The Fix

by Kristin Rouse

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  After the End

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Additional Titles

  THE FIX

  By

  Kristin Rouse

  ***

  Copyright 2017 Kristin Rouse

  Edited by Mary Cain.

  Cover Design by Olivia at MiblArt.

  All stock photos licensed appropriately.

  Published in the United States by City Owl Press.

  www.cityowlpress.com

  For information on subsidiary rights, please contact the publisher at info@cityowlpress.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior consent and permission of the publisher.

  For the kind, brave souls who unflinchingly told me their stories of addiction and triumph as I was creating Ezra’s—

  I hope I've done you proud.

  CHAPTER ONE

  For not liking me very much, Mac’s cat seems awfully invested in where I am at any given moment. I’ve been on my porch for all of two minutes, just long enough to puff down a third of my cigarette, and already she’s butting her face against the screen and scraping at it with her clawless paw. She mewls pathetically at me. If I didn’t know her better, I’d try picking her up. But walking around Anja’s wedding with the little shit’s bite marks all over my arms isn’t high on my agenda.

  It’s possible she’s trying to get me to pay attention to the fact that I’m starting a fire inside my kitchen. Shit.

  I stub my cigarette out in an old coffee can, make it through the screen without the cat darting past my legs, and fling open the waffle iron in time to see a plume of smoke and a charred, black pastry.

  Fucking hell, Mackenzie. Can’t you do anything right?

  You know you can’t.

  This is what I know: my name is Ezra Mackenzie. I’ll be twenty-six in just under a month, although half the time I feel like I’m still a sixteen-year-old idiot, and the other half I feel like I’m pushing forty. And that’s because I’m an alcoholic six months into recovery. Right now, though, if I don’t get the fucking lead out, I’m going to be seriously late to my sponsor’s wedding rehearsal brunch.

  For the sake of clarity, let’s just get it out of the way here and now that there is no “I used to be an alcoholic.” I am an alcoholic—I just don’t drink anymore. You’re either an alcoholic or you’re not. You can handle your liquor, or you can’t. I have plenty of friends who can handle their liquor just fine. I can’t. I never could. Booze was my most consistent, most reliable partner for my entire adult life. There are a lot of things about being in recovery that suck, just like there are a lot of things that are freeing and about a million times better. But for the moment, that stuff is kind of beside the point. I’m about to be so, so fucking late, and Anja will kill me.

  It’s not entirely my fault. The damn cinnamon rolls I tried making never rose, and I had to improvise. Unfortunately, I only have one waffle maker—an ancient yellow Cuisinart model Mac used nearly to death before he handed it down to me—so the process has been sort of slow going. At least I have something to offer like I promised.

  The cat, another bequeathment, is now stalking up and down the high, narrow counter separating my kitchen from my living room. I’ve been trying to get her to knock off doing that. Mac had her trained, but damned if I can figure out how. I hiss at her, which makes her skitter across the counter and knock my wallet, keys, and cigarettes onto the floor in her retreat under the futon. The little light on the waffle maker finally clicks off, thank God. I pull the cookie sheet the other successful waffles are resting on out of the oven, flip a couple of switches, and cover the sheet with a dishtowel.

  I press another cigarette between my lips once I’m behind the wheel of my car. I debate stopping for coffee, but I remember Anja said her future sister-in-law is bringing home coffee especially for this morning straight from Brazil. It’s probably rude in some way to decline coffee that has been smuggled through customs specifically for one brunch, as caffeine-deprived as I am at the moment. I pacify myself with chain-smoking, since I didn’t get my adequate nicotine fix earlier. I’m crumpling up a now-empty pack by the time I pull up to Mama A’s house. I balance the sheet of waffles in one hand and use the other to pop my trunk and haul out the collared shirt I trade my jacket for, then spritz myself down with some essential oils diluted in water to mask the cigarette stench. Deep under the layers of eucalyptus and orange, there’s a faint trace of the alcohol that’s yielded from the pressing process. I know the scent of booze anywhere, even if this application is toxic as shit. Still, I don’t want to be smoky-Joe in the corner who no one but the Almeida family knows.

  I’m halfway up the walk to the front door when Anja bursts through it, looking at me wide-eyed and frantic. She’s normally so put-together—hair perfect, eyebrows sharp and pointed, a wide smile on her face, her clothing never mussed. Playing bride has worn down her penchant for perfection and this morning she’s anything but put-together. I wonder if she slept at all the night before.

  “You’re late,” she snaps, her face contorted and eyebrows as high on her forehead as I’ve ever seen in all my years of knowing her.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, trying to sound contrite so she won’t actually try to strangle me. Which she is more than capable of. “The cinnamon rolls were a major bust. I brought waffles instead, but they took forever.”

  She rolls her eyes, but the look on her face softens a little. She has a real screw-up for a best friend, but she loves me in spite of it. “Mama made more food than any twenty people could ever eat. And they’re all going to be here any minute.”

  She yanks me through the front door, takes the sheet pan from me, and marches us through the foyer. Before we turn the corner to the kitchen, I drop my voice and nudge her. “Are your parents among those twenty people?”

