I’m barely holding my tears back when the original speaker gets back up to the podium and somehow has a smile on his face and a tissue in his hand.
“If there’s anyone else that would like to come up, we have just a few more minutes. No pressure.”
I expect the meeting to finally come to an end. For asses to stick to seats until the speaker delivers his final thoughts and sends us back into the night to face our demons with the messages we found within these old church walls.
I’m not an addict.
There’s no part of me that craves the pills for the high. No part that’s looking for the escape.
I’m looking for the end.
My stomach flips as I wait, the neck of the hoodie trapped between my teeth as a silence that hurts my ears blankets the communion.
“I just want to—oh—”
Tristen stands, interrupting the guy and my stomach rolls so hard with the insinuation of what that means.
No. Not him.
“No, wait. Don’t go up there,” I whisper, my voice lost, my heart dropping to the turbulence in my stomach.
“Come on up,” the speaker says and steps away, but I can’t focus on anything except Tristen’s back. The stretch of leather across his shoulders. The tattoo I’ve never noticed on the back of his neck.
Don’t go up there. Don’t go. Don’t go. Don’tgodon’tgo.
“He—”
Deep brown eyes find mine as he clears his throat and my chest aches so deep that I fear I might actually pass out.
Nonononono.
“—Hi. My name’s Tristen,” he says with a paleness to his cheeks that makes me sick as he wets his lips, his normally stoic voice cracking. “And I was born an addict.”
“Hello, Tristen,” several members mutter weakly, and I hold back the sob that lodges in my throat.
Not him, too.
I press my cloth-covered fist to my mouth and bite it so hard, I know I’m leaving marks as he explains that his father gave him anything he could to keep him sedated as an infant. That he was already exposed in his mother’s womb, and nothing but whiskey would settle him. That he was born two months too early, andhis mother had no idea she even went into labor when she had him.
Breaking skin when he says that his teenage years became self-medicated. Putting holes in a sweatshirt that doesn’t belong to me as he says words I never expected tohurt. To have waves of guilt rolling through me.
“I’m twenty-two and I finally hit two years sober. I almost broke it. The craving was sodeep, I—” he shakes his head and looks down at his hands where he’s doing the thing with his nails again, “I know I’m here to help people. So here I am, trying to help them andmyself.”
Was that why he found me in the hospital?
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I mutter and dart from my seat, except my wrist is caught. Pulled. And when I look down at the intensity in Hatley’s bloodshot gaze, I freeze up.
“He needs to say this. We both need to listen.”
I swallow down the bile burning my throat and pry Hatley’s grip from my arm. “Okay.Okay.”
“Ten needs you here,” he says, pinning me to the spot with a look that floods my system with even more adrenaline. “Hewantsyou here.”
With my jaw gritted and my hands fisted, I drop back into the seat and face front.
I don’t hear the rest of what Tristen says.
I can’t hear anything over the whooshing in my ears and the pulsing of my rapid breaths.
