10: Clean

                                    

                                          
Eli POV.

I was sober now for four days, and it was fucking hell. It would be bad enough to stop one addiction, but I had four, I needed to quit at the same time. Usually, when I wanted to quit one, I'd just take up another, but I couldn't really do that now, could I?
I'm sure my brothers noticed me acting strange. I was sweating a lot, and my anger levels were off the roof. I had a constant headache, but I got a lot of painkillers just for that. As for my anger, I had gotten pretty good at hiding my emotions, so I was doing pretty good so far. The only real problem was the sweating. 

"You're sweating buckets over there. Just change into something lighter," Matteo pointed out while we were eating dinner one night.
Of course, I couldn't. I wasn't going to let them see my scars. I had them all over my body, the worst ones were my arms, back, legs, and stomach, so basically everywhere. I had to make up some lame-ass excuse about liking my outfit with a pose and a chuckle, praying, that it would cover up enough of my weird actions. 
I also couldn't sleep at night, even with my meds, I had this shooting pain in my legs, I fainted once in my room (thank God I wasn't with my brothers), and I could hardly keep any food down.
I really needed to get high. 


Lorenzo POV.

Eli had been with us for five days now, and they were acting really strange. I could see how they wouldn't eat much, and always danced around the subject of food. They were really tired, and they were sweating like crazy. Just for starters.
At first, I thought it was just all the stress closing in, but I'm starting to get really worried.

"You wanna watch a movie with us?" I asked.
I was sent to get Eli, while the others made snacks.
"Sure, which one?" Eli said as they stepped out of their room and started walking with me toward the kitchen.
"We didn't decide yet, we wanted to see what you wanted to watch," I said as we got to the kitchen.
"I don't know, I haven't seen that many movies," Eli said with a shrug.
"Well, surely you've seen the good ones? like Shrek?" Antonio asked from the fridge.
"Well, I've heard of it," Eli smirked while Antonio fake gasped.
"Yeah, we're having a movie night and we're educating you," Antonio declared as he got the drinks from the fridge. 
"I didn't know I was so uneducated," Eli said dramatically as they sat down on a barstool.

We spent the night watching 'all the important movies', starting with how to train your dragon, Gabriele's idea, which Eli loved. 
They couldn't stop praising the compositions and that's when I realized how much they really loved music. They kept on going and going about the melodies and references in the chord cycles and other things I had no idea about. They had this glint in their eye, I hadn't seen before, that only came out, when they got to talk about music. None of us had the heart to stop them, so they just kept on going, until, they realized how much they were talking and stopped. Even when we tried to urge them to go on, they wouldn't. I guess they were too embarrassed to go on when they realized what had happened.