“Drunk” by Bullshit-Bulltrue
About a year or two ago, Bullshit-Bulltrue wrote this beautiful imagine that I just loved. I never really save imagines to my laptop, but this one I did not want to lose. As unfortunate as it was to see Bullshit-Bulltrue’s blog become deleted, I still have this all this time later. Because I have had a couple of people ask me for it, I’ll share it here with you. Remember, as much as I wish I could, I cannot claim this as my own, all the credit goes to the owner of the blog Bullshit-Bulltrue.
For the anon, I’ve never really written anything like this, so I hope you like it. It’s a tad long but I felt like I needed to add more details :/
Sodapop sighed, rubbing his eyes. The television might have been broken for all I could have cared, but still he pressed on, seemingly determined to keep the speaking to a minimum.
“Find something,” he pleaded, tossing the remote in my direction.
For hours, we hadn’t spoken much more than these words. These words of small talk, the ones that don’t even matter.
But it was all that mattered. Usually, when an argument such as the one him and I had had takes place, I couldn’t just show up at his house like this. And even if I did get that far, him seeing me with eyes like a deer’s - wide and fearful - shaking from head to toe and crinkles of eyeliner and mascara in the corners showing that I’d clearly been crying, well… let’s just say it felt pretty surreal when he let me in and offered me a drink.
A lot of times, people will ask you what’s wrong. That’s the normal thing to do, right? I’d come here for comfort and he’d said nothing related to the matter. I remember thinking it was a mistake. I was wondering why I didn’t call Mom, or Grace, or even Ashton. But the first place I thought of was his house, and I had no idea why. Either way, he didn’t say anything about my being upset for maybe two hours. I remember the exact moment, too - we were watching a movie. I gave a little sniffle and shifted my position. I was considering either leaving altogether or shutting my eyes for a little nap. I was beginning to vote for the latter when I felt the softest weight on my shoulder. Sodapops head.
I turned ever so slightly to see his face - see if he’d done this because he’d fallen asleep on me - but his expression hadn’t changed at all. He was still gazing at the television screen and his eyes were still glazed with sleep from the lazy Sunday afternoon.
“Truth or dare,” Sodapop said.
To anyone else I might have rolled my eyes and left then and there. But Sodapop, as I’ve informed him countless times, was not anyone else.
He still wasn’t looking at me, and I remember how warm he was.
“Why?” he asked. Why what? Why Sandy, instead of me? Why James, instead of him? Why do celebrities die in threes? Why did Eve take the apple? Why, what? He could have meant anything, but I said, “You’re the only person I want to see right now.”
“Truth or dare,” I whispered.
“I dare you to tell me…” my eyes shut tightly, then opened again, and I exhaled, “exactly why you invited me to that rodeo and not Sandy.”
He remained quiet for a long time. Then he said, “That’s a truth.”
“Soda,” I said, “please.”
“Don’t we always want what we can’t have?”
“Bullshit,” I whispered tiredly into his hair, “you say that, you contradict your entire personality.”
“Do we have to say this stuff?” He asked, still not tearing his eyes from the screen.
“This… all of it.” He sighed. “People talk too much. I don’t have to say it - you know how I feel.”
I swallowed thickly and shut my eyes again, processing this. I stuck my hand into my pocket, clenching my fist, then releasing it.
“Truth or dare,” He said.
“This morning, when you woke up, you went to church with James. True or false.”
I bit down on my lip. Hard.
“What did you do afterward?”
I didn’t even know what I was doing until my fingers were already woven in his hair. I was stroking his locks as though I was his mother, and it was such a comfortable gesture that I’m still not even sure he noticed.
“We had lunch with his parents.”
“We went to James’s house.”
I continued to run my fingers into Sodapops thick, dark hair, starting at his roots and placing my fingertips on his scalp, then tracing them through small tangles all the way to the ends, which hadn’t been short in quite some time. His eyes moved from the television screen to his hands, which I noticed he was fidgeting with. He cracked a few of his knuckles and blinked a couple of times, running his tongue over his lips.
“So,” he said, “I’ll take it that something happened over there.”
