He needed to talk to her today about running into Christine last night, about her reaction. He also wanted her to meet his boys, in a way that was planned. He didn’t want to run into them out with his ex-wife or her husband.
He’d call over there today and see if he could go and pick them up, have them stay here with them for a couple of days. There wouldn’t be a problem with it on Christine’s end, Ben would be traveling so much once their tour started, she would be glad to have the boys spend time with him before he got back out on the road. He hoped that Liv wouldn’t have a problem with it.
Before any of that, he needed to tell Liv more about himself, and it wasn’t all good. He’d overcome a lot of his demons, made significant changes in his life, but living life on tour and living life at home were two completely different things. Life on the road was crazy—a different city every night, sometimes several nights in a row. They’d have a day off here and there, but there was never enough time to come home and regroup.
A part of him wished he could take her on the road with him, but that wouldn’t be fair to her. He didn’t need or want a babysitter, he wanted a lover, a mate . . . someday a wife.
Liv shifted so her back faced his front, and he wrapped his arms around her, nestling her as close as he could. For someone who had slept alone as many years as she had, he wondered if his constant need to touch her bothered her. Even in his sleep he clung to her, when he was awake it was all he could do not to bury himself in her every chance he had.
“Sweet Liv,” he whispered in her ear, hoping to wake her slowly and gently.
“Hmm, is it morning? What time is it?”
“It’s almost nine. You can sleep longer if you want to.”
“No, I’m awake.”
It was now or never. “I need to tell you some not-so-nice stories,” he said, kissing across her back from one shoulder to the other. He felt her muscles tighten, but only slightly. It was somehow easier without her looking at him. He hoped he could get through it, be completely honest with her and not gloss any of it over. He didn’t feel as though he could ever really be free with her unless he told her all of it.
“Okay,” she said. “You can tell me.”
***
“A little over a year ago, I hit rock bottom. Will, Matt and I had been snowboarding all day and I’d been drinking, a lot. They took away my keys and drove me home, where they figured I’d pass out and sleep it off. Unfortunately, I didn’t. I got my hands on a set of keys to one of the ranch trucks that was out at my place and drove over to Will’s, prepared to give him shit I guess. I don’t remember anything about that night, so I don’t know what I was thinking.
“I guess when I got there I must’ve gone in to one of the bedrooms and passed out, but then something must’ve woken me up and I went out into the living room. Maeve, Will’s wife, was sitting on the couch, I don’t know where Will was. Anyway, I sat down and started a conversation with her.
“Will came out and started screaming at me, asking me what the hell I was doing, what the fuck was wrong with me. Then he apologized to Maeve and he got her out of there as fast as he could. I don’t remember much of this, but I do remember the last thing he said to me. ‘You need to straighten your shit out dude or get the fuck outa my life.’”
Ben took a big deep breath. He punched the pillow behind his head a little higher, so he could see at least part of Liv’s face. If he went too far, he hoped he’d be able to tell.
“The reason Will was so done with me that day, was because I came out, sat down and started talking to his wife, completely naked. On top of that, I must’ve fallen down or something either in my house before I left, or Will’s when I got there. By the time Maeve saw me, I looked as though I had been in a fight. Evidently, I scared the hell out of her.”
Ben tightened the hold he had around Liv’s arms, hoping that if he held her as close to him as possible, he could tell her everything he needed to.
“Before that night, there was a long, ugly road of random acts of misery I left in a trail behind me.”
Ben told her that he’d started drinking when he was a teenager hanging out at the ski area. It got worse when he started the band, worse still when he got married, and finally almost killed him when he got divorced.
“That night, Will took Maeve to my parents’ place, and then called Matt, who rounded up Jimmy and Phil, guys from the band who I’ve been friends with since we were in first grade. They all came back to Will’s, with my mom and dad, and told me that they were taking me to rehab. I mean, there was a lot more to it, but Liv, the sad part is, I don’t remember any of it. The only reason I can tell you what happened with Maeve, is because I’ve had the story told to me so many times.”
“Keep talking.” Liv said, almost a whisper.
“When I met Christine the band was hot. We’d released a couple of albums and were playing all over Colorado. We had a sold-out show at the Belly Up over in Aspen. The crowd was crazy that night, and she was in the front row. I was hot for her, and fully expected I’d be getting her under me sometime that night. She wanted nothin’ to do with me.” Ben laughed, in an uncomfortable way, and rubbed his eyes. “God this is sounding too familiar even to me.” He kissed Liv’s neck. “Are you all right, is it okay for me to go on?”
“Mmm hmm, keep going Ben.”
“She came to a lot of our shows. It wasn’t that unusual—young guys, hot band, there were a lot of girls that followed us around. She never got together with any of the other guys, she never got together with me, but she was always there. We had a few days off and I asked her if I could spend some time with her while we weren’t performing. That was the first time she said yes to anything I ask her.”
Ben told her that he and Christine partied together, non-stop, for a week. She drank as much as he did, maybe more, and was into coke, which he hadn’t been. During their week-long bender, they had a lot of sex, and he’d been too drunk or stoned or high to think about using condoms.
