Ricochet (Addicted #1.5)

by Krista Ritchie

  “I do it,” I choke, “and I always want more. It’s never enough.”

  “Giving something up isn’t the same thing as losing control. It’s the opposite, Lily. You’re taking back control.”

  I try to relax by her statement. While powerful, the full force of it breezes through me and then drifts away. I imagine Rose saying something similar. I hear them. I see the strength in the words. I feel it, but I can’t hold onto it and believe it the way they can. I don’t know why that is.

  “Everything is going to be okay,” she emphasizes. “I know it may not feel like that right now, but in time, everything will be okay. You have to start believing you can make it there.”

  “I know.”

  “Okay, good. Can you give the phone back to your friend?”

  Ryke peels the phone from my ear and presses it to his own. I watch his face as he listens to Dr. Banning. I can sit up now. Even if everything still hurts, I try to numb the pain with her encouragement. Be strong, Lil, Lo would tell me. When I come back, I’ll be strong with you. I wipe the rest of my tears, imagining those last words. Praying that’s what his response would be and not the awful your problems are too much for me right now. God, please, let him come back to me.

  “Yeah, I can do that,” Ryke nods, his eyes falling to the tiled floor. “He’ll answer. Thanks so much. I really appreciate it. You have no idea.” He hangs up the phone.

  “I’m sorry,” I say in a small, tired voice.

  Ryke raises his hand. “I’m going to call Lo. You cannot start crying and have a breakdown over the phone. He can’t do anything to help you right now, and you know how much that’ll kill him.”

  I nod wildly, my heart lifting at the very idea of speaking to him. “I promise.”

  He hesitates before dialing.

  I lean my arms against the bathtub rim, nearly falling over to be closer to the receiver—to hear his voice.

  After a couple rings, Ryke says, “Hey, did I wake you?” He rolls his eyes. “You’re such a fucking smartass…yeah, well, I have someone here who wants to talk to you.” He pauses and then glares at the ceiling. “No, she’s fine. She just finished talking to her therapist.” He rubs his jaw and then nods to himself before holding out the phone to me.

  I grab it quickly, but once I have it against my ear, my thoughts start to sink somewhere foreign. I forget what I planned to say. Maybe I had nothing to tell him. Maybe, I just wanted to hear his voice. I whisper, “Hi.”

  “Hey,” Lo replies back. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Ryke kicking my comforter back into the living room. He avoids the vibrator and doesn’t ask questions about it, but my cheeks flush, mortified all the same. I sink lower in the tub.

  “It’s Daisy’s birthday,” I tell him. “I’m in Mexico.”

  “Ryke told me already.”

  Oh.

  Ryke props the door open against the wall and nods to me. “Don’t close this.” He heads to his chaise, plopping down with an exhausted sigh.

  Long, silent tension pools over the phone, and I lose track of what I should say. I’d rather not bring up the fact that I’m sitting in an empty bathtub after an emotional meltdown. I don’t want to give him another reason to avoid me when he returns home. Because who in their right mind would want to take care of this?

  I’m about to mention how we’re all going ziplining tomorrow at Daisy’s request, but he beats me.

  “So what happened tonight?”

  Shit.

  “Nothing really, and I don’t think we should talk about it. You’re all the way over there.” Wherever there is. No one will tell me his exact location. He could be in Canada for all I know.

  “If Ryke handed you the fucking phone—someone who definitely disapproves of our relationship—then I know it had to be bad. I want to know, Lil.” This is not how I imagined our conversation. I thought we’d avoid the topic like we’ve always done in the past. He briefly mentions alcohol. I’ll say a little bit about sex, but when things become messy and truly focus on our addictions, we abort.

  “It wasn’t bad,” I mumble under my breath. “Ryke told me not to bring it up. I think we should talk about something else. You need to concentrate on your recovery, not worry about me.” I hesitate from going further. Dr. Banning invades my mind, and I can almost hear her saying that Ryke is wrong. That separating from Lo isn’t the answer. Finding a healthy way to be together is.

