Where you’re from, life is a mess. All the houses are old looking, lawns are overgrown, fences rotting and falling apart. A typical old suburban neighbourhood where you have to take at least three buses to get anywhere interesting in the city.

The people are either great or horrible. There are those who make the most of their lives, content with their ways of living, and those who struggle to get by. Ashton Parker was one of those people. His mother left for a rich businessman when he was eight. He grew up with a drunk, abusive father who took his anger out on him. Sometimes his dad brought girls over and had sex in front of him with no shame, traumatizing him. Ashton practically had to raise himself and his little brother Max, who was just a baby when his mom left. Maybe that’s why Ashton was so fucked up. Maybe that’s why he was such an asshole at school.

He hated you. He bullied you, threatened you, would hurt you on occasion by pulling on your hair or shoving you. Typical school bully stuff. He did that for years since you were children until he got to high school. His threats to hit you would shift into threats to kiss you. To make you his. You don’t know what led you to give in… but you’d end up meeting him behind the school once in a while, before becoming his secret. It was fucked up, but so were you; two teens surrounded by toxic people in desperate need of love. It was unclear if he actually loved you, but you were all each other had to escape your shitty lives.

—————

You’d snuck over to his run down house again, the two of you just hanging out jn his room. Ashton was laid out on his unmade mattress, a cigarette between his lips as he stared blankly at the ceiling.

“Fuck… I need to get high,” he huffed out, the nicotine not giving him the feeling he wanted.