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It was 3 AM on a saturday, and Max was out walking. There were only around three streetlamps that were working on the extremely long street that he walked every once and awhile. The street itself didn’t smell as bad as many of the other sidewalk-lined roads in the city where he lived, which made it a good place for Max to walk and collect his thoughts on nights like this.
Also, many of the other streets had alleys Max had once frequented, before his big change, before he had forced himself away from the vice-like grip of his many addictions. This road, called ‘Main Street’, was too busy for any shady dealings, and besides, it was just all houses, an icecream place, and a bar (which he was making sure to avoid).
Many houses lined the street, almost all were slightly rundown, except one, which was painted a bright yellow, and had a very happy-looking garden. Max only knew that it was yellow because during his morning commute to work, he always gave it a glance. Everytime he would glance at it, he would wonder who lived there.
He would wonder why they chose to keep the house in such nice shape, why they still seemed to give a shit about the appearance. Max always assumed that a woman lived there, perhaps an old woman, who had nothing better to do during the long days.
Normally he would stop and stare at the house for a bit, since it really did make him wonder why someone would make the exterior of their home look so happy, so intensely yellow. But tonight something was different, he could feel it.
Max passed the tree that had blocked his view of the house for his walk until now. He paused, since nothing looked different at first. The rose bush was still well-groomed, and the tree with the pink blossoms was still lucious.
Then he realized: There was somebody on the porch.
Whoever it was, they were in a fetal position, and appeared to be crying. At first, Max assumed that it was a child, since they looked small from where he was standing. As he walked closer, he saw that it was indeed an adult, and that they had seemed to have bright red hair.
When Max got within around 10 feet of the man, he stepped on a stone, which moved under his foot. He tripped, but caught himself, but not before saying “Shit!” relatively loudly. The man’s head shot up and looked right into his eyes, and Max was sure he had never seen anything that green.
He was indeed crying, if the liquid that was dribbling from his eyes was in fact tears. The man’s lower lip was trembling, and Max could feel the pure emotion he was radiating. Max felt the sudden need to help, to get this poor guy to stop crying, to be happy again.
The man looked away, towards the door, and began lowering his face back to his knees. One of his hands tapped at the ground, before grabbing onto the welcome mat that usually said ‘Welcome!’, but since the man was sitting on it, it was just ‘w !’.
Max walked a bit closer, close enough to talk. He opened his mouth to speak, but had trouble finding the right words. He settled for stumbling through a sentence.
“Are you aright? I mean, I see you are cr- is everything OK?” Max asked the man, and wanted to slap himself. He probably sounded so dumb, and kind of creepy to the poor guy who was probably going through something here.
The man looked startled at Max’s words, almost as if he expected him to not still be there. Max realized he was shaking, and probably cold. Just as the man was about to speak, a gust of wind blew right into him, causing him to shudder and whimper slightly.
The wind also blew in Max’s direction, but not enough so that he’d get a forceful gust like the man did. But, he did catch a whiff of alcohol blown towards him.
“N-no! I’m not alright! M-my friend j-just killed t-themselves, and m-my dog ran a-away, and now I'm l-l-locked out of my h-house!” The man almost seemed to wail, but it was relatively quiet, as if he didn’t want to wake the neighbors. Many of his words were slightly slurred, which confirmed that the man was drunk.
Max decided that he didn’t want to leave this man out here in the cold, he himself had a coat on top of his usual sweatshirt. He didn’t really care that much, but if it got on the news that this fucker fucking died in the cold, he would carry the guilt with him for a long time. He supposed that he could give him this coat, it was pretty shitty, but that didn’t mean much. If this guy was drunk, he might take it off, or do something else irrational.
He supposed the only thing he could do was break this guy into his own house. Max knew how to break into houses, get past most locks, he had done it all the time in his dark time, but he didn’t want to accidentally break this guy into his own house.
“Are you sure this is your house?” He asked in his normal almost accusatory tone, and winced. Max didn’t want to offend him, but he also didn’t want a possible true owner of this house to call the police.
The man had stopped crying. He slowly stood, and pointed inside one of the front windows. He bit his lip, and Max could tell that tears were threatening to fall again. Max looked inside, to see a framed picture of the drunk man and another man, who had blonde hair, with the words ‘Jasper and I’ on it.
Max supposed that this might be the blonde man’s house, but even then he would at least be at a supposed friend’s house.
“I could break you in. I mean, it might damage your lock a bit, but you wouldn’t die in this cold.” Max asked him, with his monotone. He didn’t want to sound too eager, it might seem like he wanted to break the lock for some reason other than letting the man into his house.
“M’ names Max by the way” He stated, and watched as the man realized what he was saying. At first he had a confused look on his face, but that soon changed to a smile. He nodded, and seemed to blindly trust Max.
If this sort of thing had happened to Max around two or so years ago, he would have just knocked the man out, and robbed him blind. But that was the old Max, and the new Max would instead help this poor guy out.
“M-my name is David.” The man (David) said, and offered his hand for a handshake. Max noticed that it was his left hand, but took it in his own anyway. The man had a relatively strong grip, and Max supposed that it would be much stronger when David wasn’t drunk to the point that he was crying over being locked out.
Well, being locked out on top of many other things.
Max went up the steps of the porch, and reached into his pockets. Inside one of them, he had a stick of gum, and in the other, he had a hair clip, that Nikki had probably slipped in there at some point in the week.
He could feel David’s eyes on him as he got on his knees and pulled out the clip. It slid into the lock easily, and Max immediately knew that the lock on this door wasn’t very good, and that this man seemed to trust that this lock would protect his house in most circumstances.
With a click, Max hit the right spot in it, and the door swung right open. David stumbled slightly, and Max backed away slightly, to let him in. But that wasn’t where he was going; David went right over to Max and gave him a hug.
“Thanks.” David said, practically into his ear. Max immediately felt himself tense. He wasn’t used to human contact, even Nikki and Neil knew not to do anything more than tap him on the shoulder to get his attention.
This felt… nice. The hug was very long, and about halfway through, Max reciprocated, tentatively hugging back.
At some point, he pulled himself away from David, and saw that he was smiling radiantly. Max suddenly felt the urge to do the same; and he found himself grinning slightly back. That much wasn’t normal, the closest thing Max had done to that within the past month or so was a smirk at a joke someone had made.
“Bye David.” He said simply, because he was pretty sure that even if David remembered any of this in the morning, he would think of Max as a criminal that broke into his home. The walk back seemed much shorter than before, since now he walked with a bit more spring in his step.
Fin