Once Spice World ended, another movie followed, and then another. Not even 15 minutes in to their latest viewing, Jodie had unsuccessfully tried to suppress her yawns.

“Hey, go to sleep,” Mitch nudged her, and she batted him away.

“’M fine,” Jodie insisted, and sunk further into the mattress. “Besides, it’s been forever since we’ve hung out like this.”

“Yeah, but you’re tired.”

This exchange went on for far too long, until the remote was finally snatched away from Jodie. She was then haphazardly tucked in, and the light was turned off. Again, Mitch found himself unable to sleep, but thankfully he had his phone this time. An email was sent to his editor, which briefly touched upon the chaos he’d been plummeted into; a part of him knew that this could lead to the loss of yet another columnist position, but he just couldn’t bring himself to care.

So many messages were drafted and ready to be sent to Calvin, but were ultimately deleted. On Facebook, he saw that no time was wasted in Calvin’s relationship status change to ‘single’, and Mitch’s immediate reaction was to deactivate his own account. He cried until he barely passed out, only to wake up before REM could kick in, and then repeated this cycle all over again.

There was a part of him that was thankful that he was miles away from his now-ex (a thought he couldn’t process just yet, since it made his heart feel like it was physically dissolving). He was presently with his best friend, temporarily safe and sheltered in both a physical and emotional sense. Being apart meant that he wasn’t directly at the base of ground zero, staring at the surrounding rubble in a daze.

Yet, he yearned to be in a familiar environment, even if it killed him, if for no other reason than for a moment of privacy. He wouldn’t dare complain, but being in the house that Jodie’s abulea had passed away in less than a year ago didn’t make things any more comfortable; there were still traces of the woman everywhere, but thankfully Jodie had overcome her grief enough to at least taken down the numerous crucifixes that once adorned all of the bedroom walls.

(She hadn’t, however, removed the very cool velvet Jesus painting, which now stared at Mitch in the darkness from across the room.)

Also, all of his shit was back in Connecticut, which he kind of needed but had no clue how to go about collecting. He wasn’t about to request Jodie’s help with that task, because on top of everything that she had done, there was no guarantee that she wouldn’t disembowel Calvin on sight. At the very least, he’d backed up all of his work onto a cloud network, so even though it wasn’t ideal he could technically still get work done on his phone. But it’d be nice to maybe have clean clothes, as well as his laptop. If he could get ahold of his camera and guitar, they could both be pawned off to help keep him afloat for a bit. He briefly entertained the idea of seeing if he could get more dates booked, only to remember that he’d badly injured himself just over 24 hours ago.

“Goddammit,” he hissed, pressing a palm into his eyes in frustration. Immediately, he remembered the painting and whispered “sorry” in velvet Jesus’ direction.

For a distraction, he finally replied to all of the well-wishes that he’d been tagged in on Twitter. Though quite the ego boost, the amount was still unfathomable to Mitch. Ever since Jodie had overhauled the school’s online presence and had pushed to get professional filming equipment to livestream, Grindhouse Pro’s popularity had gradually gathered a moderate cult following. It was nice that the hardwork and investments were at last paying off, but that temporary high from the ego boost drastically plummeted as he found himself completely unprepared to handle the attention.

As anxiety began to churn, he decided to attempt sleep once more after a quick glance through DM notifications. Fortune, however, did not favor the brave, and in disbelief he found himself staring at a message from Toby, of all people. His hand began to tremble ever-so-slightly.

“Uh. No.” Mitch powered his phone down and slammed it on top of the nightstand. It didn’t matter whether or not how desperate he was to pour out emotions to a familiar face, especially one that knew him, the real him, and not just Zevon. There were no circumstances that Toby could be that person.