  Her face falls. “No. They said they had plans they couldn’t get out of.”

  “Ah, kid. I’m sorry they’re still being such assholes.”

  She tosses her long blond hair over her shoulder with a flick of her head, and twirls her engagement ring around on her finger. We both have our nervous, post-addiction habits—I chew my nails. She twirls her ring. We both smoke like chimneys. She and I know that they serve to mask our cravings when the compulsion starts coming on too strong.

  “It’s fine,” she says, but I’m not convinced for a second. Bad blood in the MacCullor family runs deep and Anja has never been their favored child. Under-age drinking charges and DUIs tend to reflect poorly on politicians and make the child who earns them something of a black sheep.

  “It’s not fine that they’re t
reating you like shit,” I say.

  “I don’t want them here if they’re going to be like they are. You’re here. Mattias’s family is here. That’s all that matters to me.”

  “If you insist,” I say, even though I don’t entirely believe her.

  She peeks around the corner and swallows hard. “I wanted to warn you—Mattias and Lukas went out last night with their sister. They tend to go a little over-the-top when they get together. Mattias slept on the couch so he wouldn’t bother me when he got in last night, but… Well, they’re all sort of detoxing this morning.”

  When you’re only six months into your recovery, you tend to be a little sensitive about certain things. I can smell a whiskey bottle opening from a room over. And I can definitely smell the residual alcohol leaching out of someone’s pores the morning after a big night out. I feel a massive pang of jealousy—of course, I wouldn’t have been invited out to whatever bar they celebrated at, but mostly, I wonder what they drank. How many they had. Microbrews or rum and cokes, whatever—I want it. I’m achingly jealous that they got to drink last night and I didn’t.

  “Right. Thanks for the heads up,” I say.

  “Are you going to be okay around them?” Anja’s my sponsor. It’s her job to ask me things like that.

  “Sure.”

  “Liar.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I say emphatically, although it’s a vicious lie. “I have to get used to this sort of thing, don’t I?”

  “Yes, you do. I’d just prefer it wasn’t today that you have to do it.”

  “Is there ever going to be a better day?”

  She shakes her head. Before we turn into the kitchen, she peeks under the dishtowels to survey my offering. “Hey… Well done, Mackenzie. You didn’t even burn them.”

  “It’s been years since I set my kitchen on fire, thank you very much.” I refuse to admit I almost did set my kitchen on fire today. Anja knows what not even my landlord knows about that kitchen fire—that it was a drunken accident. It’s a wonder my eyebrows grew back in properly. And it’s a damn good thing, plastered as I was, that I figured out how to use my fire extinguisher. Thinking on it now, I’m not sure why I don’t smoke in my apartment. It’s not like I’m ever going to get my security deposit back after that.

  We turn the corner and enter the kitchen. As I expected, Mattias, Anja’s fiancé, and Lukas, Mattias’s brother, are hunched over steaming cups of coffee and hiding their eyes from the light streaming in through the windows. An extra-large bottle of Aleve sits between them, and Lukas’s now-empty Gatorade bottle has tipped over on the counter in front of him. Mama A—I think her real name is Claudia, but I couldn’t say for sure, she insists on being called ‘Mama A’—shrieks when she sees me, puts her hands on the side of my stubbly cheeks, and kisses my forehead. I kiss her cheek in return, and she coos over the sheet of waffles Anja shows her before pointing me towards Mattias, who’s supposed to be folding napkins around silverware and is slacking on the job.

  “What you guys probably want is straight water,” I mutter as I reach for a stack of napkins myself and roll one around a bundle of cutlery, but that’s just because I can’t stand sports drinks. Already I can smell the morning-after booze stench coming off both of them. It’s every bit as difficult to have it rubbed in my face as Anja suspected it might be.

  “There is not enough water in the world for this hangover, man,” he says. From the way he’s squinting in the kitchen light and the sallow look to his skin, I almost believe him. I have had many of those hangovers myself. I almost miss those hangovers—almost.

  Mama A barks something formidable in Portuguese—there’s little about Mama A that isn’t formidable, even with her diminutive stature and permanent laugh-lines—the only word of which I understand is a name. Juliana. The one Almeida I don’t know yet, save for pictures of a pretty brunette scattered around the house.

  The owner of the name turns, pulls a dry cloth from the back pocket of her low-slung pajama pants, and dries the hands that had been plunged in a sink full of murky water. I’d been so distracted by Mattias and Lukas I hadn’t even realized she was standing there. “I’m going, Mama, I’m going.” Her husky voice draws my attention, but that’s not what keeps it. Her clingy tank top is speckled with water and her navel peeks out between the hem of her top and the waistband of her pants. My eyes travel up her body, surveying her bronze skin, her long neck, the messy heap of ebony hair piled on top of her head. Her barely-conscious expression and sleep-filled eyes the only mar on her beyond-lovely face.

  The pictures on the mantelpiece do not do this girl justice.

  Anja nudges my shoulder. “Ezra, you haven’t met Juliana, my new sister-in-law. Jules, this my… Ezra.”

