Addicted

by Amelia Betts

  “That’s not why I’m here,” I said, hiding my amusement at his silly riffing.

  “Oh, screw that!” Liam’s face twisted into a grimace. He kicked at an invisible object like a child who hadn’t gotten his way. “Yes, it is,” he said. “You’re just like all the others.”

  “Oh, really? Thanks a lot!” I scrambled to my feet, briefly contemplating whether or not to storm out.

  “What do you want me to say, Mischa? You’re a groupie. You’re a groupie and you don’t even know it. That’s the saddest kind of groupie, don’t ya think?”

  I knew he was just lashing out, but I couldn’t help taking it personally. “Why don’t you get off your high horse? You’re not a rock star anymore—”

  Liam scoffed, continuing on his tangent. “There’s lots of different kinds of groupies, actually. There’s the party girls, who forget what band you’re in after they’ve sucked you off for a bump of coke. There’s the fucking gorgeous, delusional ones who think you’re gonna want them as your girlfriend just because they let you put it in their backsides. Then there’s the ones with their prized fake breasts, always wearing those tiny string bikini tops under their shirts, just begging you to ask them for a lap dance. And there’s the ones who like to do it all together, groups of four or five girls who want you to do them all together. But you gotta watch out for those ones! There’s always some junkie in the mix—everyone’s having a good time except for the one quiet girl who ends up OD’ing in the bathroom at four a.m.—”

  “I get it,” I interrupted, wanting to plug my ears at the mention of Liam’s sordid sexual history. “You’ve slept with a lot of people.”

  Liam ran a hand through his hair, avoiding my irritated gaze. “I need a drink.”

  He stumbled back into the house and I followed, hating him but at the same time feeling sorry for how severely messed up he was. Part of me wondered how much that night at Sasha’s spa had played into this meltdown. Maybe it was a self-centered thought, but it seemed plausible. I also wondered what the hell I could say to make any of it better.

  Inside, I slid the glass door closed behind me, and something small and hard nudged my lower back. “Drink,” I heard Liam say as he poked me with the open end of his Scotch bottle.

  Feeling emboldened, I took the bottle, reopened the sliding glass door, and hurled it at the mountain of destroyed guitars and amps.

  “Ha! Now you’ve got it!” he cried. “Don’t worry, doll, there’s more where that came from.” Seconds later he had located a half-full bottle of tequila.

  “What are you doing to yourself?” I said.

  With one eye closed and the other trained on me suspiciously, he leaned back against the counter. His head wobbled as he slurred his words. “Well! The drink is the only way to stop the sex, right? Gotta exchange one vice for the other, or else”—he made a blow-up motion with his hands—“boom. Explosion. Life over. May as well die in a fiery car crash—which the drink also helps facilitate.”

  I pointed to the mountain of guitars outside. “What about that? I bet those are worth a lot of money. Why would you destroy them like that?”

  “Because, princess, symbolism! The music is what made me bad—get it? It’s why I had the groupies, and why I cared so much about fucking the groupies, and why the groupies took over my life and made me hate myself.”

  “Groupies didn’t do anything to you.”

  “Just like food never made you fat, did it?”

  “Go to hell!” I shouted, finally losing the shred of cool I had been holding on to. Liam’s words had run me through like a sword. Tears welled up in my eyes but I fought them back.

  “Hey, don’t be mad. You know I like a girl with a little extra. You’ve got it in all the right places, baby. And now you’re trying to throw it in my face.” Liam raised his voice and advanced toward me. “You remind me why I can’t have sex anymore without hating myself!”

  “Yeah, well you remind me that I don’t love myself enough to be with a normal person! You remind me why I’ve wasted years pining over assholes! But you know what? I wanna get better, and I am going to get better.”

  “Oh, are you?” Liam said. He was only inches from me now. I could see his chest heaving. “Good luck with that.”

  “Thanks, I appreciate it.” I rolled my eyes, feeling certain now that my presence was doing more harm than good. Accepting defeat, I grabbed my keys from the counter and started out of the room.

  “Nobody changes, Mischa,” Liam called after me. “You’re screwed, and I’m screwed. We may as well screw each other, no?”

