Knowing how shitty she felt, I knew she needed a couple to get herself together. Quite frankly, I needed a couple as well.
I walked into my kitchen, making a pot of strong coffee and sitting down at the small two-seat table, taking my first real breath in twenty minutes.
Fuck.
I exhaled hard and took another breath before I let it all sink in.
And as I heard the shower click off, as I listened to her rinse and spit, as I heard the door to the bathroom creak open, one thing was abundantly clear to me.
I wasn't going to let her OD another time.
I wasn't going to let her think about eating a fucking bullet.
Was it my place?
No.
Was it maybe the most sane reaction?
Again, no.
But that was how it was.
Ever since the night on the train, I started to believe in signs. I started to know there were very few randoms in life, very few coincidences.
The train robot got me off in Navesink Bank. Where I met Ross Ward who got me an apartment and a job. Through Ross I got to know about the organizations in town, so when I saw the guys breaking into the gym owned partially by The Henchmen, I knew who to go to to tell. And in meeting them, in telling them, they had brought me into their fold and given me a family I had been without for many years.
And being with them meant my walking route that night had me going a way that led me to that alley, that led me to her.
It wasn't a happenstance.
It was a sign.
And I was going to heed it.
When I didn't hear any more sound after the door opened, I got up off the chair and made my way to the bedroom, finding her laying across the bed, but with her legs off the side, like she had sat down for just a second and ended up passing out.
I moved to the side of the bed, keeping my eyes up since I knew she was commando and the shirt was up high on her hip, grabbed her legs and pulled them onto the bed, covering her up with the blankets and checking her pulse again.
Finding it and her breathing normal, I moved to the bathroom to grab her sopping clothes and put them in a laundry basket.
It was right about then that my eye caught the wallet she had had around her wrist.
Curious, I moved toward it, turning it to find her license in a cut-out window, her face looking back at me.
She was twenty-five.
She was an organ donor.
She was from Navesink Bank.
And her name?
Bethany Bates.
Bethany Bates.
Fucking Bethany.
Talk about goddamn signs.
"You've got to be fucking kidding me."
TWO
Bethany
My eyes hadn't even opened yet and I knew something was wrong. I couldn't tell you why, but that was the overwhelming sensation. It was an overall unease I couldn't place- a prickling sensation on my skin, a swirling feeling in my stomach. There was a heavy blanket over my memories of the night before. I remembered walking into Chaz's, half-packed of people just barely legal being loud and annoying as well as a few local guys with 'bad news' written all over them. I remembered getting the text from him. I remembered drinking after the text and reaching for the bottle of pills after they cut me off.
The rest was just... black.
It wasn't that exactly that had dread coiling around my belly like a snake ready to lunge.
What it was was a mix of strange sensations that hit me all at once: my throat hurt, I was freezing, my hair felt damp, the sheets felt weird, I had no panties on, and I was sleeping in a tee.
I always slept in huge baggy sweats and a sweatshirt because I ran toward cold all my life, especially in sleep which I apparently did 'like the dead'.
So it was all those things assaulting me at once that had my eyes snapping open as I shot up in the unfamiliar bed in the unfamiliar room with absolutely no idea how I was there, why I was there, and worst yet... what the hell I had done.
"Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod," I whimpered as I pushed back my mostly-dry, but a little damp hair.
The room was... decent.
The walls were painted a deep gray that reminded me of the feathers my grandfather's parrot had all through my childhood, making me automatically decide I liked it. The bedsheets were a crisp white and just slightly more scratchy than my own. The floor was hardwood- dark and refinished. I could see inside the bathroom, finding white tile on the floor and the wall inside the tub/shower combo. And out of the corner where the wall broke, I could see the very edge of a refrigerator.
There was a TV on the dresser across from the bed and blinds on the windows. But no wall art, no curtains, nothing frilly.
So one could assume I was in a man's bed.
And if I was in a man's bed with no panties on...
"Oh, God," I whimpered into my hands as I buried my face in them.
No way.
No freaking way did I become that girl.
No one liked that girl.
The fall down drunk, high off her ass girl who wakes up and realizes she had sex with a man she didn't even know, couldn't even remember if she was conscious for it, let alone if protection was used.
No. Freaking. Way.
This is what happens when you go down that path, my brain reminded me.
"You okay?" a deep, smooth male voice asked, making me jerk back on a yelp, my heart flying into my chest as my skull slammed against the headboard. One look at me, at what must have been a frantic look on my face, had him nodding. "You don't remember."
Nope.
Definitely didn't.
And he was someone I would have liked to remember having sex with. Quite frankly, he was about a million on a scale of one-to-ten. He was tall with a swimmer's build, shiny, dark hair, deep brown eyes, and a very classically handsome face- all strong brows, cut jaw, and jutted cheekbones.
Really, really ridiculously handsome.
But, I reminded myself as my mind started to run away with itself, if I was in his bed, if I had had sex with him when I was too drunk and high to know what I was doing, then he might have been good looking, but he was a really, really shitty person.
