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Care.
He made me forget…
“…seventy-eight days alcohol-free,” he finishes telling the room.
Pressing my lips together, I duck my head and stare at my feet, willing my eyes to behave. I know I’m being rude, and if the furrowed glares he’s been shooting me since we started are anything to go by, he thinks so too.
But I can’t seem to stop.
He remembers me, right?
“I’m an alcoholic,” he goes on. “An addict. Have been since before I was eighteen, and will be ’til the day I die.”
I glance up through my lashes at the sound of his rumbly voice. Honestly, it takes a couple seconds for what he’s saying to register, because I’m too distracted by the way his hands come together on his lap. They’re tanned and veiny—kind of rough-looking, telling me he’s not a stranger to hard labor.
I open my palms and stare down at them, frowning. Not even a single callous or scrape. Nails clean and trimmed. I used to bite them when I was a kid, but my mother was quick to nip that in the bud, swatting my hand any time I lifted it to my mouth. And then when I was sent away and she was no longer around, it was Headmistress Beatrice with the rod.
“Filthy, unclean boy!” Thwap, thwap, thwap.
I clench my hands into fists.
“…relapsed about six months ago. I was five years and some change sober at the time. I…slipped.”
His words spark an ache in my chest, one that spreads up my throat, mingling with my own pain. It’s not so much what he’s saying, but how he says it. Like he’s given up. Like he might as well be wearing chains, and walking to his execution.
I know addiction is a lifelong disease, but to hear it put so bluntly, to see it up close without the veneer of literature and glamorized media, it’s a lot less dramatic and just a whole lot of sad.
Peering up through my lashes, I watch the way Nolan’s face slackens, his eyes glazing over as he darts his gaze around the floor unseeingly.
Someone clears their throat. Another shifts in their chair.
The silence persists for another long moment, and then the A/C kicks on and he seems to come back to himself.
“It’s not about how long it takes,” he says, his voice strained in a way it wasn’t before. “Sooner you accept that, the easier it’ll be. Day by day. Moment by moment, really. All we can do is…keep trying. Get back up…”
Blood rushes to my ears, muffling his voice. I clench my hands together tighter, and in my mind’s eye I’m no longer here, in this room, on this island, but back at my parents’ estate. I’m talking and crying and begging them to believe me…
But they don’t.
And I’m tired.
More tired than I’ve ever been in my life.
I have no one.
The scene playing out in my head converges with the one playing out in present time when Nolan’s weary, reddened gaze crashes headlong into mine from across the circle.
And everything just sort of…stops.
In my head, I’m cracking open a little orange pill bottle. One by one, I wash it down with a bottle of my father’s expensive vodka. It burns, but I’m already on fire. Burning for my sins, just like Pastor Gabriel told me I would.
He was lying. Making stuff up. You don’t actually believe that,a voice reminds me.
Across from me now, Nolan’s gaze furrows, and I wonder what he sees.
Does he hear me screaming?
His face tenses, almost like he’s flinching, revolting against something.