He said it strangely, like it was some science experiment he didn’t quite understand, or didn’t want to. He saw the un-cracked egg, he saw his parachute egg dropper, but he wanted to shut his eyes so that he never knew how it worked. Sodapop Curtis - transparent and opaque.
“Truth or dare,” I said, and my hand rested lightly over his ear.
Thousands of questions bubbled at the surface, but none completely rose all the way to my tongue. So, lamely, I asked him why he didn’t get along with Darry’s girlfriend.
He could have said anything in reply and I would have believed him, but we both knew I was just changing the subject and it would only become meaningless coffee talk instead of an actual conversation.
Soda rolled over completely until he was lying horizontal and rested on my lap so that he could see me clearly.
“What happened at James’s house, Faith?”
I looked down into his beautiful face and I didn’t know what to say: how to even begin to explain what had taken place. I just stroked his hair and hoped that he would read my expression so that I would not have to say it out loud. Realization never hit his face, however.
“You broke up with him?” Soda questioned. I tried to see if the inflection in his voice was hopeful, but it didn’t seem that way. It was simply a question, like any other question.
His eyes glazed over a little. “He broke up with you?” This time he sounded doubtful, and I remember the way it made my stomach churn.
“So you’re still together?” My hand moved to the warm skin of his neck. I raked my fingers slowly across his Adam’s apple. His eyes fluttered shut for a moment, and when they opened I said, “I don’t know, Soda.”
“That’s crazy,” he told me. “How can you not know? It’s not like there’s a ton of room for gray area.” But we both knew that was a lie. He had to have known, that everything, even then, was gray area between him and I. Always a spark of humiliation, or total trust, or candy apple red lust. But uncertainty in all of it.
I remained silent and his voice grew hoarse and quiet as he asked, “What happened at James’s house?”
I could not speak. My mouth felt as though a surgeon had delicately wired my teeth together, not even leaving room for me to suck food through a straw.
And all of the sudden it felt like I was back with James as we pulled our coats off in the front door. We were laughing about James making a fool of himself somehow.
“I bet Soda had a field day teasing you about it,” I had said as I pulled off my scarf and hung it upon his coat rack. I wasn’t sure why I mentioned Sodapop. I only knew that I hadn’t spoken to him in days and talking about him made him feel real again.
James was pulling off his jacket too, his laugh fading into a smile that then dissolved into this sort of strange, thoughtful expression. “Have you seen Sodapop lately?” he asked, and I remember thinking how it felt odd to hear his name on James’s lips, suddenly. They both came from the same world but ended up in different universes. “Darry told me he’s been acting kind of weird.”
“Weird, how?” I replied as we entered his living room.
“Just…going out a lot more. He got a tattoo, did you know that?” He sat down on his leather couch, shaking his head slightly. The way he said it made it clear to me that he had never seen the ink on my back. I felt I should be more upset about this, but Sodapop was all I could think about.
“Going out more? Like, on dates?”
When I thought about it, I felt ill. I don’t think about anything else when I think about Sodapop. He’s a separate category that deserves all of my attention.
“I guess. I thought him and Sandy would really work out, but I suppose she’s out of the picture now.”
I snapped out of the not-so-fond memory and looked at Soda. My fingers had stopped moving and were resting over his neck - over his throat. Showing me great trust, and I didn’t even realize it until then.
“You’ve been dating?” I asked. “You broke up with Sandy?”
This felt so high school. If I were anyone else, watching the way my entire body prickled at the idea of him seeing other girls, I would have laughed outright.
“We decided to take a break, yeah,” he said, and cocked his head to the side.
“Who have you been dating?”
“Are you going to tell me what happened at James’s house?” he asked, close to no inflection in his voice. I didn’t say anything; I looked away from him. He sighed heavily. “Nobody, Faith. Darry freaked out because his friend Anna saw me leaving the tattoo parlor with ‘some girl.’”
“God, Soda, do you see what that does to me?” I finally blurted half terrified because we were finally verbalizing my life’s foreshadowing from the past several months.