  I grunted loud enough for him to hear. I was angrier than I’d ever been, even angrier than the first time Bradley had ignored me on campus after our breakup. Turning as I reached the hallway, I flipped Liam off with both middle fingers before charging out and straight out that stupid, heavy front door. I doubted he’d follow, but when I got to my car, Liam was right behind me, panting for breath.

  “Wait! Mischa! I was kidding. Don’t leave.” He sounded frantic, but I had lost all sympathy.

  “Please, just stay out of my life,” I said. Unlocking the car, I remembered the one thing I was supposed to accomplish. “Oh, and call Bobby. He’s convinced you’re going to kill yourself, but I know now you’re too narcissistic for that.”

  I tried to slide into the car through the narrow opening I’d made with the door, but Liam stopped me, placing his hand proprietarily on my waist and whipping me around to face him. Up close, he smelled of pure alcohol.

  “I didn’t mean it,” he slurred gently.

  “Which part?” A better person would have wrestled her way out of his grasp, but I still found his touch hard to resist.

  “I’m a fucking mess, Mischa.” Liam’s face crumpled and he started to weep, at first silently, then in a sad, high pitch that made him sound almost childlike, like a helpless animal. There was nothing for me to do, it seemed, other than commiserate. I gave up feeling angry, reaching around him to pat his back. Hunched over me, Liam laid his forehead on my shoulder and continued to cry. The other times I had had Liam within my grasp, he had been powerful, voracious, predatory. Now he was vulnerable, even weak.

  “I’m sorry. It’s gonna be okay,” I said, even though I had no idea how anything was going to be okay. I didn’t know Liam well enough to know whether he would succeed or fail in this life. In a way, he had been right about me being just another groupie. I had viewed him as an exotic object of desire, untouchable except in moments of reckless abandon. Of course, he had presented himself that way, at first. But even after he had revealed his weaknesses to me, I hadn’t really tried seeing him as anything other than the dark and dangerous sex addict who was using and abusing me.

  His hands eventually found their way to my waistline, his lips gently kissing the nape of my neck. I stopped him, knowing I had to.

  “I wanna be your friend, okay? Not your groupie. I wanna help you.” I pushed him away, but he came back at me with greater intensity.

  “This is how you help me.” He ran his hands up my abdomen and planted them on my breasts.

  “Stop it!” I wrestled myself away from him a second time and forced my way inside the car. He placed a hand on the frame so that I couldn’t shut the door. “Liam, I’m gonna close it,” I warned.

  “You’ll break my hand.”

  “Seriously, move away from the car. I will break your hand.”

  “No, you won’t, you sweet girl.”

  “Ugh! You’re making me so mad right now!” I stomped my feet and pounded the dashboard, reverting to my own form of childishness. I looked back up at him and noticed his face wet with tears. He smiled a weak smile that betrayed the opposite of happiness.

  “Don’t you see? You wrecked me the other night. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.” Liam shook his head, swaying a little in his stance.

  I slumped forward, letting my head rest momentarily on the steering wheel, thinking, Thank God. It meant something to him too. It was
validation—maybe not in the form I would have preferred but reassuring nonetheless. In a way, I felt like we were back on the same page again, like we had been the other night at Sasha’s spa before he had told me it was over. Liam had that magical ability to draw me back in just when I was ready to give up on him. “Fine,” I said. “Let’s get you to bed.”

  “That’s more like it,” he laughed.

  “You know what I mean.” I smirked. “Don’t get any ideas… ”

  “Oh, I’ve got some ideas,” Liam said, “and they don’t involve bed.”

  * * *

  I had never watched a gourmet chef cook this up close before. It was a thing of beauty—him whipping up a simple frittata with tomato, asparagus, and goat cheese, even if he was half drunk and stumbling between the cutting board and his skillet. Liam chopped like he had been the top of his class at culinary school, and he did this thing with fresh tarragon and chervil like he was weighing little heaps of the herbs in his palm. It was probably for show, but it made him look like a food wizard. While the frittata finished cooking in the oven, Liam arranged beautiful place settings on his formal dining room table, then lumbered into the backyard to cut some fresh flowers for a centerpiece. It was the most adorable drunken display of hospitality I had ever witnessed.

