by Ashley Love
When it occurred to me that in the midst of all my pain I might have, just barely but enough to really fucking count obviously, I might have really hurt him…that was almost too much for me. No matter how much I let him hurt me, something in my heart just can’t stand to hurt him. He’s been hurt too much in his life. I just want to make him better.
When he came back, I’m not really sure what emotion I was feeling. I was still mad as hell at him, but in a way I was relieved, because even in my most fucked up mind I know that if anything would’ve happened to him after I sent him away, I would’ve blamed myself. But I just can’t keep caring so much, I knew that for sure. So when he came back I said nothing, I did nothing. He was here, and I didn’t care. I made dinner and didn’t offer him any, just left it on the stove and barely ate any myself before I sulked back into my room for the night. He seemed to be fending well enough for himself on all other fronts; if he was hungry that fucker could eat and it didn’t make a damn to me either way.
I cried all night and I know he heard me. Less than pathetic is how I feel.
This afternoon I’m surprised when I go into the kitchen and the stove is cleared. No pots or pans from dinner last night. I open the oven and the microwave, thinking Lex may have simply moved them.
“It’s in the fridge.” I hear his voice absently from the living room. I peer in to see him tuned to an Entourage marathon, his eyes not shifting from the screen.
I don’t respond, but I’m such a fucking emotional mess that when I open the fridge and see a dinner plate covered in aluminum foil I get tears in my eyes. Pull yourself the fuck together, Leala. This is the goddamn least he can do for you. I just don’t know why now all of a sudden he wants to make an effort.
I slam the fridge door with a frustrated sigh and march back into my room. I need to get out of this fucking house, I’m suffocating in here with all of this back and forth, being mad and then wanting to forgive him, him trying to act like everything is fine. I need some resolve. I need space and I need to clear my head and I need…a meeting. Yes. After last night I definitely need a fucking meeting.
I sift through the folder of papers that Ava put together for me at the center, remembering vividly the day she handed it to me, the day I was released, before she had hugged me and said, “You can do it.” Sometimes I wonder if I still can. I wonder if I’m still that same girl who was ready to kick the drugs, who was ready to fight, to fight for me. I don’t feel like I’ve fought for me a day since I stepped outside of those walls.
My eyes drift to the clock. 11:21. There’s a meeting at noon at a church a few blocks away.
Today feels like a good day to fight.
I pull my hair back from my face and try to make myself look alive. My eyebrows are starting to resemble small forests on my face, and there really has to be something to make this red under my eyes go away. Maybe I’ll get a coffee on the way there. A makeover would be nice, but coffee is more doable at this point.
My closet is what some would consider bare, but I should have expected nothing less when my mother came back into my life. When she moved me out of the old apartment she’d rid me of practically every article of clothing I’d owned in the past five years since I moved out of her house. Most of it doesn’t fit now anyway after I’ve gained my weight back, but that’s beside the point. “You were far too skinny,” she’d said as she threw away my old jeans. I told her I was doing cocaine, what did she expect. She didn’t like that explanation.
I pull on some of the new jeans she bought me for Christmas, some name brand shit that fits just as good as my Target jeans, but they do feel a little better. I hate when she’s right. When I look in the mirror, what do you know, I have a body shape now. Who would’ve thought I’m not a 12-year-old boy. It’s amazing what a few healthy pounds can do for the female figure. She also got me this ridiculous coat, it’s all corduroy and big buttons and lapels, and it’s yellow for chrissake, probably something I would’ve loved as a kid but my mother just can’t seem to cope with the fact that I’ve grown up. But I’ve been trying to wear it so it can grow on me; it’s “in” or something like that. A yellow coat; that’s exactly some shit my mother would pull.
“Where are you going?” Lex asks as I rush down the hall and reach for the door knob. I look at him and he’s eyeing me curiously, almost confused, looking me over but I say nothing, just button my coat around my waist and open the door, stepping outside, the bright afternoon sun almost making me forget how bitterly cold it is. I shut the door behind me and I don’t make it down the steps before I hear him again, “Where are you going?” I turn at the bottom step to see him standing outside the open door, anger and confusion mixed in his eyes.
I just shake my head and turn again, casting one more glance at him as I reach my car and he’s leaning on the railing, a lit cigarette between his fingers, watching me. Watching me go. Something tells me he knows I’m coming back, but who knows if he’ll be here when I do.
26
The road to Santa Monica is a familiar one.
When the meeting was over I was in no right mind to go home, especially not with Lex there, so here I am, driving around to clear my head. I was en route to Santa Monica before I could stop myself. It just seems like the perfect place to get away. It’s a 30-minute straight shot down the 10 freeway and it’s not Los Angeles. It’s exactly what I need after that meeting.
“What’s holding you back?” had been the question of the hour. Fuck, that list is endless. But I was more than terrified to actually speak…sitting there in the small room, a room designated for Sunday School classes at this church which made me feel even more guilty if not a little ashamed. I should probably just go to confession while I’m at it.