Then, like a hot knife through butter, his next sentence sliced through my swirling thoughts.
"You OD'd last night."
At that, there was a blurry resurfacing of someone's fingers in my throat, explaining why it was so sore. There was also a weird feeling of ice water, but it was too fractured a memory to make any real sense of it.
I had OD'd?
OD'd like... like some junkie.
That was always my immediate response to drugs- distaste, disgust, superiority.
For all of five seconds until I remembered I was that person.
I had sunk that low.
My life had come to that.
It was all still so new, so surreal. It was like I was watching the events of my life unfold around me, but was completely detached from it all. It wasn't me who found that bottle and took the pills that first time. It wasn't me who closed their eyes as her first high blossomed through her system- the feeling of bone-deep goodness something akin to standing in the sun after lifelong darkness, like joy after only ever knowing pain.
High wasn't what I expected.
It wasn't like the movies.
Not for me, at least.
It was just... wellbeing. I felt good when I took the pills.
When I didn't, my life came flooding back to me, the sadness of it, the hopelessness.
But somehow, doing the only thing that made me not miserable made me that girl I had always looked down on all my life.
What an awful dichotomy of feelings to constantly be stuck in between.
"Did you hear me?" he asked, making me painfully aware that I had been sitting there like a freak with my mind taking off in a million different directions.
I looked back up at him, casually comfortable in well-loved, soft-looking jeans that were w
orn in the knees and belt hoops, and a simple white tee. He was way too good looking for any damn time of the day. And all I felt was...well, rage.
"How fucked up are you to have sex with someone right before or right after they OD?" His brow went up at that as he jerked back. "Yes, I was drunk. Yes, I was high. Hell, I might have literally been asking for it. But any decent human being would know I was too messed up to make that decision for myself and would have..."
"Okay," he cut me off, tone almost infuriatingly calm. "Let's just stop that before it gets out of hand. We didn't 'have sex'. You don't know me and I get that waking up in someone else's bed in someone else's clothes with no memory is scary, but I am not that guy. I don't take advantage of women who clearly need help. You are right. You were fucking messed up. That shit would have been rape, not sex. Just so we're clear on that. You're here because you begged me not to take you to the hospital."
The hospital.
My stomach clenched hard at that as my eyes fell to my hands.
"Sorry, I shouldn't have accused you. I... this is my fault..."
To that, he let out an exhale so loud it was pretty much just a glorified sigh.
"Let's start this over," he suggested, moving in the room a foot, but not approaching the bed. "My name is Lazarus Alexander. You're in my apartment. The only thing that happened last night was I found you outside Chaz's; I helped you get that shit out of your system; I brought you back here and let you clean up and sleep. That's it. I slept on the couch."
Okay.
I exhaled slowly, trying to calm myself down.
That wasn't that bad. I mean, it was horrible. He had helped me get that shit out of my system by shoving his fingers down my throat and helping me throw up. That was just... humiliating. There was no other way to put it. But at least I hadn't done something as dangerous and careless as getting so trashed that I slept with an absolute stranger.
Small miracle, for which I felt wholly undeserving.
I gave him a small nod. "I'm Bethany Bates," I offered. "Thanks for, well, saving me last night."
I was thankful. Actions of the night before aside, I didn't actually want to die. I wouldn't even say I was particularly in a self-destruct spiral. Things had just... gotten bad. And I hadn't dealt with it in a healthy way. I had never even been close to an OD before and I hadn't even been using the pills for long.
Not that that was any kind of excuse.
An addict was an addict whether they used for a week or fifty years.
"Can I level with you for a second?" he asked oddly, watching me with those dark eyes of his. It was intense enough that I almost felt the urge to squirm under it, like maybe he could see all my secrets.
"Sure," I croaked, my heart lodged in my throat making it hard to speak normally.
"I'd really prefer that, after I saved your life, you didn't go and throw it away again."
That hurt. I wasn't going to lie. He barely knew me, but he didn't want me to die. It was more than could be said of the people I did know. Hell, he seemed to care more about my well-being than I did.
"I would prefer to not OD again too," I admitted. Granted, I didn't remember most of it, but that was almost somehow worse than if I did. Scarier.
"What I'm saying is, I think you should stay here and detox."
Alright.
So he was crazy.
Only crazy people said things like that. Not because he wanted me clean. Any sane person would want an addict to clean up their act. But you know... in a hospital setting where people could keep an eye on you and give you those detox meds and whatnot.
A place I totally would have gone to if I had insurance.
"That's, ah, a nice offer. But really..." I started, swinging my legs off the side of the bed and moving to stand.
I hadn't noticed him moving too, but when I looked up, he was in front of the doorway, blocking it. I felt my belly twist, knowing just knowing down to my bones that things had just taken a turn into OhShitsVille.
"I had kind-of been hoping you would just agree and make this easier," he said, a certain sadness in his eyes.
My heart was frantic, beating hard enough to be nauseating. "Make what easier?" I managed, feeling like I was choking on my own tongue.