“If it bothers you that much at the idea that I’m seeing someone else, how do you think I feel, Faith? You’re dating my fucking best friend.”
I shut my eyes as his hand closed over mine. I drew in a ragged breath. “Soda,” I said, “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know what that means,” He said, scooting off of me and moving to an upright position. His eyes moved back to the television set. “What are you saying?”
I shot back to James’s house, jumping as the champagne cork popped and he was filling two glasses.
“What’s the occasion?” I had asked, smiling a little as the end credits came up on the screen.
He smiled, all dazzling white teeth and charming brown eyes. “Faith,” he said, “does there always have to be an occasion? Can’t I just celebrate you?” He handed me a glass and I accepted it with a strange smile on my face, not knowing what to expect.
He scooted closer to me and moved his lips to my cheek. “I really miss you when we’re not together,” he said, and I smiled lightly.
“I miss you too, James.” I remember fidgeting with my hands, stalling for time. I didn’t know if this was about the message he’d left with my Mom or not. All I knew was that there was a cold sweat beginning to form on the back of my neck.
“Faith!” Sodapop shouted, and his head whipped to the side. “Stop daydreaming already!”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “my head doesn’t quite work like yours.” I ran my fingers along the hot inside of my palm. “I can’t pretend to be unaffected.”
He laughed, putting his face into his hands. “Right,” he said, “this is me, completely unaffected.” His shoulders shook slightly. I licked my dry lips. It felt so hot in the room suddenly. I touched his elbow.
“I’m not daydreaming,” I said, “I’m trying to think of where I went wrong.”
“I thought I’d start,” said James, “by saying I love you.”
Start? Start what, I thought in a panic. This was unfamiliar territory. I could handle sex; that was easy. But this was land charted only in cinema - they don’t teach you how to react properly in high school to men with nice eyes that are trying to ask you a question.
I said nothing, only looked at James the same way a blind woman would if she were seeing for the first time.
“And I was hoping,” he continued, “that I could do something about that.”
He was hoping. He was hoping that he could do something about that.
I won’t go into it much further. I don’t want to be reminded of it, of the way those famous… those infamous words sounded in his mouth, of the little blue box I was handed, of the way that he looked when he saw my face.
“Soda,” I said. He looked back up at me, his eyes so vulnerable like no matter what I said it would affect him in such a 180° way that it was almost too hard to say anything at all.
So instead I said nothing, and let my hands fall to my sides. When he looked at me there was just this gigantic feeling of mass confusion coming off of him in waves that would have bent my knees to a right angle had I been standing.
“You haven’t told me anything,” he said. “You came here for comfort? I can’t comfort you if I don’t even know what’s going on.”
I wanted to tell him that he could, that it would be so easy. All he had to do was… to tell me what to do. To tie strings to my arms and legs or set me on a pottery wheel. At that point I felt I had too little direction and too much control.
“I’m afraid you won’t sit here with me anymore.”
His eyes were soft, hot caramel apples at the carnival. My legs were a jar of Welch’s. And the kiss that followed the way that he looked at me was warm, sticky honey licked delicately between the little fingers of a toddler in the summer time.
I felt like water being poured onto wax paper. It suddenly hit, nothing was relevant until that moment. Up until then, I had just been surviving, but now I was living. All of these analogies just flew into my brain - I was Eve, his daughter, and he was breathing life into me. I was his creation, and now I had fingers and arms and a back and ribs and kneecaps. He had given me all this. Now I just had to decide what to do with it.
Soda said, “I will always sit here. This couch will never be vacant.” What a dorky thing to say.
I’m pretty sure that the slightest brush of his lips against mine was made to be some sort of dramatic gesture to prove that he’d always be by my side. After that, I was supposed to continue talking, to tell him what had happened with James, to unveil everything I’d ever kept hidden from him. But it didn’t make me want to talk.
I brought my face back to his; I wanted to devour him completely but I felt unsure. Maybe it had been a fluke. Maybe I had misunderstood. But I tried to ignore those voices and brought my lips to his. It didn’t take him any time to respond. It felt like this kiss had been postponed one too many times, and whoever was behind it had set our mouths on fire, ignited the sky, and inflamed the electricity that had been sparking for nearly a year.
