With every mistake, we must surely be learning

The first of my new writing exercise regime.

The prompt for this was the following line from Hey Jude by The Beatles (of course) - The minute you let her under your skin, then you begin to make it better. It features Eric and Kill from Amped, and comes in at 844 words. It's probably not the best, but hey, practice makes perfect (and for those who don't know, no, I don't write mindless romantic dribble, there's some real shit going on in Amped, but this is just a snippet of a bigger whole...all these exercises will be like that, I am more trying to just write as opposed to actually convey an entire story in a few hundered words, so yeah, just keep that in mind.)

***

How did things come to this? When exactly did he let things get so out of his control that he ended up punching some or other tour manager and standing in the flowerbed outside a label party? Eric wished he knew.
Another wretch from the girl next to him distracted him from his thoughts and he turned to her, rubbing soothing circles on her back as she doubled over. He didn’t bother masking his concern as Kill shook with the force of her body exorcising the litres of Snakebite she’d downed during the night. Her hair fell haphazardly across her face, sticking slightly to a pale cheek. Eric noticed her hair was getting longer and more dishevelled. They were all going that way. There was hardly time to sleep on tour, let alone maintain hairstyles. Of course Phoebe had been threatening to tie them all down and shear them, but Tyler had been a little too keen on helping and no one really wanted to let him near a pair of scissors if they could help it.
He smiled at the thought and almost unconsciously brushed the stray hair behind her ear. He liked it that little bit longer. It made her seem more fragile somehow, like someone who might actually need him. Kill’s eyes snapped open at the motion, and when she looked at him, it was both grateful and angry. There was something else too. Something that made his stomach tighten but he quickly suppressed it, forcing himself to deny he even saw it in the green depths of her gaze in the first place.
He looked away quickly and she straightened. Yeah sure, she needed him. She needed him like he needed Tyler’s Metallica binges when he had a hangover.
“I don’t get you Hayes,” she said quietly. He titled his head slightly at the sound, but didn’t turn to face her. He could imagine her perfectly, outlined in the haze of the not-quite-full moon surrounded by trampled flowers, with her hands on her hips and her eyes narrowed.
He couldn’t do this. Not to her. He didn’t deserve it, and she certainly deserved better. If he turned around and met that gaze, the one that was always searching and which always seemed to see too much, he wouldn’t be able to turn away, and he knew that he should. He was broken and a part of him didn’t want to be fixed.
He scrunched his eyes and tried to hold onto the feelings, the loss and the guilt that kept him up so many nights. It was too easy to forget things when he was with Kill, too easy to want to be whole again. He sighed and opened his eyes only to find her standing in front of him, concern outweighing the wealth of emotion in her eyes. God, she had such honest eyes.
“Are you ok?” She touched his arm and he started, backing away from her. Kill immediately brought up her defences, fire in her voice again as she stared him down.
“What do you want from me?” she spat, hand on her hip just as he’d imagined it.
Eric opened his mouth to respond only to find he had no witty reply, no sarcastic observation to hide behind. He tripped over his words and cursed his overenthusiastic alcohol intake which was no doubt to blame for this entire fucking mess.
“I – I want to love you.” The words tumbled out on their own accord and as Eric heard them cutting through the night, he blinked in surprise to find that they were in fact his. Kill stared at him, a mirror of his own reaction.
“I want to let myself love you,” he said again, barely more than a whisper.
She shook her head, slowly, as if rolling the phrase around her head. She didn't take her eyes off him before she moved, closing the distance between them again.
“You don’t know what you want, do you?”
Eric dropped his eyes to the floor as he gave a barely audible reply. “I wish I did.”
Kill said nothing. Instead, she took his hand and squeezed lightly. He stared at their hands for a second before he laced his fingers through hers. What was it about his girl that always put him so off his guard? She was determined to break through his best defences and he wanted to let her through. But he knew where that would end. Still, the basic human contact, the comfort of being touched, of being cared for…it felt better than he was willing to admit to himself. It all came down to basic risk assessment, and he was far too drunk to make any proper decisions.
“We should get back to the van” he said finally.
“Yeah, we should.”
She shivered and Eric extracted his hand and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. She smiled up at him, wrapping her own around his waist. Together they walked down the sloping driveway and into the night, neither one saying a word.

Music: I've just seen a face - Jim Sturgess
Mood: Busy