I was by far the youngest one there. 23 and only ten days out of rehab, I was an amateur. These people had been through everything. They had families and jobs at stake throughout their addictions. Husbands, wives, kids. They tried to hide it from every person they loved. I used to shoot up with the person I loved. Everyone else who I loved, I had abandoned.
“What’s holding you back?”
The question hung in the air with a suffocating thickness. In my head, the answer was simple. I think anyone with a brain and any knowledge of my circumstances could’ve answered for me, but as I listened to other people’s responses it wasn’t so clear to me anymore that Lex was to blame for my inability to move on with my life. I was refusing to look at the one person who was really responsible for my actions.
When silence fell on the room after an older woman had shared her story about not being able to forgive herself, I was ready.
“I’m in love with an addict.”
It was just that easy to get everyone’s attention. I’d then backed up and introduced myself, not yet used to NA meeting protocol, and had then continued on about Lex, about living with him again, about abandoning my family for him back then, about loving him more than I loved myself. It was then that I realized, in that small room filled with chairs and unjudgmental stares, that until I stopped putting him first I would never ever love myself enough to completely recover. I would never be able to give him the love he needed, the tough love, until I loved me first. When I finally said those words, really spoke them and believed them, part of me was stronger, more free. That freedom I sought all of those years by destroying myself, I finally felt, just a little bit, by believing in me again. That’s what was holding me back.
A guy approached me after we’d finished. His name was Evan and he was twelve years sober. Twelve fucking years sober…sober til I’m 35…I can’t imagine that shit.
“It takes a lot of balls to do what you just did in there,” is what he said to me. I think it takes a lot of balls to approach a girl like that who you don’t even know, but I’ll take a compliment where I can get one.
“Thanks, I think,” I said with a nervous laugh. He went on to say he couldn’t imagine how hard it would be in that type of situation, bein
g so new out of rehab, where I’m living with someone who is doing what I have to spend the rest of my life trying to give up, and not hate that person.
“Most people are always looking for someone to blame, you know. But you still see something in this guy, past his addiction, that makes you love him. You look past the ugly. What you’ve realized and admitted in ten days, it takes some people ten years.”
And now here I am, in the last place I saw it, that thing that makes me love him. Santa Monica, the last place where I saw the real Alex; not Lex, but Alex. Something about this place gives me hope that I can’t deny.
It’s beautiful here. Everything is beautiful here and he told me I was beautiful here and I want it to be this way. I want it to be beautiful. I’m so tired of the ugly. Maybe I’ll live here someday. With him. I would be lying if I said I didn’t want Lex here with me. In my heart I want him wherever I go, but I can’t make him want it for himself.
I stroll slowly up the boarded walkway, zipping the front of my jacket to shield the January chill, intensified by the cool breeze coming off of the water. When I reach the pier’s railing I lean onto it hesitantly, looking out, trying to clear my head, but all I can think of is the last time I was here.
Shouts below me turn my attention downward, and a wistful smile pulls at my mouth when I see three young kids, maybe teenagers but I can’t really tell from here, bundled up in hoodies, running around in the sand. The late afternoon sun is probably still warming the sand enough to keep their bare feet from freezing, their shoes and socks abandoned in a pile a safe distance up from the shoreline.
The boy picks up the smaller of the two girls over his shoulder and she shrieks in protest, her brown hair falling out of the hood of her jacket and whipping around their faces as he runs toward the water, carrying her. Just as he reaches the surf he dips forward as if he’s going to drop her into the water and a wave washes up, covering his feet with icy cool water and reaching the tops of his rolled up jeans before he can escape its path. He curses loud, her laughs drowning out his words. The breeze suddenly feels warmer to me, the sun a little darker, and I can see Corey and Kandice chasing each other around on the Mexico shore, Lex and I sipping beers and Randy making a log pile to set ablaze when the sun went down.
27
Mexico, Five Years Ago.
“Why are you trying to start a fire, it’s a hundred damn degrees out here!” I laughed as Randy stumbled over a few stray logs as he ran around the fire spraying it with lighter fluid.
“No shit, man,” Lex chimed in from behind me, taking a pull on his beer.
Seated on his lap, I swayed a little when he shifted his knees underneath me and I glanced over my shoulder at him. He grinned at me with playful eyes, his free hand coming up against my lower back to steady me as he took another sip from the bottle and I bit my lip as a smile crept onto my mouth.
It was our last night in Mexico and we were all just enjoying ourselves, lounging on the beach one final time, winding down after a crazy week of bars, parties, dancing, sunburns, and a few random hook-ups, Lex and myself not being one of them.
I held my disposable camera up to my face, squinting through the viewing window to take a few more last minute pictures, capturing a few more memories before the night was over: Randy running drunk around an unsuccessfully burning fire, Sam making out with Adam, one of the other guys who had come with us for the week, two more of the guys pissing in the ocean, and a few of the girls doing cartwheels on the beach.
“Take a picture with me,” I said to Lex quietly, glancing over my shoulder at him as I reached back to poke his chest jokingly with my index finger.
He shook his head in response, furrowing his brow in disagreement.