His mouth was indescribable. Half of the feeling I got may have just been from the sheer fact that I had wanted to kiss Sodapop for so long. Whatever it was, it was warm and delicious. Not like kissing James at all. With James, it was always planned, well thought out, carefully calculated. With Soda, it was free-range. I wound my arms around his neck carelessly and dove into him. His arm slid down my arm and rested at my waist. I opened my eyes as I kissed him; saw his open too. We both laughed and broke apart.
“You’re not supposed to look,” I said.
He let out such a wild laugh that it almost caught me off guard. “You were looking too!” he said.
I came close back to his mouth, not liking that I was now without him, and I said, “You looked first.” And then I kissed him again, and it was reality of mouth on mouth, flesh on cloth, blanket of perfection placed on two very broken people.
It was only when the heat started to build up so much in my gut that I slid my leg over his, coming in even closer, kissing, kissing, never wanting to stop, and lightly pushing him back did he break apart from me, gasping into my mouth. Both of our eyes fluttered open at the same time.
“What?” I whispered, breathing heavily, drunk off of his kiss, his presence and the moment his body pressed up against mine.
“I just…” He looked like he was scared, suddenly, in danger, like he was about to make a life-threatening decision and it had to be made fast as his eyes bore into mine. “Maybe we shouldn’t do this, Faith,” he said.
I remember feeling absolutely horrified and I got off of him, leaning back on the couch and brushing my clothes off, scooting as far as I could to the other end. A loud commercial began to play on the television and Soda made an annoyed sigh and quickly shut it off. He looked at me. I looked at the ground.
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling completely stupid.
He scooted back to me, closing the space between us, and brought his lips to my jaw. My eyes were watery like I was trying to keep them open while standing next to a bonfire for hours at a time. I clenched and unclenched my fists as he softly kissed my throat. I tried to act unaffected, but he had me by the neck, and I couldn’t have left if I had wanted to.
My eyes fell shut. “Soda,” I whispered, leaning back on the couch. He only followed me.
He didn’t say anything but he moved his mouth to my ear. I had wanted to devour him, but it felt so good for him to consume me so slowly.
But I couldn’t even formulate a sentence in my brain, let alone in my mouth.
“I can’t let this happen,” he whispered against me, though he sounded like he felt otherwise. “Not when I don’t know what’s happened.”
“James, he… he…” His tongue formed slow circles below my ear. Hot tears formed in the corners of my eyes and I reached up and touched his hair. “I… He…”
“Hold on,” Soda said, “just kiss me for a minute.”
I didn’t have to be told twice.
I brought my mouth to his again, kissing him slow and warm, my eyes shut so tight I could see small shapes in my eyelids. My hand came to rest on his chest, my fingers in the hollow of his throat. He reached up and took my hand in his, interlacing our fingers. My breath was caught in my throat and I kissed him harder. Suddenly, I was crying into him, and I never wanted to stop.
“Faith,” Soda said, “don’t go getting all soft on me.” He smiled as my eyes opened and brought his hand to my face.
I didn’t smile back. I looked down and back up, taking deep, even breaths, trying to calm my racing heart. “James,” I said, “asked me to marry him.”
You know how in the movies, two people will be walking along at night, having fun and laughing, and all of the sudden, out of nowhere, it begins to rain so hard that they’re soaked instantly? They have to run, newspaper or jacket over their head into a shelter. But the rain always seems so fake, so forced by cinema crew. Rain doesn’t come that fast, I always thought.
But Soda proved me wrong as his eyes began to thunderstorm and he pulled away from me, breaking every connection we had. He looked dangerous suddenly and I wished I could take it back; take the whole day back.
My life, his life, everyone’s well being was determined by my decision.
Sodapop would never survive on a deserted island, because he never had a plan. We spent the rest of the evening on his couch, watching television and laying on each other with troubled hearts and eyes. Just before sleep, somewhere around 11 pm, I asked him what we were going to do. He replied, “We’ll figure it out in the morning.”