  But does he still want me? I’m not so sure. I wipe my eyes.

  He lets out a short, bitter laugh. “If you don’t tell me, I’m going to be worrying about it all fucking month, Lil. And Ryke hasn’t fully comprehended the fact that I’m going to eventually come home. And when I do, I’m going to be with you again. We’re going to have to start talking and reforming a better relationship. If I can’t handle this shit over the phone when I’m sober in rehab, then I shouldn’t be returning home anytime soon.”

  All I hear is: I’m going to be with you again. I bring the receiver away from my mouth and wipe uncontrollable, silent tears that stream down in an avalanche. A huge pressure rises off my chest. I feel like I can breathe again.

  “Lily?” he says in a frantic voice. “Lily, you there? Lily, dammit…”

  I put the speaker back. “I’m here.”

  I hear him exhale and breathe heavily. “Don’t do that. And don’t make me fucking guess what happened.”

  I rest my back against the tub. “It’s embarrassing,” I admit.

  “So?”

  “So you really want to do this? To talk and stuff…”

  “If we want to stay together, like really stay together and not go back to enabling each other, then yes, we’re going to have to talk. I need to know when you’re freaking out, and you need to know when I am so that we can stop each other from doing stupid shit.”

  “Like the opposite of what we’ve been doing.” Dr. Banning said as much.

  “Basically. Look, we’ve spent so much energy hiding each other’s addictions from our families. If we put that into helping one another, we just might be able to make this work.”

  I like the game plan. It starts clearing that haze that has been clouding my future for so long. A picture begins to form of us when he returns. And I’m more overwhelmed by the fact that there will be an us after a three-month separation.

  I finger the hem of my shirt. “We divorced,” I mutter. “I thought you weren’t going to want me back.”

  His voice lowers to a pained whisper. “Why would you think that?”

  I lick my dry, chapped lips again. “Couples who divorce usually don’t get remarried.” Of course, we’re not actually married. But he’ll understand the metaphor. He’s used it before when we were teenagers. We played house most of our lives. It’s kind of fucked up, but I guess that’s just us.

  “I’m remarrying you, Lil. Fuck, I’d remarry you a hundred times until it stuck.”

  I pinch my eyes again. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Even if I make you miserable?”

  There’s a long pause before he murmurs, “You don’t make me miserable. You make me want to live. And I want to live with you.”

  My throat closes for words. I sniff and rub my nose and wipe the last of my tears.

  “Okay?” he breathes. “So about tonight, you need to tell me what happened.”

  I nod to myself. Right. “These past couple of months, I’ve just been masturbating a ton. And this boat trip was supposed to be better than last time. I wasn’t supposed to turn into this compulsive monster.” I fucked up. But telling him this is easier than I thought it would be. Probably because we were always best friends before we ever became a real and true couple.

  “Compulsive how?”

  “I couldn’t stop. I was using my vibrator and then Ryke bulldozed into my room because he was scared he was about to get raped by a sixteen-year-old girl.”

  “Seriously?” he says in disbelief. I’m not sure what he’s referring to, and so my nerves jost
le.

  “What? Which part?” I scratch my arm.

  “The part where Ryke is scared of a high school girl. What a pussy,” he says with a laugh.

  I relax. “That’s mean to say about your brother.”

  “Half-brother,” Lo snaps back. Okaaay. Obviously there’s some issue going on that I’m not aware of.

  “I thought you guys were cool.”

  “Oh yeah,” Lo says sarcastically, “I just love being the bastard.”

  I guess before Ryke showed up, Lo thought he was a child caught in a nasty divorce between his parents. Come to find out, he was the cause of their separation: a product of infidelity.

  He sighs heavily. “Look, I can forgive him for lying to me because he’s been supportive of my recovery, and besides you, he’s the only person who knows what it’s like to be around my father. But he can be so fucking abrasive.”

  I smile, glad we agree on something. “I know. He bugs me all the time, but I kind of have to put up with him.” Because he means well. And he’s one of the reasons we’ve reached this place. If Ryke hadn’t injected himself in our lives, I’m afraid we would have continued to enable each other.

