I wouldneverdrink again.
Chase doesn’t move his gaze from mine, flames burning in his deep eyes, but as quickly as they get there, he blinks them away, speaking to Harlen with an emptiness I hadn’t heard before.
“Yeah…” he says, turning. He walks out of the room but not before snatching the bottle out of Harlen’s hand.
Harlen watches him leave, then jerks his chin at me. “You coming?”
I wet my lips. “Nah, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
He gives me one of his lopsided smiles, then takes a step into the room, pulling me in for a hug. I wrap my arms so tightly around him that I start trembling, and I think he notices because he returns it with the same kind of force.
I shiver when his breath whispers over the top of my scalp. “You wanna talk about it?”
I pinch my fingers into his sharp obliques. “Nope,” I admit, then I counter in a whisper, “I can’t.”
The weight of Laiken’s truth had crushed me.
I knew how it felt to want to die, the need to end it all, to want to drift to a quiet place.
A place where every snapped rib could be melded back together without any heavy lifting.
Where you could blunt the shard that had incessantly driven trauma to your heart.
And I knew how it felt to bleed against the barrel of a gun.
Knowing that Laiken had taken the same turn as me, tasted the same bitter metal, and I was too blinded by my own pain to see her hiding beneath the striations, proves just how goddamn selfish I’d been.
I had convinced myself that if she still had Harlen, she would be okay. I didn’t think to wonder what she might have been hiding from him in the dark, that she could be wandering down the same decaying path.
I lift the bottle of whiskey to my mouth, adding pressure against my lips. The liquor blows fuel against the flames in my chest.
When I watched her from my truck early this morning, disappearing for a short second too long toward the back of Devil’s Diner, something debilitating came over me. It was fear,the palpable pressure of losing another person who meant the whole goddamn world to me.
And tonight, without the coke to alleviate that pain, I felt like a complete fraud.
I only watched her the one day of the year that I thought mattered. For the other three-hundred-and-sixty-four days, I’d left her on her own.
“Shit looked serious in there,” Harlen says from beside me.
We are sitting at the large glass table on the deck. The foreboding clouds overhead had just opened up, casting a light sprinkle of rain around us.
“Mmmm,” I counter.
“You wanna talk about it?” he asks.
My chest squeezes as tightly as my fist around the bottle. I don’t look at Harlen when I tell him, “She just told me she’s spent three years wanting to kill herself…” I return the bottle to my lips, take a pull.
He stays silent and I don’t turn to look at him; I’m staring at the lake in a guilt inflicted stupor when something runs from my nose. Touching my fingers to my top lip, I draw them back to see the crimson smear of a nosebleed. I press my nose into the crook of my arm and drag it back across my bicep, wiping it away. I’d never had nosebleeds, not until I started using coke.
“You know what else she told me?” I rasp, wiping the blood from my fingers across the front of my jeans. My knee jerks up and down.
When Harlen doesn’t reply, I tell him, “That every time she tried to squeeze the trigger she couldn’t do it…” I pause. Blood thuds against my eardrums. “Because she kept seeing me.” Clenching my teeth, I seethe, “Do you know how it fucking feels to know that me, the person that fucked her up so bad…” I slam my hand to my chest. “Was her flinch?” I’m shaking my head.“She told me herself…that I fucked her so hard she couldn’t remove me.”
My pain, the depth of my guilt, stills the air around us, turning it rotten.
The rain falls harder now, dimpling the obsidian surface in the distance when Harlen rasps, “Fuck.”
I close my eyes, and push the bottle flush against my lips. “Yeah, fuck.” I sink way too much liquor, catching the spillage at the crook of my elbow when I turn to look at him, begging for some clarity, “What do I do?”
