The Morning After (Part One)

His mouth flooded with saliva, his soft palate spasmed. He was going to vomit. A tremble began in the center of both knees and in the joints in his fingers and soon his whole body was shaking. He couldn’t stand. He swallowed the excess of saliva but it replenished again, bringing him closer to retching. His body felt too heavy and unwieldy. With alarming haste he leaned roughly into the wall and slid to the floor, crumbling to an indecorous mess of limbs. His arm burned from the too-rapid friction with the wall and the pain in his ankle seemed to indicate he’d twisted it in his ungainly collapse.

He drooled slightly, jaw hanging slack. He swallowed again, willing the nausea to subside—he couldn’t think, couldn’t process. When he closed his eyes, squeezed them tight, forbidden images assaulted him, attacking him from within, but when he opened them the sight was worse, corporeal, irrevocable. With the heavy imprecision of a ragdoll he threw his head back and it thudded against the wall. He welcomed the sharp pain and the dull ache that chased it.

Christ, what had he done? He wished he could pretend that he was dreaming, that he had but dreamt the night before. Unable to close his eyes and unable to look in front of him for fear of what he would see, he let himself stare, in a glazed sort of way, at the ceiling. White and smooth and limitless. A soothing, numbing nothingness. But this position had a disadvantage- with his head tilted back so dramatically he was tickling his gag reflex and the saliva began to pool, hot and full at the back of his throat.

His pulse rushed as his body teetered on the edge of heaving, and he thought his skull might split in two. What had he done? The question repeated, again and again, a mantra, but in some instinctive act of self defense his mind would seek no further than the rhetoric. For the same reason that it wasn’t safe to close his eyes, nor let them look into the room, he couldn’t allow further inquiry, couldn’t let himself pursue an answer.

When he heard a stirring in the room before him he held his breath. His eyes came back into focus on the white plaster ceiling and he froze. He wasn’t sure, but maybe if he just willed it this would all disappear, it would have never happened at all and things could be as they were.

The faint sound of fabric sliding on fabric as the top sheet pulled across the other fell like thunderclaps on his ears. Quiet as a whisper to anyone else, the muffled shifting of weight on the mattress felt earsplitting. He was certain the whole house could hear and he expected, in his fevered and panicked brain, that they would be found-out. Even her breathing felt conspicuous in the early morning hush of his home.

Then she spoke his name. It was barely a whisper.

He slammed his eyes shut, trying not to have heard it, and in so doing a flood of graphic, incriminating images barraged his consciousness, and he gagged. His body recoiled from the sound of her voice and convulsed. The vomit he’d been struggling to hold at bay came up now without recourse. He vomited violently on the floor in front of him.

Suddenly she was next to him, touching his back and he shrank from her touch as if she were made of hot iron. It caused him physical pain when she touched him now, and he scrambled to move away from her concerned ministration. He was clumsy, however, and in his fight-or-flight panic he moved his body into and through his own vomit, the smell of which reached his nose and caused him to retch again, though this time he could only heave and purge nothing.

He almost wished this feeling of exorcism would never cease, this relentless and absolute push outward from every fibre of his being. He felt as though he might somehow push so hard from within that he would turn inside-out.

He hadn’t meant to scare her, but his reaction was primal. He was a wounded animal, afraid and without regard. When the dry-heaving ceased he at last drew breath and, shaking uncontrollably, tried to stand. Tears were streaked across his face and he couldn’t be sure if they were a side-effect of being ill or if they sprang from some deeper, primeval well.

What had he done? What the fuck had he done?

He was afraid to look at her. Afraid to make it any more real than it already was. He knew if he looked she’d be there by the wall, wrapped only in a bedsheet, kneeling on the floor between his sick and her discarded clothing. How the fuck had this happened?

Jonah Delaney leaned his elbows on the bed and buried his face in his trembling hands. He hadn’t yet managed to pull himself to standing and he took a moment to try to get a hold of himself, to master his nerves. Slowly, deliberately, he pulled his balmy hands across his face, toward one another, and pushed them together in front of his nose. He kept his eyes closed and made himself take several long, deep breaths until they came a little less ragged, until the shudders racking his body subsided.

To an outside observer it might have looked an awful lot like prayer, kneeling there beside the bed with palms pressed together and eyes closed. And perhaps it was a kind of prayer, though Jonah knew, for certain, that there must not be a God afterall, or surely, if there was, he was already in hell and no prayers from his lips would ever reach the ears of heaven.

To his right he heard the strangled sound of suppressed weeping and he knew he needed to go to her, to comfort her, to tell her, as he had done a million times over the years that everything would be alright. It was his responsibility now more than ever before to be strong for her. He should do what was right.

But for the life of him, Jonah couldn’t persuade his body to mobilize. He couldn’t muster the synapses that command muscle and flesh. It was as if, in that one horrible act, he’d lost the mastery of his own person. Perhaps there was indeed a God, and that God was just.

He wished, for the first time in his life, that he kept a gun.