I collapsed into a heap onto his bed, curling into a fetal position as I hugged his pillow tight to my chest.
When would it ever stop hurting so much?
Love was ruthless.
Love was pitiless.
Love was cruel.
Love fucking sucked.
Finally, when I had no more tears left, my body started to unclench, and I found that after the violence of my despair I could be soothed into relaxation. Because no matter the anguish Maxx had unleashed on my world, I felt the strongest sense of peace in his space, with his scent around me.
And there in the bed of the man I had loved and lost, I fell into an exhausted sleep.
chapter
three
maxx
there was a five-inch crack in the plaster above my head.
If I stared at it long enough, it seemed to grow and move right before my eyes.
I blinked and it stopped. Then it would start all over again.
Right now, that fucking crack was the most interesting thing in my life.
What a depressing realization.
“It’s time for group, Maxx.”
I didn’t bother to look toward the voice coming from the doorway. The air was stale with the smell of sweat and too much Axe cologne. My roommate, Dominic, an obese pothead, seemed to think that dousing himself in that shit replaced the necessity of a shower.
It was day eighteen at Barton House, a state-run rehab facility that had, for a brief period, seemed like the ticket to starting over.
I was now starting to rethink everything.
It had been easy to make the decision to come here. In the beginning I had been coming off the worst withdrawals of my life. I was still reeling from the fact that I had almost died and that all the people I loved had left me.
I had been alone.
Completely and totally alone.
I had not been in a good place.
So I came here thinking this was my new lease on life. This was my opportunity to show everyone that I didn’t want to end up another scary statistic in a brochure about addictions.
I would beat this shit before it beat me.
But then the days started to drift into each other, and once the initial desperation had worn off, I was left with the second-guessing.
Because the physical withdrawal was long gone. The seventy-two hours in the detox unit had taken care of that.
Now I was left with all the urges that came after my body had returned to stasis. The ones that were entirely in my head. The ones that made it really hard to stay.
Because the longer I stayed here, playing the part of the recovering addict, the harder it would be to face what waited for meout there.
