We lock eyes again.
"To the best of my knowledge I haven't got a sex tape," he says. "I wasn't always exactly sober during the act, but if it's not surfaced by now, it probably doesn't exist."
"That's not what I was getting at," I say, even as my eyes fill with tears.
Gavin's past with other women is something I've stayed far, far away from, but I'm more relieved than I thought I would be.
"Were you trying to explain how not knowing is better than getting hurt by the answer?" he asks.
I sniffle.
"Yeah, but you put it a lot better than I was going to," I admit.
"That's because I've been to loads of group therapy in the past ten days and I'm a fucking expert at discussing my feelings," he says.
A tear rolls down my face, even though I'm trying not to cry, and he reaches out and brushes my hair back from my face.
"Not all the answers are going to hurt," he says softly. "And I can't beg you to give me another chance if you don't know everything. It wouldn't be fair."
I exhale, still trying not to cry.
"Don't beg," I say, trying to make a joke of it. "It's a bad look for you."
"My point does stand."
I take a deep breath. I drag one thumb under my eye, wiping off some tears.
"Okay," I say. "Tell me everything. Start with the coma."
48
Gavin
Marisol holds my gaze steadily. For a moment, I wish I'd not done this, that I'd let her continue in ignorance. But that's how I got into this in the first place, by hiding the truth because I didn't want her to see my ugliest side.
And here it goes, out into the light.
"I don't remember a lot of it," I admit, taking a deep breath. "Being in a coma and everything."
Marisol nods.
"I'll give you the short version first," I start, since I've got no idea where to begin.
The actual beginning is probably in a club in Yorkshire when I was seventeen, or when I picked up a guitar at fourteen, or when I befriended Liam in primary school because we both had black eyes and no lunch money.
"We were in Seattle, about to play a show," I say. "It was our first show back in the U.S., close to the end of the tour for Lucid Dream, and things had gotten a bit ugly with the band, so I'd taken to getting high before we went on stage to take the edge off, as it made dealing with Darcy and Trent a little easier. Of course, part of the reason things had gotten a bit ugly was that I had a vicious heroin problem, so I wasn't helping matters."
Marisol just watches me, her arms wrapped around her knees.
"On the tour, Liam and I had befriended one of the roadies, Allen, and when I say befriended I mean we got high together and I didn't even know his last name until I read his obituary. I think he liked hanging out with rock stars, and the two of us liked having a regular person there, as if it made us less degenerate. Anyway, Liam knew a bloke in Seattle so he went out to score, got the stuff, came back to the hotel room."
I go quiet for a moment, coming up to the edge of my memory of that night.
"I remember Allen thought Liam had gotten quite a lot," I say softly, staring off into the distance. "And Liam said he was celebrating being able to speak the language again, and besides, it wasn't much more than we'd been doing. But I took a bit less anyway, since I knew I had to stay upright for the show and couldn't hide behind a drum kit."
I swallow and rub my face with my hands. For a long time, I thought about that night constantly, but in the past month or so it's started to fade, just a little, at least until right now.
"We, you know, did the thing, shot up, and as it's going in the last thing I remember is thinking holy shite this is fucking strong."
I look over at Marisol. She's just listening, cheek against her knees.
"And then I woke up in the hospital a several hours later, strapped to a load of machines. Liam woke up in another twenty-four hours. They told me Allen was dead of an overdose when they found him. And then... the record label along with Darcy and Trent made it quite clear that my options were to enter rehab or have no more Dirtshine, and you know the rest."
Marisol considers this all for a moment. I think she knew the basics already, because it's not exactly a secret. It was in the news.
"Who found you?"
"Trent. He came to find us for the show, because he knew we were probably getting high and couldn't get ourselves there, and when we didn't answer the door he kicked it down."
Her eyebrows go up.
"Trent kicked down a door?"
"He did."
"He seems so... chill."
I laugh. I've seen Trent do some spectacularly un-chill things.
"He has hidden depths," I say.
"It must have been hard for him," she says.
"It was," I agree. "He came to visit me during my first stint and we talked it through for a good long while."
I pause for a moment.
"We both cried," I admit. "I think I cried more. Darcy cried when she visited too, though she shouted at me first. I did deserve it."
"And Liam?"
I crack the knuckles on my left hand, because this particular relationship is nothing if not complicated.
"Liam was my other half for nearly twenty years," I say, looking off into the distance. "He may as well be my brother. Dirtshine is his as much as it's mine. Just about everything I've ever done he's been a part of and vice versa."
"But?" she says softly.
"But when he left rehab his first stop was at a liquor store," I say. "We needed different things. I needed the band and he needed an escape, so I guess we both got what we wanted."
I swallow.
"And all the same, I couldn't turn him away when he showed up at my doorstep, even though I knew it was a bad idea. Because I always thought that, somehow, we'd get through this together. Even after I knew we wouldn't, I wanted us to. Going on without Liam just feels a bit... wrong."
Marisol reaches over and takes my hand. She doesn't say anything, just holds it. After a bit I lie back on the blanket and she joins me, staring up into the branches. I force myself not to think about how close she is right now, how I haven't seen her in over week, or how if I simply rolled over her body would be beneath mine, soft and warm and fucking irresistible.
"I don't really know Liam, but I think he feels the same way," she says softly. "And I think instead of getting better himself, he's trying to hold you back with him so he's not alone."
"Have you been talking to my therapist?" I ask.
"It's not exactly rocket science," she laughs.
We look up at the tree and the sky beyond together. She shifts her hand in mine, settling her fingers between my knuckles, and then, finally, she looks over at me.
"Tell me what happened after I left before I lose my nerve," she says, her deep brown eyes close to mine.
I kiss her. I can't help myself.
"You can't evade the question," she says when I pull back.
I turn my face skyward again and steel myself, because while everything that happened before was Past Gavin, this was me. This wasn't some drug-addicted arsehole who hurt people. This was me, hurting Marisol.
"The very first thing I did was chug half a bottle of vodka," I start.
I list everything I remember mechanically, staring up at the sky. I can't look at her, even though I feel her eyes on my face.
Tequila. Coke. The girl in Liam's room, pills, something else, whiskey, more whiskey, putting up the blanket in the spare bedroom. Sitting around drunk as fuck and high off our asses, reminiscing about wretched flats in London when we were just starting out. Huge chunks of time completely lost to my memory.
And then: walking in on Liam with the needle in his arm. Him tossing me the baggie before he nodded out.
Me being completely trashed, recklessly high, but still with that ceaseless, gnawing emptiness inside that I couldn't fucking get rid of, so I took it, only to find that snorting heroin off my bathroom sink didn't fill it either.
I stop talking. I don't tell Marisol that the gnawing emptiness faded when I got her first letter, that it shrunk when she wrote I think I love you. It's not fair to let her think she's in charge of keeping the darkness at bay.
She detaches her hand from mine and rolls over without talking, and for a moment I'm certain that she's leaving, but instead she straightens her dress and lays on her stomach, her right side touching my left. I reach up and stroke her cheek with one knuckle, still waiting for her to say something, my heart feeling as if it might burst from my chest.
After a bit, she takes my hand and pulls my arm in front of her, tracing my veins and tattoos and scars with a fingertip absentmindedly, like she's trying to put something into words and it's not going well.
"Is that it?" she finally asks.
"More or less," I say. "I woke up face down on the grass Wednesday morning and got halfway through a bottle of Jim Beam before I finally had the nerve to check myself in here again."
She presses her fingertips against pockmarks on my arm, one by one, until her hand is splayed out.
"Is it going to happen again?" she asks softly, not looking at me.