Page 10 of Pretty Obsessed

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I didn’t expect to see anyone else as I trudged down the long hall towards my suite. The rest of the guys would be out. They always were at this hour. I loved them and the time we spent together, but their partying habits provided the alone time I needed to feed my soul.

I missed the closeness fostered by all of us doing everything together, but we’d grown apart. I wasn’t sure when the threads started to come undone or when I’d started to feel it, but there were divides. Rifts at times. My closet friends drifted further and further from me, and I didn’t know how to change the course of any of it, or if it was even possible after the tides we’d set in motion.

I held my phone to the door to my suite and pushed the door open, expecting an empty room but finding the last person I expected there.

Iris sat in the main area of the suite, a focal point of the room, set recessed into the floor almost like a ’70s-era conversation pit, leaving an expansive view of the mini pool on the balcony and the lovely Chicago skyline.

… Well, that was unusual.

He didn’t look up from the work he bent over. My chest clenched. How was it possible to miss someone you spent nearly every day with? But I missed my best friend. The person who sat in my hotel room was Iris and also not Iris at the same time. Merely the shell that remained of him.

"Hey," I said, voice tentative, kicking my docs off near the door. I feared the worst but hoped for the best. “What’s going on?”

He finally glanced up from the line he held a razor blade to. "I can go…"

If anyone could invoke powerful emotions, it was Iris. Love and hurt and fear and so many more I couldn’t name. I wanted to pull his frail body into a hug and forbid it. Something told me I shouldn't let him leave tonight. We’d spent the beginning of this journey inseparable and then his habits crept in, and we spent less and less time together. Instead of sleeping in my room every night, at some point he’d started sleeping in Cas’. They became inseparable, and when I realized how close they’d become, it felt like it was too late. And my own loneliness became a monster, one I still fed in secret.

It felt like we all had secrets this past year.

Some better kept than others.

“Stay. Please.” The request was as much selfish as protective. I didn’t want him to run away so soon, and he’d come to find me for a reason. Iris always had a reason.

“I know you’re usually asleep by now. I—I didn’t want to be alone.” Iris carried sadness around him like a heart-shaped box. The only person in the world who made it almost seem cool. Or maybe it was the eyeliner.

I smiled, tucking the little taste of who we used to be into my chest. “I don’t want to be alone either. Keep me company?”

"You sure?" he asked. “You are welcome to tell me you’re sick of my bullshit and the existential dread I leave in spaces like glitter.”

“Positive.” I laughed and shed my jacket, coming over to sit on one of the chairs across from him. “I heard that’s really hard to get out of the soul.”

“It’s like a fucking succubus.” He leaned forward and snorted the line, wincing, pressing his eyes closed. “I’d complain to the powers that be, but you know, it gives me all this material to write soul crushing lyrics. And if we aren’t torturing people with heart breaking songs, what would we do with our lives?” He flashed me a grin, holding out the straw, but I waved him off. He tossed it on the table, slumping back, eyes closed.

“We’d probably still be living in that shit hole apartment dreaming of this life.”

“How fucking naive we were,” Iris mused.

“But would you go back?” I asked.

“No. Time can’t be put back in the hourglass and it’s useless to dwell on what cannot be.” Iris was a poet at heart, and I’d always thought art required pain. What else could we distill into music? If writers bled on paper, song writers kept our pain close and fermented it before distilling it into those feelings the world loved so much.

“You’re right. Only forward in this life.”

But that didn’t stop my brain from all the what ifs, especially when it came to my best friend and the pain I watched him carry.

"Everything alright?" I asked when he didn’t speak.

"The same miserable as always. My brain will quiet soon." He tapped his temple. “All for our art, right?

“I guess.” I laughed, wishing he didn’t need a substance to quiet it, but how could I blame him? I craved the same releases, I just handled mine better.

Kids of addicts, we either chased the monster or stayed as far away from it as possible. I saw so much of my pain in my best friend. I hated it.

“Maybe the universe gifts me pain on a silver platter to bring music to the world. Either way, it will be good for us. We have to get back in the studio after this tour.”

“Do you have to Taylor Swift this one, can’t we have a happy album?” I didn’t think Iris could handle writing happy with the same beauty he brought to heartache.

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