Please, Won't You Push Me for the Last Time

~Vic~

I wake up suddenly, and find myself in a large open room, and I feel panicked. Where am I? Why am I on a fold out bed? I take a few deep breaths and try to think clearly, which for some reason is harder than usual. Okay, okay, what’s the last thing I remember?

I remember the party, and kissing Kellin and I remember being on the rails and I hugged him and I was super happy and then… not much. I remember walking somewhere and I remember lights. Am I in a tunnel right now? I think so. Where’s Kellin? What happened after the party? Is something wrong with me? Did something else happen? I have a million scenarios going through my head, and it’s terrifying. I’ve never felt like this before.

“Kellin?!” I sit up and yell suddenly. Fortunately, he is in another folding bed thing right next to me. There’s also several other people in the room, scattered about, some of which make noises of complaint at my outbreak interrupting their sleep, some are unphased. Kellin wakes up though, and walks over to me cautiously.

“You okay Vic?” he whispers, and I’m even more confused, but I feel comforted now that he is here.
“I- I’m… I don’t know,” I whisper back honestly, my mind is a mess. There’s so many things going on and I can’t keep anything straight.

“Come with me?” Kellin asks and offers me his hand, which I accept happily. He leads me to another tunnel that leads back to the room where the party was. There are people there, and they are all drinking warm drinks or water, roaming around and talking to each other. Kellin and I take a seat against the wall in the back, and he looks at me, with what I somehow easily recognize as concern. I’ve never picked up on an emotion quite so quickly before.

“So… why are we here?” I ask him, and he smiles.

“Because, Vic, you were drinking alcohol while you were on cures. That’ll mess you up! That’s part of why nobody drinks it anymore. But it’s okay, I got you back here and the guys helped you. You have no cures in your system right now though. Usually sleeping somewhere is okay because they’ll last til about noon the next day, but you had to have a detox, so everything is completely out of your system. How you feel right now, this is how you truly are, naturally… how do you like it so far?” Kellin babbles, still smiling, and I start trying to think it all through, let him know exactly what emotion I have right now, but I can’t. I can’t figure out how I feel or if I like it. I’m so many things at once. My heart feels like it skips every time I meet Kellin’s eyes, but in a good way. I feel scared still, and I feel worried, and there’s something else. I keep noticing new things. The shape of the room and the emotions of everyone in it. It’s so beautiful and so messy at once. I have so many things at once and I don’t know if I like it or not.

“It’s… overwhelming,” I finally respond. Kellin doesn’t seem phased by that but he squeezes my hand a little tighter.

“Why don’t you get dressed? I wanna show you something before you have to go home. There’s clothes back in that room,” he gestures to the tunnel we came from, “you woke up early, it’s only five, we have a few hours before we have to get home, but it’s also before curfew ends, so we will have to travel through tunnels.”

We both head back into the makeshift bedroom, where nobody else seems to be awake. There’s a closet in the back and we grab clothes according to a long crawl. I get the words for them from Kellin, there’s skinny jeans, t-shirts, and fingerless gloves, to keep our hands from getting scraped. We go to get dressed when I find myself a bit distracted by Kellin. He’s currently shirtless when he notices me staring and blushes, tossing his shirt at me.

“Hey no peeking!” he whisper-shouts at me. I toss the shirt aside and step a little closer to him, and I don’t know what possesses me, but I put my hands on his hips and pull him to me quickly, kissing him hard and letting my hands roam his back a bit, he doesn’t resist, and we finally pull away, out of breath. I have this feeling in my chest, and it’s the best feeling. I also have a bit of a… problem a little lower down that for once I can’t seem to will away. I continue looking at Kellin as my mind wanders to exactly what I would like to do with him right now. He’s blushing again.

“Calm down,” he tells me, although I think his mind may be in the same place mine is. Nonetheless, he continues changing on the other side of the closet door where I can’t see him, and I reluctantly do the same. Fortunately, nobody in the room has woken up the whole time we have been here.
Kellin leads me to a tunnel opposite the one I think is the entrance, and it’s only about twenty minutes or so before we reach the little room we first met Jack and Alex in. I’m tired of crawling so as soon as we stand up in there I just grab Kellin and kiss him again, wanting to get back to where we were earlier. He pulls away slightly, to my disappointment.

