Take the edge off. Just the edge.
It can't get much fucking worse, right?
I unscrew the cap. The stuff smells like paint thinner, cleaning fluid, and sweet oblivion. I close my eyes, hold it to my mouth and take a single sip.
It burns, all the way down, the pain and fire blossoming through my chest, the first alcohol I've had in nearly six months. It goes straight to my head and dulls all the sharp edges. It's fucking divine.
I take another sip. Then a gulp. I'm sitting in my front yard and it's not even six in the morning yet but I'm drinking shit vodka from a plastic bottle, letting the alcohol fall over my brain like a soft, warm, wool blanket that dulls everything out.
I finish it off, then chuck the bottle away.
Fuck it. Fuck everything.
42
Marisol
I cry hysterically most of the way back to my apartment in the Uber, the sun coming up in a flat gray sky over downtown Los Angeles as I get home.
I hate still being awake at this time of day, which is usually because I've pulled an all-nighter. My eyes feel like they've been scraped out with spoons, except right now all of me feels like that, deflated and hollow.
How could I believe everything was that good?
Things like that don't happen to people like me. I don't get lucky, I fight and claw my way by until I force luck's hand.
I head inside my apartment. It's about the time I'd normally be getting up anyway, but I slump onto my bed.
The whole time, I keep thinking. He kissed me and Liam was there. He told me about his past, about everything, and Liam was in his house then.
All the dates, all the sex, everything, he was hiding Liam.
Why wouldn't he just tell me?
I glance over at my dresser, where I've got the addiction books stacked up. One's got a bookmark in it where Gavin was reading it last week while I studied.
I'm an idiot, I think one more time. A total fucking idiot.
The sun comes up. I have some coffee, some breakfast, I take a walk around my neighborhood and become capable of rational thought once more.
And I think Liam was lying. At least he was lying some, because there's no way Gavin could be getting shitfaced or doing mountains of cocaine and I wouldn't know.
Right?
But on the other hand, I was clueless enough to eat pot gummi bears like a moron. I'm naive as hell about drugs, and I know it, and even though he lied to me, I still trust Gavin. I shouldn't. The evidence is against it, but I do. But I shouldn't.
I'm making myself completely crazy.
I spend the day studying for finals, forcing my eyeballs to the page with an intensity I didn't even know I had. Drowning myself in work is the only thing that gets his face out of my head, that makes me stop thinking of him saying I quite like you or I've never wanted anyone the way I want you or even the way he teases me about needing to only touch me with rubber gloves.
Gavin doesn't call. He doesn't even text. That makes it ten times worse, the feeling that not only did he lie, he's not trying to fix it.
Maybe he doesn't care like you thought he did. Maybe he decided that being with you was a little too much work, or that he needs someone cooler or more fun or more interesting.
I'm spiraling again, and I throw my phone onto my bed, out of reach, to keep myself from texting him myself.
Tomorrow, I tell myself. Tomorrow we'll have a conversation like rational adults and we'll discuss this and I don't know, maybe it will be fine. Maybe he'll have somehow magically not betrayed me eight hours after I let him come inside me.
Which happened because I trusted him.
God. How dumb can I be?
I take a deep breath, get out of my chair, and do twenty jumping jacks to distract myself.
Then I force myself through more class notes.
Gavin doesn't call.
43
Gavin
I wake up when the sun hits my face, and I squeeze my eyes shut harder, trying to block it out but it doesn't quit.
I turn my head to the other side, still trying to escape, and I realize I'm on the ground, face down in the grass.
Fuck. Fuck. A breeze stirs the blades and they tickle my nose while I lie there, saying a quick, silent prayer that this isn't what it feels like.
Because it feels like my head's been filled with rocks, pounding and clashing every time I move it. It feels like my bones have been removed and replaced with an aching nausea. It feels like time has slowed just so that every moment can be more exquisitely painful: my head, my feet, every joint in my body.
And Marisol left. I lied, she's angry, and she's left. Fucking simple as that, though it feels like a hole's been bored through me.
I push myself to my knees, hands still in the grass, and assess. My eyes and mouth and throat are dry as the Sahara. I'm not wearing a shirt. My feet have scotch tape wrapped around paper towels around them, and there's blood soaking through.
