Seth said not onething.
I sighedagain.
“You ever hear that thing about Gandhi,” I asked him, “how he slept surrounded by naked women to prove he could resisttemptation?”
Fucking finally, he spoke. “Sounds likebullshit.”
“Maybe.”
“So you got a bottle with you, what, to prove you can resist thetemptation?”
“I tell myself it’s this monument to my sobriety, that I can resist it, that it doesn’t have control of me anymore. But in reality, it’s there to assure me that I can have it if I break the fuck apart and needit.”
Seth didn’t sayanything.
“I’ve never told anyonethat.”
“Even yoursponsor?”
“EvenRudy.”
“Then here’s what we do. We get back to the hotel, we get rid of that bottle. Then you call Rudy and you tellhim.”
I wasn’t gonna argue with that. And I knew what I was in for. Rudy was pretty much Seth, still sober and twenty years into thefuture.
“There’s this thing Rudy always says. Something about fame and fortune… how it gives you the means to have a fantastic life, or to fantastically killyourself.”
Seth gave a dry laugh. “Trueenough.”
“I don’t know what the fuck I’d do without him. If it wasn’t for Rudy, I think I might be dead.” There was a weird lump in my throat as the truth of that sat, heavy in my chest. “If it wasn’t for Maggie…” I didn’t even finish that sentence. “You know, I got sober a few months after I met her. She was a big part of that. I mean, she probably doesn’t know it. But shewas.”
“There were plenty of times I would’ve killed myself,” Seth said, “if it wasn’t for someone saving my ass. Elle, finding me on the floor after I’d OD’d on that tour bus. Jude, getting me into rehab, over and again. My foster father, giving me a home and a name and some pride. You,” he said, glancing over at me, “picking me up off the street and bringing me home, bringing me into the band. Jessa and Jesse and Dylan… there were a lot of people over the years who cared aboutme.”
“Yeah.”
“You need people in your corner, Zane, but you can’t get clean forthem.”
I didn’t sayanything.
“No one wants to be your reason,” he said. “Maggie doesn’t want to be the reason you drink, and she doesn’t want to be the reason you stay sober. Don’t put that on her. This is allyou.”
I sighed and rubbed my hands over myface.
I don’t want to be the reason you don’t fuck other women, and I don’t want to be the reason you don’t drink, or the reason you don’t end up injail.
That’s what she’d said tome.
We can’t just keep havingsex.
I can’t handlemore.
She’d said that, too. Admitted she couldn’t handle what was betweenus.
And I couldn’t handleanything. Not likethis.
I definitely couldn’t handle losingher.
Jesus and fuck. Were we seriously doomed? Because we were both too fucked-up to keep a relationshiptogether?