“You can guess what I’m gonna tell you next. Christine came into the Goat looking for me a couple months later. I hardly recognized her. She’d put on some weight, which I later found out was mainly because she’d stopped doing coke. She was also pregnant, and scared out of her mind that there was going to be something wrong with the baby.”
Both Ben and Christine had seen the pregnancy as a wake-up call. She’d stopped partying completely as soon as she realized she was pregnant, and knowing what he’d done and that he had a child on the way, Ben stopped partying too.
He moved her into his house and rather than asking her to marry him, he told her they were getting married.
“I look back on it and realize that my parents knew exactly what was going on. I tried to play it off like I was some kind of responsible guy who’d fallen in love, gotten my girl pregnant, and we were getting married. They were on to my shit the entire time. I guess there was a part of them that played along hoping that it was the thing that made me stop drinking, made me start acting like the grownup I was old enough to be.”
Ben shifted again, moving so he was on his back, Liv put her arm around his waist and put her head on his chest, right above his heart.
“Jake was born, and thankfully he was okay, there were never any signs that he was adversely affected by Christine’s partying, then and to this day.
“We played house for a couple of years and did our best to find a common ground that didn’t have anything to do with partying. I had to hand it to her then, she really changed when she got pregnant, and she’s always been a good mother to Jake and to Luke.
“Not as much changed for me as it did for her. I was still out playing clubs just about every weekend. I stopped doing any kind of drugs, and convinced myself that as long as I was only drinking, everything was fine.”
He told her the benders stopped, but in between the time that Jake was born and Christine got pregnant with Luke, he’d slept with a lot of other women. Whenever they played out of town,
they’d always stay over to the next morning. No matter where they were, Ben rarely slept alone. The one thing he’d learned his lesson about was unprotected sex though, and he never went without a condom.
He and Christine were having lots of problems, mainly because he was never home. Living out on the ranch was hard because even though it wasn’t as far from town as Liv’s place was, Christine still felt isolated. His mother was nice to Christine, she still was, but they were never close.
In an effort to repair their marriage, they did the thing everyone says not to, they tried to have another baby. It didn’t take long for her to get pregnant, but if she’d thought Ben was going to make any changes in his life because she was, she’d been wrong. And that didn’t make her happy.
When he was home, all they did was fight. He realized, mainly while he was in rehab, that most everything that went wrong between them was his doing. He hadn’t been committed to the relationship, ever. He loved her, more as the mother of his kids. And, she was beautiful, no question. But he wasn’t who she wanted him to be, and he realized now, she wasn’t who he wanted her to be either.
Liv shifted a little bit when he said it, but kept her arm around his waist and didn’t try to move away from him. He kissed her forehead, and started to run a trail of kisses down the side of her face.
“Keep talking.”
She was right, it was better to just get through it before he lost the nerve to tell her the whole story.
Two years after Luke was born, Ben made arrangements to record the band’s next album in Los Angeles. Christine wanted to go and bring the boys, but Ben told her it was out of the question. He told her it wasn’t a good environment for the boys to be in, but the truth had been he didn’t want her there.
When he left, she told him she wouldn’t be there when he got back. He didn’t believe her. After all, where was she going to go? Ben had never met her family, never heard a single thing about them, even after they’d gotten married and she’d had two kids.
They’d been in LA a week when a knock on the hotel room door early one morning woke him up. He was hungover and it took him a while to answer. When he did, Christine was standing on the other side of it, Luke in her arms, and she was holding Jake by the hand.
He’d answered the door naked and had little choice but to let her push her way inside. When she did, she practically threw Luke in his arms before she attacked the woman still asleep in Ben’s bed.
Jake was five at the time and Ben still prayed his son had no memory of that day.
Trying to manage a two-year-old and a five-year-old, both of them crying so hard they were screaming, and rein Christine in was more than he could handle. Ben sat Luke on the floor and tried to get Jake settled, while he tried to keep their mother from pummeling the woman in his bed. Jimmy, one of his band mates, was in the room next door and heard the commotion. He came over to help, but it was still just ugly.
When they finally got things settled down, the woman out of the room, the kids out of there and with another member of the band, Christine told him they were done. She wanted a divorce and she wanted full custody of the kids. On top of it, she wanted a hell of a lot of money.
Ben had no idea what his financial situation actually was. He knew there was money, but he didn’t know how much. He also didn’t know if he’d put the ranch in any kind of risk by marrying her without a pre-nup.
He flew home with Christine and the boys, dropping them off at the house, and he went to stay with his parents.
He looked like hell and he knew it. Between what was going on with Christine, the band trying to cut this record with a producer who was as detached as he could be, and the non-stop partying, he felt like he wanted to die. And then he learned he was sick. Very sick.
Less than a month later he was diagnosed with cancer. The record went on hold, the divorce did not. He went through a tough surgery, followed by both chemo and radiation therapy. He stayed at his parents’ place through it all, while Christine and the boys remained in the house. She was adamant that she wanted full custody of their boys, and she used his illness to further her fight.
