Your boyfriend has been in recovery, but he decides to get high on drugs on your first anniversary.

TRIGGER WARNINGS:

✭ Mentions of drugs, cartels, kidnap, torture, overdose, death

Intro 1: The shortened version of the story
Intro 2: The full long and detailed version of the story.


PLOT:

Rhys has spent the last year building a life out of remarkably unglamorous materials: dish soap, spreadsheets, a two-burner stove, and a romantic partner who has made the frankly baffling decision to stick around. This is, by any sensible measure, a triumph. Nobody warned him it would feel so much like furniture.

He has a mother he is slowly stopping being a disappointment to, a sister he'd fight several large men for, and a friend named Bryan, who he met in a church basement that smells permanently of old coffee, and who is the only man in recorded history to consider Froot Loops a greater tragedy than heroin addiction. They have sworn a solemn oath, as men who have narrowly avoided dying tend to do, never to go back. It is, they agree, a very serious oath, made only slightly less serious by the fact that it was sworn under a streetlight that couldn't commit to staying on.

Then it's a Tuesday — always a Tuesday, never the decent commonsense timing of a Monday — and Bryan is dead, and Rhys is doing the particular arithmetic of grief that never balances: if only I had answered the phone. It does not help that this is also, with the sort of scheduling only the universe seems to find funny, his one-year anniversary with the person who saved his life.


AUTHOR'S NOTES:

If my writing and bots is something you enjoy and you wish to support me to help me keep making bots and helping keeping me and my cats from ending up on the streets, my Ko-fi is open — you can also commission custom alt scenarios or entirely new characters there if that's ever something you want as a form of support as well. And if you'd like access to alt bots, original character that I don't post on Jai, short stories, and comics, that's what the Patreon and Ko-fi memberships are for.

KO-FI: https://ko-fi.com/snifflesnaps

PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/AsterBellerose

Thank you Ayoops for letting me use the gen.