I'm clammy and sweaty and tired and yet underneath my skin feels a little itchy and I roll my shoulders, flex my hands because it feels like I need to, like if I stop moving something bad will happen.
That's all to say: even though I feel like I've been punched in the gut and left on the side of the road, this is dreadfully, horrifically familiar. In a strange way, it feels like I've returned home after a long time away, and even though home is a rat-shit-filled hovel, I do know where I am.
I stand. My feet scream in pain, but I stumble toward the back door of my house, fight with the latch for a bit, then get inside. Liam's face down in the center of the living room, but he's breathing, and I lean against a wall for a moment, just glad to be out of the bright light.
Then I continue on to the kitchen. Water, coffee, see if there's any whiskey left, though the glass of water I drink makes me feel nauseous, so I grip the counter with both hands, head down, teeth gritted together, as I wait for the single-cup coffee maker to finish.
Over in the corner of the kitchen, I spot a phone. My phone, Liam's, I don't fucking know, but I make my way over and bend to pick it up like an eighty-year old man, every inch of my body protesting.
The thing's fucking shattered like someone threw it across the room, but it does turn on, and it's mine. I've got an absolute sea of notifications, and I slump against the counter, flipping through them.
All I'm looking for is her name, though I know it won't be there. I'm just hoping for a sign, a hint, something.
It's a long time before I notice that the date says it's Wednesday, and I stop scrolling. The gears in my head grind together, rusted together and stuck.
Wednesday?
No, it's Tuesday.
I open my phone, and even though I can barely see anything, I open the calendar. Wednesday.
It's not fucking Wednesday.
Open the news. Wednesday, everywhere. There's a bottle of something lying on its side behind the dishrack, half-hidden, and I grab it, then slide to the floor with my back against the cabinets.
I'm hungover as fuck, I'm itching inside my skin, and I'm clearly coming down from something. Cocaine at least, as that's Liam's favorite and I doubt it's hard to get in Los Angeles, but the itching tells me there may have been something narcotic.
With one hand, I unscrew the bottle, my eyes shut. I bring it to my lips and swallow, then swallow again and again. Jim Beam, I think, though I don't even bother checking.
And there it is, that nice soft warm blanket, everything going just a bit fuzzy and manageable. Thank fuck. I take a deep breath in, hand still around the bottle, exhale, taking things a moment at a time because that seems to be all I can manage, a moment at a time.
Then: Marisol in my front yard, tears running down her face, saying I don't know what you lied about. The way she looked at me and I felt like a monster and a worthless fucking puddle all at once.
I take another drink.
Then it's her, naked in my bed last night, whispering I want you inside me with nothing between us and I take two long swallows because I've fucked up the best thing that's ever happened to me and it only took eight hours.
I sit on the kitchen floor. I drink from the bottle and slowly, surely, the pieces start coming back and I begin fitting them together.
Marisol, leaving, my heart a rock in my chest. Liam tossing me the bottle, me drinking. Later, my arm around his shoulders as he took me into the house, wrapping my feet in paper towels and scotch tape, going on and on about some idea he had for a space mission.
More drinking. The sun up, bright, shining through the windows; a blanket over a window in an unused bedroom.
Liam doing a line off a sheet of notebook paper, handing me the straw, only letting me do a bump since I wasn't up to it yet.
Fuck.
Then blurred memories, gray mush. Then a girl showing up, smiling at first but uncertain the minute she saw the broken mirror in the entryway.
I hold my breath and take another drink.
No. Please no. Please anything but that. Heroin again but not that.
The girl disappears but Liam's there, pills in my hand, washing it down with more whiskey and then sitting on the couch staring at the ceiling, feeling so fucking good.
Then nothing. The film seems to stop there, just ending. I'm still nauseous but now I'm drunk as well, and I look at my phone again as if she could have called in the past five minutes and I'd have missed it.
I want to text her, call her, hear her voice and plead with her, but I can't call her now, like this. I've compounded fucking up with more fucking up and now I'm on the kitchen floor with a bottle of whiskey and no fucking shirt and I don't even know what pills I took last night.