Boy Toy

Marshall is basically what you’d call a lightweight. He doesn’t ever drink, except for a few sips of wine here and there, and he is not used to the affect the alcohol has on his wimpy, skinny, starving body. Yeah, Marshall wasn’t even smart enough to get something to eat before downing four nasty ass beers and two shots of vodka. So, by twelve thirty, Marshall is trashed. Trashed, wasted, piss-ass drunk.

Mattie, the guy he came with, is lost on the dance floor, surrounded by a sea of grinding, sweaty, sticky bodies. And Marshall can’t quite walk straight, but he’s definitely ready to leave. He manages to wander his way outside by groping on to the sweat-slicked walls and people he passes and the cold air hits him like a fucking freight train. His eyes start to water and his hands go numb and his stomach starts to ache again.

Marshall was happy inside the grungy club- you couldn’t get him to shut up though no one
was listening- but now he feels like he could cry. He has absolutely no clue why, he isn’t even really thinking about Nathan, he just feels miserable. And then, as that first wave of sadness overcomes him, he thinks of Nathan. Then he pulls his phone out, and then he’s dialing Nathan’s ever so familiar number and the phone’s to his ear.

He doesn’t even know why his emotions are screwing him over right now. Well, okay, Marshall has an inkling about why he’s feeling so fucking rundown and terrible.
It was his day, his mom, his Nathan, and the fucking alcohol that just about blew his brains against a wall, he finally decides as the ringing drones on and on in his ear. Three, four, five, he’s counting and tears are actually starting to fall.

Marshall is close to crying before the seventh ring, the one right before the bitch of an operator comes on and tells him to leave a goddamn voicemail or fuck off, before Nathan picks up.

“Mar, you can’t do this,” he’s whispering and Marshall’s heart is still cracking. He thought
the tears were gone and it couldn’t hurt any worse, but Nathan’s voice isn’t like how Marshall remembered it. It’s not sweet, low, and caring like it was.

It’s harsh, kind of raspy, and rough. Nathan’s voice isn’t supposed to be rough, it’s supposed to be the one that sings to Marshall and whispers the cutest things into his ear.
It’s a sweet voice, not rough.

While Marshall’s drunken and slurred thoughts are racing, Nathan is getting a little impatient.

“D’you need anything, man?”

Marshall is brought back to reality, just a little bit, by the question and he lets out a tiny, close to inaudible sob, but Nathan being Nathan, it’s still heard. “Are you okay? Are you at your house? Marshall, where are you?”

Marshall shakes his head almost violently, he slams his eyes shut in an attempt to keep the tears from falling, and he remembers the mirror, the bathroom, the punch he’d throw into Nathan’s gorgeous jaw line before he starts apologizing like crazy, saying how he shouldn’t have called, and then he hangs up.

Part of him wants to throw his phone into the street because he knows Nathan will call back in a matter of minutes, if not seconds, but the rational, slightly sober part of him tells him that no, he shouldn’t throw his phone into the middle of traffic because Marshall has absolutely no fucking clue where in the hell he is at.

It takes Nathan two minutes to call back, but by then, Marshall’s eyelids are too goddamn heavy to even try and keep open anymore, so he slouches against the dirty, stained, piss-smelling alley wall and drifts into Dreamland, where he is safe from his mom, from his thoughts, from Nathan, from everything.

~

The light’s too bright when Marshall wakes up the next morning. There’s blaring car horns, the smell of garbage and urine, and a lot of yelling. As he goes to roll over onto his other side, the rough brick scratches his face. He sits up slowly and tries to focus. As he does so, his head pounds like fucking thunder and everything he’s ever eaten in his entire life floods out of his mouth in a stomach acid tasting stream.

He’s groaning and cradling his head and trying to keep his stomach inside his body as the yelling and car horns increase in volume. Marshall has honestly never in his life felt as bad as he does right now.

“Marshall Brayden Hastings, where in the fuck are you?!” he hears a voice that’s probably familiar to him scream, the voice echoing millions of times in his head before finally disappearing. Marshall thinks he’s dying, he could swear that he is, he can’t even see straight.

“Go’way,” he mumbles and twists back into the wall and curls into a ball.

He feels slight vibrations and the magnified sound of shoes on concrete as they near the terribly hung-over boy.

“Go’way,” he murmurs again and cringes as his own voice meets his ears.

“Goddammit, Marshall, we’ve got to get you home. You’re in such deep shit,” Marshall hears as he tries to keep the light from invading his sensitive retinas. He knows the voice now, he knows he does, but he just can’t match a name to the low, deep sound.

Before he knows it, he feels a hand on his back, shaking him slightly and a light tugging on his upper arm. “Come on, Hastings, you dead-weight lardass, get up,” he hears the whisper as he gives a weak tug to his own arm. He’s mumbling nonsense, not forming anywhere near coherent words as he lets his face fall from his arm of a pillow to the disgusting sidewalk below him.

The voice keeps coming and the tugging gets stronger and Marshall realizes that this person, that he knows he knows, is not going to give up until Marshall stands.

“Get the fuck up!” the voice sounds again and Marshall lets his eyes slowly slide open as he turns his head slowly around and tries to get his feet under him.

“Nathan?”