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He had issues with addiction, too, though he hadn’t gone into it with me. That was what was keeping me back from talking to him, if I was being honest. I didn’t want to bring up any of this shit for him, not if I could avoid it. But then … who else did I have to talk to?
I peered around the door, and his head snapped up from the work he had been focused on the moment he heard me coming.
"Hey," he greeted me. "Are you okay?"
"I … I don’t know," I admitted. God, it was hard to get those words out. I had spent so long trying to crush down my feelings, it was difficult for me to even connect with them long enough to put them into words myself. I wanted to talk to him about all of this, of course I did, but it just wasn’t that easy.
"Come, sit," he told me, getting to his feet and pulling out the chair for me, nodding down into it so I could rest for a moment. I did as I was told, clasping my hands in my lap. I didn’t know exactly how to begin to put this into words, but I had to try.
"What’s going on?" he asked me, frowning as he gazed at me with genuine concern. My heart twisted in my chest. Oh, I wished I didn’t have to put this on him. Maybe I should have just gone, walked out before I made a mess of whatever it was that we had …
"You can tell me," he remarked, as though he could sense what was going through my mind right now.
"Uh, I really want to … to use today," I admitted, finally. I could feel the heat on my face, the same coursing through my system. He had been so supportive with helping me kick that shit, it must have felt like such a let-down to hear me saying this to him.
"Oh, yeah?" he replied, frowning. "Why? Did something … Did something trigger you?"
"I don’t know," I confessed. "I just woke up this morning, and I reached over to my bedside table just like I did for all those years, looking to rack up a line. Like it was second nature. It’s been all I’ve been able to think about all day. I just … I don’t know if it’s ever going to go away, you know?"
"Selina, it’s been a few weeks since you kicked that shit," he reminded me kindly. "You’re still early in the game, trust me. You can’t put so much pressure on yourself to have completely forgotten about it so soon."
"I know," I sighed. "But … But when does it start getting better? When do I start forgetting about it?"
He clasped his hands in front of him, considering the question.
"I don’t know," he replied finally, honestly. "It’s been the better part of a year for me, and I still find myself thinking about it sometimes. Wondering how easy it would be to go out, get a drink, without anyone noticing."
"That’s what you had problems with? Alcohol?" I asked him, and he nodded.
"Yeah," he replied, grimacing. "I used to drink a hell of a lot. I just wanted to put everything out of my head for a while, and that felt like the only way to do it."
"Everything?" I prompted him. Talking to him about his own issues was serving as a way to get my head off mine, and I would take anything I could get in that instant.
"Everything I’ve … been part of," he replied, face darkening, voice dropping, as though the shame was already starting to grow in him. "Working for a Mafia family like this, there’s a lot of shit that you get involved with that you start to second-guess when you take a step back and look at it. People who’ve lost their lives because of the choices I’ve made. That doesn’t sit easy with me. It never will."
I inhaled sharply. I hadn’t realized that was a part of his past. I could see the pain of it, the regret, written all over his face, and my chest ached for him. I wished there was something I could do to lift some of the weight from his shoulders, but I knew it wasn’t going to be that easy.
"I’m sorry," I muttered. "I shouldn’t have brought it up …"
"No, it’s okay," he replied, shaking his head. "I know what I’ve done. I know I have to live with it. I’m not going to try and deny my past; it’s part of me."
"How do you … live with it?" I asked him, my voice dropping slightly. "I don’t know how I’m meant to just go through my day, you know, feeling everything that I’ve done, everything that I’ve been through …"
"I’m not going to lie to you, it’s tough," he told me, offering me an apologetic look. "And yeah, sometimes, you’re going to feel like you need to be high, just to get through the day. But you don’t have to live like that, not anymore. You don’t have to hide from the way you feel. You can face it."
I chewed my lip. I wanted to believe him, of course I did, but how could I? After the hell I’d endured, it just felt impossible, impossible for me to look forward to a future where I could leave all of this behind.
"I just can’t stop thinking about my family," I admitted, shaking my head. "I mean … I think that I can live with all of this, but then I think about the look on my mom’s face when she found out about the dancing, and I worry that I’ve done too much damage to fix what happened there."
His eyes softened as he gazed at me.
"I think you should give your family a little more credit," he replied. "It sounds like they got faced with all of this out of nowhere; it’s only natural that they would freak out a little bit. Maybe, now that you’ve given them some time to figure themselves out, they’ll be more accepting of it."
"Or maybe they’re going to hate me even more when they find out everything else I’ve done in the meantime," I replied, lowering my gaze to the desk and picking at a hangnail on my finger.
"You’re not going to know until you contact them again," he told me gently. "All of this is just in your head. You said it yourself, you haven’t seen them in a long time—a lot might have changed since then."
"I guess so," I confessed. But he hadn’t been there when all this mess had gone down in the first place. He hadn’t seen the horror in my father’s eyes when he thought about his little girl getting naked for random men. He didn’t understand just how hard it had been for them to wrap their heads around what I’d done and why I’d done it, even though it had all been for them.