  “Dear Lord”—he took my hand when we finally sat down to eat, our steaming slices of frittata giving off tantalizing eat-me-now aromas—“thank you for sending Mischa, goddess of love, to take care of me on this dark night of the soul—”

  I laughed through my nose the way kids do in church.

  “And may you keep her warm and safe from my inevitable advances”—Liam glanced over at me with a mischievous smile—“forever and ever, amen.”

  “Amen,” I echoed, and dug in. “Oh my God,” I said, tasting the eggy, cheesy perfection.

  “Good?” Liam asked, his mouth half full.

  “Beyond,” I replied.

  At the same ravenous pace, we ate our way through firsts and seconds and thirds in a comfortable silence that reminded me of the times Gracie and I had gone for greasy diner food after nights of drinking. Every once in a while, I studied Liam’s face when he wasn’t paying attention, noticing how his mood had magically changed from dark to light. It had happened, actually, the minute he’d started cooking, and I realized what he had told me the other night must be true—that he forgot his problems at work, that cooking really was his salvation. It was something to aspire to, I thought, to find the thing that would make me forget my problems.

  After we’d finished, I walked him upstairs to his massive bedroom and helped him into his bed, which sat low to the ground on a minimalist frame. Knowing how drunk he was, I had no fear that Liam’s sex addiction was much of a threat at this point, so being in his bedroom felt like no big deal other than that it was intimidatingly grand like the rest of the house. On the wall behind his bed, there was a giant, modernist painting, and several other pieces of seemingly expensive art hung on the opposite wall.

  “It’s hot in here,” he said, throwing off the sheet that I had placed on top of him.

  “Come here.” I took Liam’s hands and tugged until he sat up. “Put your arms over your head,” I instructed, then pulled off his T-shirt. Glancing behind me, I saw the bathroom door ajar and went to deposit the sweaty shirt in his laundry basket. Behind another door beside the massive glassed-in shower, I found the linens and grabbed a washcloth that I ran under cool water. Returning to Liam’s bed, I placed the compress on his forehead.

  “Oh my God,” he groaned. “That’s the best thing I’ve ever felt.”

  “How are you so friggin’ rich?” I asked, giving voice to the thing I had been thinking ever since I’d arrived. Even though it was a rude question, I felt like Liam could use a little frivolous conversation.

  “My dad had money.” He patted the small sliver of bed between him and the edge of the mattress. I shook my head, choosing to lie on the other side of him, on top of the covers. Liam glanced at me sideways with a pained look in his eyes. “But I wanna lay with you, like in the biblical sense,” he whined.

  “How about this?” I reached out for his hand, and he let me take it. “Turn on your side,” I instructed, and used my free hand to adjust the washcloth as Liam turned to face me. “So, your dad had money. Does that mean he died?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Recently?”

  “Two years ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Stop telling me you’re sorry…” He squeezed my hand a couple of times. “I know you care,” he said, then took a deep breath. I waited for him to say something else, but the minute he had hit the bed, I could tell it was going to be a matter of seconds before he passed out. His eyelids started to flutter, and he tried to make a joke but I could barely hear it.

  “You’re gonna be okay,” I said. I knew he was probably sleeping already, but I uttered the words anyway, because in that moment I wanted to believe them—for him and for me. Maybe it was leftover from my revelations at that night’s OA meeting, but I sensed that change was on the horizon. I couldn’t put my finger on why or how, but it was the closest thing to a psychic intuition I’d ever experienced. “We’re both gonna be okay,” I whispered moments later as I let go of his limp hand and kissed his forehead, hot from the alcohol.

  I stayed on the bed a little while longer to make sure he was fully asleep. I wanted to stay all night, cozy up to him and lay my head on his warm bare chest, let the sound of his breathing coax me to sleep. It took all the self-discipline in the world not to burrow under the sheets and do exactly that. At the end of the day, I knew it wouldn’t be right; in the morning, we’d be facing the same problems we’d come up against before: Liam was an addict and I was his drug. I cared for him too much now to ignore that.

