PEARL

NINETEEN

TRACK 19
ALWAYS FOREVER
CULTS

🚬

MICAH's world made it seem as if he'd taken another handful of illicit lakeside pills, although of a kind that painted it in far less pleasant colours than azure and amethyst and Rowan's-eyes-emerald.

Because everything was like February – dull, grey and cold – and everything was wrong. Rowan was meant to be the one who kept his once-lilac head together whenever Micah struggled to get his under control, and was meant to have let Micah's ritual-roughened thumb preserve the cracks in his mesmerizingly mundane bottom lip to memory in the light of the last two moons.

But both of those things had been black when they should've been shooting-star-white.

"I mean," Nate began, after the dinner Rowan had – unsurprisingly, but still upsettingly – been absent from, as he and Ida accompanied Micah down the hallway that his persistent if no longer germ-propelled anxiety wouldn't let him forget the sight of green eyes streaming in, "you can hardly blame him for flipping out at you both like that. Those shots mean everything to him. As do you."

"Yeah," Micah nodded, with a heavy sigh, ignoring the ice-blue eye-roll that Ida gave the end of Nate's comment. "I know, Nate, but...you should've seen what he was like out in the hall. This hall."

"I heard. Ida too."

"But you should've seen him. It was fucking terrifying. I didn't know what to do."

Moonlight filled the following silence as the three turned onto Nate and Rowan's row of rooms, whatever the former was saying about panic attacks fizzling into white noise in Micah's ears as he thought of the stubborn door handle and radio silence that was sure to swallow any hope he had of holding Rowan close enough on their final shared night to remember his smell and smile for years.

"What if he doesn't let me in again?" he asked Nate in a hushed voice as they came to a slow stop outside said door handle. Its metallic glint made Micah's chest tighten. "What do I do?"

"Well, you're sort of spitting on the advice I gave you earlier..." Nate replied, but tossed his humour aside and picked up sincerity as soon as the hallway's suicide-proof window let in enough lunar light to show him how anxious Micah really was, "but I'm sure he will. It's your last night, sadly."

"I know, Nate," Micah sighed, raking back his curls hard enough to make them pull painfully against his skin. It seemed to be becoming a habit, like the nail-biting he wished Rowan hadn't resumed. "I know. That's why I'm so freaked out. This is my only chance to say goodbye properly, y'know?"

Ida may have maintained her detached yet somehow slightly disdainful aura ever since setting foot from the cafeteria, and continued to do so then, but Nate stepped forward to squeeze Micah's arm.

"It'll be okay," he smiled, and thankfully, the way he said it sounded a lot more sincere than telling Micah that he'd try to not steal his lighter again ever had. Either Nate meant it, or he was a better actor than Micah had ever given him credit for – whichever was true, he was grateful, because the dread dragging him down had lessened. "And if it isn't okay, or it really is and you and Ro need...anything..."

His humour returned as quickly as it had been discarded.

"...or you just want to borrow some sugar, then Ida and I are going to be right next door."

"Thanks," Micah laughed, despite the fear of never seeing Rowan with dry eyes and never feeling his rose-oil-soft touch again still turning his chest into a tightening corkscrew. "I'll keep that in mind."