"You're going to detox here."
Yep.
Crazy.
Freaking bonkers.
Fantastic.
My eyes moved to the window for a second as I took a deep breath and tried to keep calm. "Look, it's nice of you to care about me. But you can't just... keep me here. I mean you could try. But this is an apartment building," I added, hearing a TV set sound coming from somewhere nearby. "If I scream, someone will hear me."
"They'll hear you," he agreed, nodding. Calm. He was so freakishly calm talking about holding me hostage.
And it got me that he agreed they would hear me in such a nonchalant way- like whoever he was or something was enough of a threat to keep them from calling the cops even if they did hear me scream.
I dropped back down on the bed, cradling my head in my hands. It was starting already. It was too soon, but I could feel the itchiness of my skin, the fogginess of my brain. I was already starting to withdraw. I needed to focus, to think things through, to figure out a way to get through to the freaking sociopath I was stuck in an apartment with.
"Hey," he said, close. Too close. I snapped upward to find him right in front of me, squatting down so his eyes were a bit lower than mine and I didn't find coldness there or evil. I saw... understanding and warmth and maybe a bit of... pleading?
What was he pleading for?
I was the hostage.
"I want to go home," I tried. It was a lie. I really didn't want to go home to an apartment that felt like a prison, left alone with nothing but my dark thoughts.
"You will," he said, nodding. "But after you detox."
"Look, I think you might like... have good intentions here. But people need to detox in hospitals. They need to..."
"They need to wrap up in blankets and sweat, puke, scream, and cry through it," he cut me off. "And that's what you're going to do. Here."
"You're not a doctor," I insisted, knowing that fact down to my bones.
"No," he agreed, nodding, still way, way too casual about something so serious. "But I know all they are going to do at detox is load you up with Subs which are, in and of themselves, addictive. You can OD on Subs. And what they do is jack you up on that shit for the week or two you are at detox and then release you and you detox from the Subs and, without fucking fail, will go right back onto the harder shit. Most addicts go to detox willingly or by court appointment at least four or five times before they finally straighten out. You want to spend the next couple months or years on this roller coaster?"
No.
That was easy.
I definitely wanted to stop, before I got too out of hand. Before I graduated to street drugs. I knew enough about addiction to know that was inevitable. Pills would become hard to find or I wouldn't have the money for them anymore. Then it was just natural to switch over to heroin which was about half the price. Then, well, things didn't look good for me. Heroin was hard to get off of. It killed people all the time, daily. Hourly. It was all over my Facebook feed about people OD'ing on heroin in the middle of stores, in their parked cars, with their babies starving to death in the other room.
I didn't have a baby. But still.
I didn't want to go down that route.
I wanted to get out while I still could, before it completely consumed my life.
But I knew how awful I felt after just twelve hours of not having a high. I didn't even want to imagine how miserable I would feel after a day or two. I couldn't imagine going through that without assistance.
"Bethany," he said suddenly, breaking through my swirling thoughts. My eyes snapped up to him, again seeing nothing but good intentions there, which somehow made the whole situation worse. "I want to make this a choice. I think most addicts need that choice.
But I don't want to have to know you wasted ten years of your life on this shit when I knew I could kick you of it in a month."
The words were harmless. Actually, they were rather sweet. But there was something there, something between the words, something weighted and frightening.
"What are you..." I started, only to be cut off.
"You're staying here and you are detoxing," he said, finality in his tone.
There it was again.
And I knew it for what it was.
"You're not letting me have a choice." My words sounded hollow even to my own ears.
"I'm asking you to make the choice so I don't have to make it for you."
But either way, I was detoxing.
I wasn't upset by that fact.
I didn't want to be an addict. I didn't want to be that person I was raised to never turn into, to be a menace to society, to be a pathetic trope.
I wanted to get clean again, to turn things around before I was in too deep to see the way out anymore.
I wanted to detox.
But to be perfectly, painfully honest, it was absolutely terrifying. Any idiot knew what withdrawal was like- had seen it in movies or on TV. Even for someone who had never felt withdrawal, you could sense the overwhelming helplessness of it all. And however bad it looked, I knew it would be about a thousand times worse to live through it.
I was going to be forced through that one way or another. I would get sick and the sweats and the chills. I would hurt everywhere and rage and cry and feel more miserable than I ever had in my entire life.
I didn't know a damn thing about the gorgeous man called Lazarus Alexander, but I got the distinct impression that he would have no mercy. He wasn't going to give in to my pleas for a couple 30s to take away some of the misery. He would cut me off cold-turkey and force me to crash through the withdrawal until I was nothing but a puddle of sweat and tears and vomit on the floor.
"I get you're scared, sweetheart. And I won't sugarcoat it- you should be. This is going to be scary and awful and you're never going to feel more alone and miserable than you will the next week or so. But the worst is the first two or three days. That's it. Just three days. You can endure anything for three days, right?"
Lazarus (The Henchmen MC Book 7) Page 3