  Even though it ripped me apart, I slowly rose from the bed and went down to the kitchen where I found a bottle of aspirin and filled a large glass with ice water, then tiptoed back upstairs to place the items on his nightstand. I fought the urge to leave a note. Mostly I just wanted to kiss him once more, somehow sensing this was a final goodbye. He was even more beautiful asleep. I could see the way he would be when he was mended, peaceful, no longer tortured by his compulsions, and longed for the parallel universe where Liam and I could be together.

  Outside it was foggy and dark; not even the stars or the moon could offer me company as I parted ways with Liam, seemingly for good. I drove up to the gate and it opened automatically from the inside, giving me no last-minute excuse to stay. If someone had asked me three days ago whether or not my heartache could have gotten any worse, I would have told them no. And I would have been wrong.

  * * *

  I didn’t realize how exhausted I was until the minute I crawled into bed at two a.m. But before I let myself fall asleep, I tried to get back to that ecstatic peace of mind I had had in the parking lot, just before Bobby had accosted me, by taking deep breaths and naming all the things I was thankful for again. Just when I got to Gracie, I heard my phone ring and was shocked to see her name on the screen.

  “What’s up? Is everything okay?” I said as I picked up.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m fine. I just can’t sleep.”

  “Phew. Also, are your ears burning? I literally was just saying your name in my head.”

  “Ha-ha, why? Are you obsessed with me now too?”

  “Basically.” I laughed. “You sound good for someone who’s up at two a.m.”

  “Oh you know, just livin’ the life. I miss you!”

  “I miss you too. We gotta hang sometime. What are you doing tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know, I think I’m free. Ha-ha. Wouldn’t that be great, if I could just come over and hang?”

  “Maybe you should visit.”

  “But I just left! I don’t know if I can handle the instant nostalgia thing. So… how are you?”

  I turned on my side and propped myself up. “I’m actually good, all things considered.
I mean, I had to talk Liam off the ledge tonight—”

  “Really, what was that about?”

  “Oh, where to start?” I took a deep breath and searched my mind for the relevant details. “You know what?” I said, after a substantial pause. “It’s not important. What about you?”

  Gracie sighed. “Meh. Same here, I guess. Haven’t seen the guy. It’s probably a good thing… It’s all much ado about nothing, right?”

  I smiled, allowing my eyes to close. “Right on, sistah.”

  * * *

  The rest of the weekend went by quietly. On Saturday, I took Cecile to a matinee showing of the R-rated movie she’d been dying to see, but said no when she begged me to get her nose pierced afterward. On Sunday, still artfully avoiding me, Julien took Cecile to his mother’s house to celebrate the Fourth of July, and I went to Isabella’s, where I made virgin daiquiris and she and I watched the neighborhood association’s fireworks show from the perch of her golf cart. When it came time for the grand finale, I squeezed my eyes shut and made a wish that I would be accepted into Reid’s graduate program, even though it seemed more and more like a long shot as time had ticked by.

  “What are you doing, Fluffy?” said Isabella, poking furiously at my side. “Open your eyes—you’re going to miss it!”

  The next day was Monday, and back to work. By that time, Julien and I had eased back into talking as if our late-night run-in had never happened and I was grateful for the awkwardness to subside. It seemed clear now that in my heightened emotional state after seeing Liam, I had misinterpreted the hand-holding with Julien, which was in actuality nothing more than a fluke, not even significant enough to warrant a conversation. It was a great relief, and I was happy to return to our easy mentor-mentee dynamic. I even mustered the courage to ask him to put a good word in with the graduate studies dean, and he eagerly agreed, throwing out a quote from a Maya Angelou poem about new beginnings, which I was miraculously able to counter-quote.

  That night, Cecile reminded me of a promise I’d made to cook her dinner, and I obliged. It helped that Julien was out for the night. It also helped that she had stopped bullying me ever since my meltdown the other morning. The only nasty comment came at the end of dinner when she requested fruit for dessert but suggested I skip it. “I mean, you’re gonna need to lose at least twenty pounds if you want Droolian Poundwell to look twice, don’t ya think?”