  “Anja’s Ezra? I’ve heard a bit about Anja’s Ezra. Nice to meet you,” Juliana says with a smile.

  It takes me less than a millisecond to notice her dimples, deep-set in both cheeks, and the way her lips rub together like she’s rubbing in invisible lip gloss after she speaks. She reaches out to shake my hand, and her fingers are pruney against my palm. As I grip it, a jolt ripples through my arm and courses its way up to my chest. I’m sure it’s just me, because the next second, she’s swatting at her mother and leaving the room, presumably to change into something other than her damp pajamas.

  I feel something foreign, something I haven’t felt in a long time, and certainly not since I sobered up. It feels like the beginning of a problem I shouldn’t mind having. Problems of any kind aren’t exactly welcome these days—even ones that look like Juliana Almeida.

  ***

  I take Anja up on a piece of nicotine gum for the rehearsal later that day. I don’t chew my nicotine typically, but I’ll make an exception today. The tingle of it against my cheek is handy for distraction—it keeps me from paying attention to curves, to the intoxicating scent of her subtle, citrusy perfume. Or at least, I try to pretend it distracts me, even though I’m having no further luck banishing the image at the back of my mind of the girl I met in wet pajamas voraciously eating the waffles I’d made. Or the way we seemed to keep catching one another’s eye through the crowd of people at brunch. But the thing that’s really making all this stewing, all this pining all the more difficult is that the girl in question is on my arm right now. I am Juliana’s escort down the aisle.

  It’s a small wedding party—just me, Lukas, Juliana, and Anja’s younger sister, Amanda. Juliana and I keep getting sent back to “give the walk in another try.” According to the wedding planner, I walk down the aisle like Lurch from The Addams Family. I don’t think I’m that terrifying, but I’m not the one being paid an ungodly amount of money to make sure everything runs smoothly.

  “I’m know I’m no winning conversationalist when I’m hung over, but are you all right?” Juliana asks as we line back up in the Clock Tower wings. She’s been so quiet since we started that I startle when she speaks. I’m sure this does not comfort her at all. She must think I’m either a huge asshole or utterly antisocial. I don’t fancy myself either, but I’m trying not to let this beautiful woman on my arm affect me too much. I can’t remember the last time I felt like this, to the point I’m not even sure what ‘this’ is. I’d heard from her mother and her brothers that Juliana is a special sort of person, the sort of person people just like right away, but I didn’t expect to feel it so acutely. That’s part of the problem of spending the last five years at the bottom of a bottle—I feel everything now.

  “What? Oh. Yeah. Fine. Sorry,” I say, trying not to sound like a total moron. “I, ah, just… I’ve never been in a wedding before. And my tux came with these crazy shiny shoes that I think have as much polish on the bottom as they do on the top and let’s just say that grace has never been my strong suit.”

  She laughs. I made her laugh. Shit, that’s awesome. I didn’t know I was capable of making a girl laugh without us both being plastered.“Well, even in the insane heels Anja picked out for us, I’m incredibly steady on my feet. I promise to c
atch you if you start to fall.”

  Here’s the thing about being in recovery—I can’t really pick up on things sober the way I used to when I drank. If Juliana and I were drinking right now, I’d swear that was an innuendo of some kind. But sober, I have no idea. I’m probably just imagining it, because I’m a sucker for brown eyes and dimples. And hips. But I’m pretty sure the more I listen to her talk, and definitely the more I hear her laugh, the less I’m going to only be attracted to these physical features.

  “I’ll hold you to that,” I tell her, and I mean it. Clearly the maintenance staff at the Clock Tower buffed the floors recently. I wonder if they thrive on the comedic value of an entire wedding party slipping and sliding as Pachebel’s Canon mocks them.

  “Surely they’d skip the second coat of wax on a wedding weekend,” Juliana says, echoing my thoughts perfectly.

  “Anja said they were trying to convince her to book for today instead because it’s not being used at all, other than this,” I mention.

  “I bet they did. The extra money she and Mat would have shelled out for a Saturday wedding versus a Sunday wedding I’m sure wasn’t a mitigating factor in the slightest.” Sarcasm suits this girl.

  I can see the appeal of the Clock Tower as a wedding venue—the panoramic view of downtown Denver and the Rockies off to the west can’t be beat. But weddings in general make me nervous. I don’t have a lot of good memories involving them, and hardly any sober ones. I really wanted to tell Anja no when she asked me to be one of Mattias’s groomsmen, but I owe Anja big. I owe her everything.

  The wedding coordinator beckons us all to line up again, and shoots me a dirty look, as if defying me to walk like a monster again this run. I studied movement in massage school, and my gait is perfectly normal, thank you very much.

  “If it makes you feel any better, no one really looks at the guys in the processional—unless you’re the groom. They look at the groom, and the bridesmaids, and definitely the bride, but the guys? Not so much. You’re basically my arm candy.” She nudges my shoulder with hers. She winks at me, or tries to—her left eyelid shuts completely and her right does almost as much. It’s probably just a quirk of her musculature, but the way her eyelashes flutter against her cheeks sends that pang through my gut all over again.