even worth it if he got such mixed feedback…
"Whatever," he breathed hot and heavy through his mouth and pushed off the edge of the counter, and placed his hands back on the pill bottle and cap to marry them back together. He grabbed the glass and shotgunned the rest of the water left in it and fit it among the menagerie of unwashed dishes in the sink. He still had to load those up. James eyed the dishwasher as the thought pinged through his brain and regarded it with a dismissive huff.
Another quick glance elsewhere, this time at the calendar pasted on his fridge, told him that his appointment with his officer wouldn't be until 1pm, so he had an unreasonable amount of time to kill.
But that was the question: doing what, exactly?
James didn't have anywhere to be right now. He had no obligations, and left to his own devices, he'd wallow, and when he'd wallow, he would start to drink. The thought of alcohol nauseated him enough to dissuade him from even considering looking in the fridge for any left, but that was at the moment.
Later? He'd probably start to clamor for it.
He needed something to keep him busy. Something to keep himself from self-destruction. Squeezing his eyes shut and rubbing his hand all over his face, he caught sight of the phone over on the coffee table off its charging port…
Wait… why was it...?
James felt the blood drain from his face, and he paced over to the table, situating himself on the edge of the couch as he sat down. He furrowed his brows when he grabbed the telephone, turning it in his hands so the screen was facing him. It was completely blank. He tried pressing a few buttons on the keypad to no avail. The thing must be drained entirely. He grunted as he slotted it back in the port, watching the light at the base flicker on and the phone screen come to life.
James leaned against the backrest and let his head loll as he folded his arms over his chest. How come he didn’t notice that before when he was picking up the leftover cans? Then again, it would be easy to miss such a detail when your living room floor and couch are in complete and utter disarray. Why was his phone even off the port in the first place?
Did he…? No. No, wait, hold on.
An influx of scenes and sensations flooded back to James as he snapped off the backrest of his couch and buried his face in his hands, groaning loudly in abject, stomach-rending embarrassment.
He remembers now. He remembers it all. Chris had called him at possibly the worst time imaginable. James was too shitfaced to ignore an unknown caller ID, so he had to do the stupid thing and hit TALK. And talk he did! It was hazy for James, but he remembers the most presumptuous ask of them all:
Was Christopher single?
Sure, he was quick to correct himself as that wasn’t the question he wanted to ask, but when he remembered it before the very frantic edits he made, James felt his chest twist and turn, heat rising in his cheeks and his hands going cold and clammy. He grit his teeth when he recalled the silence over the receiver, the incredulous and well-earned Excuse me? he got from Chris… and his laugh! Jesus, that laugh of his… that warm feeling in his chest started to return, and James Sunderland grasped at his heart as if it was going to leap out of his chest.
He was jumping the gun. He was really jumping the fucking gun with this, and it felt like his head was spinning. So what if Chris had a nice laugh? So what? That doesn’t mean anything. Laughing’s a nice sound, right? It’s a signifier of happiness! Chris was happy on the other end of the cell, and James… made him happy. And he… he wanted to hear that laugh again-
James slammed an open palm against his face. Fuck, fuck, fuck, did he hate this feeling. Fuck. He couldn’t feel this way about somebody else. He didn’t deserve to feel this way about somebody else, much less another man, God forbid. He shook his head morosely as if that would rid himself of this sickening feeling.
…He should really get dressed.