“I’ve ruined my life,” I mumble against my palms. “My family hates me. My friends are…are better off without me. And now I’ve gone and fucked up and—and—and made it even worse. Because that’s what I do. I make things worse.”
Wyatt is silent, the motion of his hand on my back the only rhythm I can cling to.
My next breath shudders into my lungs. “I don’t even have a good excuse. I don’t…. It’s not like I had a terrible childhood or I was abused or horribly traumatized in some way. I have no reason to be the way I am. I just—I’m broken. Something in my head isn’t right. But I have no excuse.”
“There’s never an excuse,” Wyatt says. He touches the crown of my head, and his fingertips are light, so light, like birds resting on my skull. “You don’t need one. Addiction is a disease. It’s…chemical. Your brain doesn’t work like other people’s brains work.”
“You’re damn right about that,” I mutter, and manage a wet little laugh.
Other people have excuses, though. Chaya was a lesbian living in a culture that would never accept her. My first sponsor was horribly abused as a child. I used to get high with a girl who had grown up in foster care and been homeless since she’d turned eighteen. Shannon got addicted after a back injury.
Me? Nothing. No sob story. I was the blueprint for every fucked-up antidrug propaganda piece about not giving in to peer pressure. I had no self-control.
Haveno self-control.
“It’s not a race to the bottom,” Wyatt says, as if he can read my mind. His fingers loop through my hair, and I wish he would keep touching me like this forever. Even if I don’t deserve it.
But instead he pulls away, carrying my half-empty water glass to the kitchen counter and refilling it. I take advantage of his absence to scrub my face against my sleeves and try to pull myself together. Not that it works. The room is still spinning far too wildly for me to even pretend I’m not a goddamn mess.
“Come on,” he says when he’s back, offering me his free hand. “Get some rest. You’ll feel better in the morning.”
“I doubt that.”
“Well, let’s test it and see.”
I sniffle and take his hand, letting him pull me upright. The change in position makes me dizzy all over again and I stumble; Wyatt catches me, an arm sliding around my waist, fingertips pressing in at my ribs. He helps me, just like that, the pair of us picking our way across his apartment to the bedroom. He doesn’t turn on the light, so I can’t catalog the room—it’s all dark shapes and edges as Wyatt settles me onto the bed and places my water glass on the nightstand.
“I’ll be in the other room if you need anything,” he says. “Bathroom is through that door…. Try to get some sleep, okay?”
He closes the door softly behind himself, and I curl up in the middle of Wyatt’s bed, burying my face against the pillow that smells like him, and try to pretend I am someone else, anyone else in the entire world.
22
When you go four years without a single hangover, you start to forget how god-awful they are.
Or maybe the hangovers just get worse with age.
Either way, waking up the next morning is awful. The sunlight streaming in through the windows falls directly on my face, I have the headache from hell, and my tongue feels like a slab of dryer lint. I fumble on the nightstand for my phone before remembering that—right—I’m not at home. I’m at Wyatt’s.
My hand hits the sweaty side of a glass of ice water. I crack my eyes open just enough to see; Wyatt’s left the water and a bottle of aspirin next to the bed.Bless this man.
Also, there is a black cat sitting on my chest.
“Hey, buddy,” I mumble. Opening my mouth feels like a gamble, but you can’t meet a void cat and not say hi. It’s extremely rude. “Sup?”
I manage a clumsy scratch behind its ears, which only sends it leaping off me and tottering off into another room on three legs.Great. Even the cat hates me.
I down two of the aspirin and then embark on the slow, agonizing process of getting out of bed.
By the time I make it out to the main part of the apartment, the pounding in my head has escalated to a constant throb right between my eyes. Worse is the humiliation that coils in the pit of my stomach, hot and nauseating.
Wyatt is in the kitchen pouring pancake batter into a skillet. The smell of frying butter makes my gut curdle; I try to breathe through my mouth.
I wish that I were here under literally any other circumstances. There are so many versions of this morning I could have spent watching Wyatt’s strong muscles shift under his white T-shirt as he flipped pancakes. In another world I could have come up behind him and slid my arms around that firm stomach and kissed the nape of his neck. And he’d have been happy to see me. He would have shifted in my arms to catch my mouth with his, still smiling.
Why did I have to call him? Of all the people on planet Earth.Fuck you, past Ely.
“Hi,” he says, setting the spatula down on a spoon rest as he turns to face me. “You’re up. Did you sleep okay?”
