Word Count: 686

He woke up with sunlight on his face.

He didn’t open his eyes at first, not right away, but lay there in warmth and silence, shifting a bit further beneath the blanket pulled over him. When he finally did open his eyes, it was to the sight of a room that wasn’t his own, and a window that looked out onto a clear blue sky. Paris sighed heavily and turned his face into the pillows. He didn’t want to move.

His eyes felt dry and swollen, his nose stuffy, and his chest felt as if it had stretched too far. He stomach was empty and made known its displeasure, but he ignored it. He felt tired and weak, like all of his strength had leaked out with his tears the night before.

He regretted it now, crying so much. Not just because he felt miserable afterwards, but because he didn’t have the time for such childish displays. He wasn’t a child. Not anymore. Sometimes he wondered if he’d ever been.

A pressure against his side alerted him to the fact that a foreign arm was draped over his torso. He turned to look over his shoulder and saw Chris fast asleep, hair mused and face covered in a layer of light stubble, and his arm resting over the blanket, keeping Paris’s back close to his chest. Paris couldn’t manage a smile, but he took a shaky breath and grasped Chris’s arm to pull it closer, holding tightly to his hand.

He could do this, he told himself. He’d been through worse. Watching his mother leave by her own choice had been far more traumatic and scarring than his father becoming ill, not by his choice but through his ignorance. When his mother had left, he’d acted out, started hanging out with the older kids more, and began to develop a taste for parties and alcohol and, later, the touch of another’s hand. He hadn’t felt worth anything so he hadn’t bothered to try to prove that he was. He’d done what was easy, as if any of it could truly fix what his mother had broken.

Now he had to do what was hard.

Truthfully, he did not regret having to leave school. He hated it, saw very little value in it, and couldn’t find any reason to stay under such an oppressive atmosphere when he had no plans to go to college in the first place. He didn’t know why he’d even bothered to stay so long, except, perhaps, in an attempt to hold on to his adolescence a little longer, stop himself from growing up and shouldering the responsibility he feared would crush him. But people grow. People change. And good people did what was right, not what was easiest or most comfortable for them.

Paris had never thought of himself as a good person. Chris was a good person. Chris who loved family and animals and wholesome things, who was nothing like Paris at all, really, except that they both had secret lives in which they shared a similar moral code. Other than that, Paris didn’t consider himself to be a good role model – not bad, perhaps, but not good either. Someone in the middle. Someone who behaved wrong but thought right.

Letting go hurt. Realizing that he could no longer be who he was before was one of the most difficult things he’d ever come to grips with, but he couldn’t fight it anymore. Not now. He had responsibilities, and for once in his life he intended to see them through. Seventeen was young, but old enough to fight the harshness of reality, to prove his own worth.

His eyes, which felt so sore and dry he thought he could never cry again, prickled in the corners and threatened to prove him wrong, but he held back. Chris’s chest rose and fell with each breath he took, and Paris focused on that, shut his eyes again and pressed Chris’s hand to his heart and forced himself to breathe.

In and out…

… in and out…

He could do this.

He had to...