The pull of the drugs turned out to be easier to overcome. After the band broke up, I didn’t have a reliable dealer and never craved it enough to try find another one. The seductive promise of alcohol, on the other hand, was as potent as ever. I yearned for the dullness of mind a bottle of Stolichnaya would bring, some days more than others. But so far, my craving to live, to survive, was turning out to be stronger. I hadn’t relapsed since I’d gone cold turkey after my OD.
Getting onto Santa Monica Boulevard, I drove down the palm-lined street and checked the GPS on my phone. I was five minutes away, but the meeting wasn’t for another thirty.
I’ve had a lot of these meetings in the past few months, yet they never got easier. It was easy to hurt people. It was much harder to look them in the face and acknowledge the pain I’d caused. Some were gracious, letting me off the hook easily. The women I barely remembered sleeping with would smile and tell me how good I looked. How happy they were that I was doing well. Sure, I’d never called them back, but they hadn’t really expected anything different.“You were Jamie Berg, for God’s sake”,they’d say with a laugh, as if I’d ceased to be him after the band broke up. In many ways, I had.
Parking in an empty spot outside of Verve Coffee, I pulled up Ivy’s message for the hundredth time.
“K. Two pm at Verve Coffee on Santa Monica Blvd. Thursday.”
I don’t know why I kept reading it. It wasn’t as if the terse, factual words gave any hint to how this meeting would go down. If her goal was to keep me on edge, she’d succeeded. And if I had to guess, she wouldn’t be one of those who’d let me off easily.
That heart-shaped face flashed in my mind. It’s funny how despite meeting her at a time when I struggled to remember much of anything, I’d never forgotten her face. In fact, I thought of it often. Sometimes, when the cravings felt strong enough to drive me insane, I’d think of her face twisted in that disgusted expression as she called me a liar. Ivy wasn’t the first one to call me that, not by a long shot, but for some reason, her words had managed to penetrate my drug and alcohol-induced haze and land with impact. Whenever I recalled that encounter, my desire to not be that guy anymore overpowered the need to numb the pain.
I got out of the car and walked into the shop twenty minutes before our appointment. It wasn’t busy, but as was typical in LA, there were a few aspiringsomethingtypes hunched over their mugs. I walked up to the counter and ordered a black coffee, my current vice. It was safe because I never drank coffee when I was still using, so it had no association to my old life.
I picked a two-person table in the corner by a tall window. It wasn’t exactly private, but it was far enough away to be out of the earshot of the other patrons milling about. My coffee was half finished when the door swung open, and she walked in.
Yellow T-shirt, jean cut-offs, and a pair of long, sun-kissed legs. Purple streaks peeked out of her black shoulder-length hair that looked like it would be silky soft to touch. She removed her tortoise-shell sunglasses with a graceful flick of her wrist and looked around the coffee shop. Unsurprisingly, her gaze slid right over me and moved to the other tables, but even that lightning-fast flash of her face was enough to throw me off-balance.
The full lips I had once kissed were pulled into a guarded pout. Her cheekbones had sharpened, and her thick dark brows brought out the hazel of her eyes. Despite the typical LA outfit, there was nothing typical about her. When I’d first met her, she was seventeen—I’d never forget that fact after having it screamed at me by her brother—and by my calculations, she’d recently turned twenty. Even back then, she was beautiful, but now she was entirely something else.
The back of my neck prickled with shame just as my dick decided to wake up. I hadn’t touched a woman since I’d gotten clean, and I still hadn’t figured out when I would allow myself to do so. I’d done enough mindless fucking to last me a lifetime, and I wasn’t ready for a real relationship. So what the fuck was I doing ogling her? I’d come here to apologize for accosting her in that dressing room when she was underage. I’d probably terrified the poor thing. The past two years had all been about proving, mostly to myself, that I was better than that. Well, here was my chance, and I wasn’t about to blow it.
Ivy was now looking in the opposite direction from where I sat. I waited for her to turn back around and raised a hand. When she saw me, her gaze narrowed, and her forehead wrinkled in obvious confusion. I waited for her to connect the dots.
There was the haircut, and the short beard I’d been meaning to shave, but it was my body that really took me from different to unrecognizable. My weight had nearly doubled since the last time we’d met. Looking at pictures of me from two years ago still made my chest hurt. I’d been so desperately unhealthy. I couldn’t believe I’d allowed myself to get that bad.
Seconds ticked by. A part of me worried she’d turn around and leave, but then she finally moved in my direction. Her expression hardened with each step, and I sat up straighter as my anxiety spiked.
When she stopped on the other side of the table, I rose from my seat. “Hey.”
She squinted at me. “Jamie?”
Her voice rushed through me like an electrical current. Memories from that wretched tour flashed before my eyes—her back pressed against the dressing room lockers, my hand pulling open the door to the bedroom on the bus, the sting of her palm on my cheek as she tried to keep me conscious… Goosebumps erupted across my skin and I forced myself to swallow past the dryness in my throat.
“Yeah. Thanks for meeting me, Ivy. Have a seat.” I motioned for her to sit. She did, keeping her eyes glued on me.
“I didn’t recognize you,” she said in a low voice. Her gaze flickered across my chest, to my arms, then back to my face.
“I get that a lot these days.” My lips curved into a half-smile.
Her eyes widened, and she looked away. An awkward silence stretched between us until I could no longer take it. “You look great,” I complimented her before I could think of something more appropriate to say. Jesus, what was wrong with me?
Her gaze jumped back to me. She didn’t seem offended, but she certainly didn’t seem friendly. I wished I could read her thoughts. Had she ever thought about me? Had she wondered what happened to the guy whose life she’d practically saved? I ran a self-conscious hand over my jaw, and the frown on her face deepened.
“Do you want me to get you a coffee?” I offered. “I got here early and already got mine.”
“I’m fine.” She clasped her hands in her lap. “I don’t have much time, so whatever you want to say to me, you should probably start.”
“Sure.” I bit on my tongue, hard enough for it to hurt. Well, here went nothing. “First of all, thanks for meeting me,” I began. “I appreciate it. You don’t owe me anything, so the fact that you showed up means a lot.”
“You already said that in your message,” she said flatly.
“I did.”
“If you’re just going to repeat things I’ve already heard, maybe this meeting wasn’t such a good idea after all.” She crossed her arms.
I shifted in my seat. All right, she was still angry with me. That was fine. She had a right to be.