  “About that…” Lo trails off, trying to pick his words carefully. “I’m not feeling particularly loving towards him when I’m stuck here and he’s over there…” He refrains from adding with you, but I hear it anyway. “It’s just not an ideal situation.”

  “You wouldn’t want to be here anyway,” I tell him. “Daisy’s friends talk nonstop. Your ears would start bleeding.”

  “But I would still be with you,” he says and then lets out a frustrated groan. “I just want to hold you right now. It’s killing me.”

  “Not as much as me,” I breathe.

  Lo pauses. “What happened after Ryke walked in on you? He didn’t see you naked, did he?”

  I blush. “No, no…” I quickly explain my comforter snafu and waddling to the bathroom. “I should have stopped, you know. That was the point where I should have ended my self-love for the night.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  I bite my fingernail to the bed. “Afterwards, I got sad. I broke down. Ryke came in and called my therapist. I talked to her and managed to stop crying. That’s it. That was my glorious night.”

  “I thought you got rid of all your toys,” he says, confused. I imagine his brows furrowing and his forehead wrinkling in a bit of disapproval.

  Shit. I did tell him that the first time we talked. Along with trashing my porn (which was the truth), I told a lie about ditching my sex toys.

  “I lied,” I blurt out the truth. “But I really did throw out my porn.”

  “No more lying,” Lo says roughly. “Not with each other and not with our friends. We have to do better.”

  “Yeah, I know. I will. That was…that was all before I met my therapist.”

  I hear him shift a little, the chair creaking.

  “Are you on that ugly orange chair?” I ask.

  “No, I’m in my room at my desk.”

  “Oh...” I try to picture his room, and just when I’m about to ask, he pipes in.

  “What did your therapist say tonight?”

  I cringe. “No more self-love for me.” I press my forehead to my knees. “I think it’s going to be impossible though until you get back. It’s been so long; I can’t even imagine…” Not touching myself? Not reaching that high just once….it seems infeasible.

  “How old were you when you started touching yourself?”

  I kiss my kneecaps, knowing the first moment well because Dr. Banning made me dig through my memories and give it to her. “Nine, but I started doing it to porn at eleven after I found that magazine at your Dad’s place.”

  “Okay, that’s disgusting,” he snaps. “Please never mention how you masturbated to my father’s porn ever again.”

  “It was yours, you jackass,” I say lightly, not as offended as I should be I think.

  “How do you know?”

  “It was in your shoebox of porn on your shelf and in your closet.”

  “Oh. Never mind then.”

  I smile. I miss talking to him, even if our conversations aren’t normal on any standards. I don’t think we’ve ever been normal. Maybe that’s why it works.

  “Well, that sounds like a solid plan,” I say. “I’ll try to minimize now, but completely eliminate self-love when you return home.”

  “That’s the shittiest plan I’ve ever heard.”

  “What?” I frown. This is not normal. He usually agrees with me.

  “It doesn’t matter if I’m there or not. If your therapist doesn’t think it’s a good idea, then it’s probably not one.”

  “But that means…I won’t be able to have any kind of sex until you come home…” My pulse speeds up in sudden fear. I know Lo is cutting alcohol completely from his life, but my therapist said that recovering sex addicts shouldn’t strive towards celibacy forever. It’s an impossible standard to maintain. Sex is a part of human nature.

  “Unless it’s with me,” Lo adds.

  Now I’m really confused. “I don’t understand. You’re not here. Unless you’re going to mail me a dildo of your dick,” I say hopefully.

  “Uh, no. I’m not letting anyone mold my cock for your pleasure. You can have the real thing at the end of March.”

  “Then how am I supposed to have sex?”

  “What about phone sex?” Ohhhh. Wait…

  “Isn’t that the same thing as me masturbating?”

  “Not if you’re doing it to my voice and only my voice. That way, you know when to stop, and it’ll set up a system for you. The hardest part about recovering from sex addiction—for you, I think—is going to be establishing limits, right?”

