24...

“Mary got pissed, of course.”
Bryan rolled his head towards Frank.
“What was she pissed about?”
“You name it,” Frank sighed. “She was pissed that I came in smelling like smoke and tried to pass off some lame excuse. She was pissed that I spent time alone with Alexis. She was pissed that I wasn’t having a good time at the party.”
Bryan got up from the couch and headed towards his room. He called back through a door half open.
“But you didn’t do the dirty deed that night?”
Frank’s eyes were aimed at the ceiling, but he was looking at something else. He was looking at the way the rounded tunnel of the past took the edges off of things. He was looking at the heart’s filter. He was looking straight at his own romantic lies and letting himself get lost in their labyrinthine extravagances; like some glowing spider’s web of Celtic design.
“Nope,” he said dreamily.
Bryan came back to the living room with a smirk on his face and a towel around his waist.
“You talk about her like you love her.”
Frank turned towards him and stared with such seriousness that Bryan’s smile faltered a bit at the edges.
“She does something to me Bryan. I cannot explain it. It’s not love, but this sort of sick compulsion that seems so passionate and alive at first, but then just ends up pulling me into this bad and negative energy.”
Bryan wanted to make some sort of joke, any wisecrack to lighten the mood, but couldn’t. His tongue was stuck in his mouth, wondering what the hell had happened to all the spit in there. His smile had run for cover, sheltering it out until better days.
“And see, I know this. And I got suckered in every time. I thought that I had finally escaped it, that I had removed myself from the process but…”
Frank looked down at the floor with a fierce concentration. This severe seriousness was something that was rarely seen in Frank, and it may be one of the reasons it made Bryan so uncomfortable. When Frank looked back at Bryan’s face though, Bryan was more troubled by what he saw in his eyes. A mixture of things in there combined into a swamp, into quicksand that pulled into and was fed by the darkest parts of ones soul; a destructive cycle that tore and fed on its own energy. Bryan saw misery, loneliness, hopelessness, a deep sense of loss and some spark like primal fire.
“I can feel it starting up again,” Frank said, standing slowly. He stiffly glanced towards his bedroom door and began walking towards it as if in a daze.
“And fucking fates protect me. I’m excited about it.”