“Note to self,” he smiles, “natural Vic is very horny.”

“Shut up!” I say, slightly embarrassed, “you’re the one who's been crawling in front of me with that fine ass of yours for the last twenty minutes.” Did I really just cuss? Where did I even learn that? What has gotten into me?

“Fine,” Kellin blushes, pulling me back to him and kissing me gently, sweetly, you can lead the rest of the way.” My heart is doing that thing again, it feels really nice.

“No way,” I argue, smirking. We smile at each other for a moment. I didn’t realize how much I like this boy. He’s so… beautiful, not to mention a free thinker and just different from anyone I have ever met. I love just holding him, looking at him. I want to be like this forever.

“I was gonna bring you all the way to my tunnel room, where we met,” Kellin says, interrupting my thoughts, “but I’m tired of crawling, and I think this place will do.”

He gently pushes me away, which is disappointing. Then he sits down and gestures for me to sit beside him. He pulls out a small device, it has a little screen on it, looks like old technology to me, I don’t know where he got it or why he has it, but he hits some buttons and some music plays, but there’s no words, just some background music. It’s pretty fast and upbeat though, and complex. It’s nothing like you hear on the radio. It gets my mind racing and my blood pumping, I suddenly have the urge to change the world or beat someone up or something.

“I want you to sing with me,” Kellin says nervously, “but not like you do in school. I want you to sing whatever you think, whatever you feel, as loud as you can. And I will too. Maybe… we can write a song today. What do you think?”

“I think it sounds amazing,” I say, and it’s true. A million things are going on in my head right now, and I am dying to get them out.

Kellin starts, singing, screaming, even cussing and after a few minutes I can see him really letting go, getting lost in his words and the music on the old device. We sing, and we scream, and Kellin helps me come up with words for things sometimes, things that make me angry about what we’ve learned about the old world, things I wish were in this one. It feels so nice, building up so much emotion and letting it out. It’s perhaps the best experience I have ever had. We keep it up for a few hours, playing with words and emotions and enjoying the music and each other, joking and teasing and learning what the other knows. It’s so lovely, being here with him.

Kellin scribbles down what we’ve written on a page of a half-empty notebook, one of the few that are in here. He says that the things in them were probably written recently, and left here. He points out some of them are songs Alex and Jack’s band played at the party. This has been such an intense, powerful and amazing morning, and I’m still not sure if I like my mind being so jumbled, but I look at Kellin, and the way he is looking at me, like I am the best thing to ever exist, and I know that, whatever my mind is doing, it’s worth it because Kellin is happy. I lean in and kiss him, not rough and passionate like earlier, but sweet and slow like he kisses me, like I can somehow convey without words how perfect this moment is, and how happy I am.

We finally decide to head back to where the party was, since it’s probably an insanely long crawl to get back through the tunnels when we can take the rails for much less effort. Kellin insists that it is now my turn to crawl in front, and we head out. I realize Kellin hasn’t had any problem with the tunnels lately, and I’m proud of him for that. Maybe Alex said something to him that helped. They sure talk a lot without me…

I feel my heart drop at that thought, and it takes effort to keep myself crawling. What if he ends up liking Alex more? I mean Alex is more than likely taken by Jack but for some reason it still scares me. I’m not familiar with this feeling. In psychology class we learned about dangerous emotions, and this one seems to fit the description of “jealousy,” the one that makes people bitter and ruins relationships. I don’t want our relationship to be ruined. Kellin is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

By the time we get out of the tunnel that one random thought had developed in my head to a full-blown set of emotional chaos. I try to keep it to myself though, fight back the tears and anger, but then I look at Kellin as he stands up in the tunnel and I feel so heartbroken at the very thought of losing him. I quickly grab him into a hug and whisper in his ear sadly, “I don’t ever want to lose you.”