He learned later that his dad intervened and made a deal with her to finalize the divorce. In exchange for giving up all claims to the ranch, along with any of the other family holdings, Ben’s family would take very good care of her for the rest of her life. It would continue provided she never tried to take Ben’s boys away from him. If she ever tried, she’d lose everything.
The negotiations his father worked out on his behalf included a joint custody agreement. Christine moved into a house in town, and Ben went back to his place on the ranch as soon as he felt well enough.
“You’d think with all that happened, the way Christine and I got together, the boys, the divorce, the cancer . . . that I would’ve stopped drinking. I didn’t. It only got worse.”
Ben and the band went back to LA to finish the album, and it wasn’t long before he started picking up old habits. He continued to drink, and self-destruct, for another five years.
“That brings me back to the beginning of the story. When I nakedly terrorized my sister-in-law.” Ben tried to put a light-hearted spin on the words he just spoke, but there was nothing light-hearted about the story he just told Liv.
“What happened between now and then, with you and her?”
“With Christine?”
Liv nodded.
“The years before I got sober were really tough. All she was trying to do was look out for our boys. Sometimes I was easy to get along with and sometimes, well, let’s just say I wasn’t.”
Once he got sober, Ben asked Christine to go to counseling with him to figure out a way they could be co-parents to their boys without destroying them in the process. They had been able to work through a lot in those sessions, and came out of it far better than when they’d gone in.
Now they managed to have somewhat of a friendship. Christine met a guy not too long after they were divorced and married him. Ben told Liv he didn’t know a lot about Joe, but he seemed to be good to his boys, his life with Christine seemed stable, and that was all he cared about.
The scene from the night before still plagued him. Christine knew, as well as he did, that casual drinking would never be an option for them. They were alcoholics. Christine had been going to AA since she got pregnant with Jake. Granted, he’d been in the same bar last night, but he wasn’t drinking. Maybe she hadn’t been either. The truth was, apart from how it affected Jake and Luke, what Christine did or didn’t do, wasn’t any of his business. It was just another example of something he needed let go of control of.
“Addicts tend to be very sensitive people Liv. We feel everything. We have a need to be in control, which should mean control of ourselves, but sometimes it spills over to other people in our lives.
“We also like to talk about everything, at least most of us do. We’ve learned that talking through how we’re feeling, acknowledging how we’re feeling is the key to our sobriety. As soon as I stop thinking through the decisions I make I run the risk of making bad ones.”
***
Liv was trying really hard to wrap her head around everything Ben just told her. So much of it was completely foreign to anything she’d ever encountered in her life. It sounded almost absurd, but she didn’t think she’d ever known another alcoholic. She certainly never had anyone close to her who was. Her parents drank, but always in moderation. She’d never seen her mother or her father drunk.
She supposed there were occasions that Scott may have had more to drink than he should have when they were out with friends, but not so much so that it had worried her, or that she’d even noticed. And drugs had never been a part of her life, not in any way.
She wanted to believe this wouldn’t change how she felt about him, but it did. She didn’t have any way to relate to so much of what he told her. She didn’t understand what drove someone to do the things he did.
What she did understand better was his desire to ta
lk about everything, his impulsiveness, even his insecurity, and above all, his need for control.
But nothing about his life before his sobriety or since, explained his attraction to her. There was an undeniable sexual attraction, but other than that, what did they have in common?
She began to worry that Ben might see her as safe, or innocent, the same way Scott had. She wasn’t anyone’s savior, not Scott’s, not Ben’s, not even her own.
She was a normal woman who led a very safe life. She rarely took risks, of any kind, rarely even stepped out of her comfort zone.
What if Ben needed her to be someone she didn’t know how to be, and she failed him? What would happen then, would he start drinking again? Would he blame her?
And what if it was all about her being safe? What was she supposed to do? Babysit him? Keep him from doing things he didn’t want to do? Liv’s life had been very sheltered in comparison to most, maybe he saw that as a plus.
He knew her story, she lived with her parents most of her life, with the exception of the brief time she and Scott were married. And when her parents passed away, Liv inherited everything. Everything had just been handed to her. She’d never had to worry about working or providing for her daughter, or the other things most people had to worry about.
He knew that when Scott told her to let go of her dream to be a barrel racer, she had, for him. Did Ben think she’d just give up the life she’d created for herself for him the same way she had for Scott? Funny that was what she was thinking about yesterday when she told him the story of her life, that she couldn’t give herself up again for someone else.
If that’s what he thought she’d do, he was very wrong. The bottom line was, they had nothing to build a lasting relationship on. She and Ben were not meant to be, and it was best if they both realized it now, before either of them got in any deeper.
It was as though Ben knew the moment, the very instant, Liv disconnected from him. Her head remained next to his heart, but his heart hurt worse than he ever imagined it could.
And Then You Fall (Crested Butte Series) Page 14