“Lex, c’mon,” I whined a little as I leaned back against his chest and I fought the butterflies that swarmed in my stomach when his hand that had been pressed lightly against my back moved around to my side and I felt his fingertips against the skin of my waist.
“No,” he groaned and reached for my camera with his free hand, chuckling a bit as I wrestled with him in the chair, giggling as I tried to hold the camera out of the reach of his long arms.
“C’mon. I don’t have a single picture of you from this whole week without you covering your face or flipping the bird!” I squealed, finally pulling the camera down against me to shield it, my upper back still against his chest. I turned my head and craned my neck back to put some space between us so I could look into his steel blue eyes. He just glared at me.
“'Cause I don’t like taking pictures,” he answered simply, his lips close to my nose, full and pink and parted just slightly, the corner of his mouth turned up just barely in a crooked grin. God, if I was brave I could just…
“Not even with me?” I teased, shaking the thought from my head.
He sighed, almost groaned, and let his head fall back, looking straight ahead. I studied his face, giggling when I saw a slow grin spread across his mouth. We’d been flirting like crazy all week, and I loved to see his reactions to comments like the one I’d just made. I knew normally any guy would be pushing up on me, grabbing at me, trying to lure me into his hotel room every night after the kind of flirting we’d been doing, but with him…he always wanted to seem like he could keep his cool. And that made me want to test him.
“One…just one,” he conceded softly and I grinned.
I laid my head back against his shoulder and held up the camera once more, warmth spreading over me when I felt his jaw press lightly against my temple. I guess being so close to him made me brave for a second because I suddenly reached back with my free hand and rested it on the back of his neck, fingers stroking his skin affectionately. I tingled from head to toe when I felt him relax under my touch and his breath tickled my forehead.
“No middle fingers. And you better smile, asshole,” I teased lowly, squeezing the back of his neck playfully and I felt the vibration of his chest against my back as he laughed softly. My smile increased ten-fold when without warning he draped a long arm across my shoulders, pulling me back closer to him and I snapped the picture suddenly, wanting to capture that exact moment. “There…that wasn’t so painful, was it?” I quipped before sitting up again.
His arm slid from around my shoulders slowly and he laughed again, fingertips intentionally tracing down my spine as I leaned forward. But I feigned innocence at his deliberate touch as I tossed my camera onto the beach towel that lay at my feet, wanting him to think that it didn’t affect me, that he didn’t affect me, all the while cursing the goosebumps on my skin for confessing my true feelings. I sat still on his thighs for a minute or so, chewing anxiously on my bottom lip, just feeling his fingertips lingering at rest on my lower back, like a secret no one knew but the two of us.
I could feel his eyes on my back too, a feeling of want radiating in the air between us, torturously filling up that space separating my back from his front. He closed that space suddenly, putting a large hand on either side of my hips and tugging me back gently, slowly, my bottom sliding back onto his lap and I didn’t fight him. My stomach flipped at the feeling of the friction between the denim covering our lower halves, the seam of my shorts rubbing against the fly of his, and I knew he was there, right there under me as his legs opened just barely.
His hands moved up to my waist and tugged me slightly in suggestion and I grinned as I leaned back against him again, not really sure why I was going along with everything that his body was asking mine to do, making silent proposals that I was anything but objecting to. But something about him was just…safe.
I shifted against his lap slightly, getting comfortable, and I heard him hum right against my ear, quick and quiet, as if he hadn’t meant for it to creep up and he tried to force it down at the last minute, and I couldn’t stifle my giggles. His breath rushed across my neck as his own laughter took over him . His hands slid down my waist and touched my thighs as he leaned in against my ear to whisper huskily, “What are yo
u trying to do to me, girl?”
I turned my head to look at him innocently, his face dangerously close to mine again, and I bit my lip at the sight of the lust in his blue eyes, almost half-hidden by heavy lids. He blinked slowly, tongue peeking out to wet his lips and he grinned when I mimicked him unconsciously and my cheeks flushed a little at the realization. He tipped his head forward to touch our foreheads but I couldn’t fight the urge to claim his mouth with mine for the first time in a quick hard kiss, lingering for only a moment before I pulled back.
We both gazed at each other, surprise dancing across his face as he lifted his brows at me and I opened my mouth to say something, maybe to apologize for being so forward but his smile shut me up. He smiled and smiled and I smiled back at him, biting my lip nervously, letting it slide out just as he leaned back into me and kissed me, slow this time, and I kissed him back.
We walked hand in hand back up the beach and he carried his fold out chair under his other arm. Sam piggy-backed on Adam not too far ahead of us. We’d stayed out on the sand long after the fire had died and the embers had been stomped out, me on Lex’s lap, his long arms draped around me lazily. No one had talked much once exhaustion wore in. Randy laid down on a towel and downed the last of his beer, Sam and Adam were quiet simply because their mouths were occupied otherwise, and Lex and I just sat there, comfortable, my head resting against his shoulder as his rested back against the chair. He would turn his face toward me, eyes looking at me glassily until one of us would smile, which was often, making the other smile, and he would lean in and kiss me again, lips pressing and moving against mine, always slow, always comfortable. Neither of us were in a hurry.