  It sounds like a really good idea, and I’m kind of surprised he came up with this on his own. “Yeah, how do you know so much about it?”

  “I’ve been talking to some counselors who know a lot about addictions, some have worked with sex addicts before. They’ve been giving me some advice.”

  I smile. “So can we have phone sex now?”

  “No.”

  “What? But you just said—”

  “You have to earn it.”

  Huh… “That’s kind of mean.”

  “I never said I would be nice. I’m done enabling you, which means we’re not going to have sex whenever you want it. You’ll have to find the strength to hold out until the time is right.”

  “And you get to choose when the time is right. How is that fair?”

  “I’m not the sex addict.”

  Touché. “Jeez. I thought sober Lo would be nicer.”

  “I’m nice when it counts,” he says. “You love me anyway.”

  “I do,” I agree. “But if you wait another month before we have phone sex, I might hate you.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Ryke knocks on the door frame, and I jump at his sudden presence. I forgot he was even still here. “You done? You’re killing my battery charge.”

  He hates that I’m talking to Lo, but I actually feel a thousand times better. Dr. Banning must have known that he’d be the one to say the right things and in the right way to make me believe the words. He’s given me hope again. That I’ll kick this addiction. And I won’t have to be alone when I do it.

  “Lo, your brother wants his phone back,” I tell him.

  “Half-brother.”

  I smile and climb out of the bathtub.

  I needed this.

  “I’ll call you later. I love you.”

  “Love you too.” I hand Ryke the phone with an added glare.

  He touches his chest. “Hey, I called him for you.” He snatches the phone. “You shouldn’t be scowling at me. You should actually kiss my toes.”

  “With this,” I say, pushing past him into the room. My comforter lies in a ball at the base of my bed. I tug the tangled blanket out and wrap up in it, hopping on the mattress. I close my eyes but can’t seem to wipe th
e silly grin off my face.

  No more self-love, sure. I’ll probably be in a world of pain tomorrow, but for right now, I feel like I’m in the clouds.

  {9}

  I almost peed my pants. Ziplining should be banned from all civilized cultures. What I thought was a mild fear of heights intensified to the millionth degree as I propelled across a rainforest. Never again.

  I almost had a heart attack as well. Only it spurned from watching my little sister gliding on the line completely upside down. All her friends kept yelling at me for screaming at her as she zipped headfirst over the hundred foot drop. Am I really the insane one in this scenario?

  When we decide to go eat lunch back in the village, I could nearly kiss the safe, flat ground. Daisy chose an outdoor café with tiki lights and Mayan-themed masks dangling from umbrellas. We gather around a long picnic table, and I barely concentrate on the menu. My nerves have fried from all the anxiety, and the craving for a release irritates my skin. It’s like someone keeps pinching me, and my mind just responds go to the bathroom. Release. Release and you’ll feel better. I hate it.

  And I know that I can’t do it anymore. Time to make better choices or at least ones that do not involve ditching a table of girls to masturbate in the bathroom. Thinking the words actually causes guilt to surface. Yeah, I want to avoid that shame. Besides, Lo says I have to earn phone sex. Giving into the urges the day after I make a commitment to stop will award me zero points.

  So I try harder.

  I take a deep breath and train my eyes on the menu, debating between fish tacos and a chicken enchilada. The girls start discussing boys in their grade and successfully ignore Ryke and me since we have nothing to add to the conversation.

  The sun causes my forehead to bead with sweat, and one of the girl’s complains about needing a fan moved out here just to cool them down. Ryke orders an extra pitcher of water to shut them up.

  As the waiter leaves, Ryke nudges my arm and asks in a low voice, “How was Lo?”

  “Mean,” I reply. “But good mean, I think. Does that make sense?”

  “Yeah. With Lo, it does.”

  I wish he was here in Mexico with us. Maybe next year or during spring break we can enjoy a trip together. If he’s at a place where he can be surrounded by alcohol, that is. Him, sober. Me, not as compulsive about sex. It sounds quite nice even if it’s a little hard to picture.