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What it means…
You kissed him.
You kissed him, and then you called him by his sister’s name.
What the actual fuck is wrong with you?
Shawn says simply, “Gavin’s here. Ready?” putting a momentary halt to the berating voice in my head.
No… I’m not ready.
I’m not ready for any of this.
Izzy’s dead. She’s fucking dead.
I broke my sobriety.
I told Waylon I wished it was him.
I kissed Jeremy, of all fucking people in the world to kiss…
And I called him by his sister’s name, not even, what, minutes, hours later? Does it even matter? Kissing him or not doesn’t erase how fucked up that is regardless.
At this rate, I’ll be lucky if I didn’t cost myself two, if not three, of the most important people in my life.
And for what?
A ghost?
“You ready to return to the land of the living?”
Turning away from the window I’ve been staring out for who the hell knows how long, I find April standing there with her head tilted and a small, knowing smile teasing her lips.
“Not really,” I admit sheepishly. “I forgot how nerve-wracking it is waiting to be picked up on D-Day.”
D-Day, what everyone around here calls Discharge Day.
“I just want to skip ahead to when things are normal again.” I chuckle, and there’s a rusty uncertain quality to it.
April nods, her blue eyes drifting past my shoulder toward the windows stretched out across the wall behind me “Yeah…that would be a nifty little power, huh?”
At her wistful tone, my chest tightens.
April arrived a couple weeks ago—halfway through my thirty-day stay—so she’s still got a while to go, seeing as it’s also her first time, and she’s fresh out of detox hell.
It was a bit of a sucker-punch when I checked myself in this time, only to find I didn’t recognize any of the other admits. Why I stupidly thought this was some kind of unchanging bubble I could return to, I have no idea. Save for the doctors, and a couple familiar staff, it’s a whole new pond of people.
Not to mention not having Shawn at my side, who I’ve come to depend on for all things recovery-related more than I even realized in the last two years…
Well, it’s been lonely to say the least.
That is, until April arrived.
Not that the other admits haven’t been friendly—don’t get me wrong. But like last time, most are older than me. Most have had a rougher time of it too. And while I know comparing my struggles to theirs is unfair to myself…it’s not something I can easily shake.
But then I met April.
She’s a few years older than me, and her vice of choice is alcohol, but we clicked almost immediately, bonding in our shared losses. Not even a year after being married, her husband died in a freak accident on the job, leaving her a single mom to a two-year-old.
