Addicted for Now (Addicted Series 2)

by Ritchie, Krista

  “Rose already showed me where the door is,” Connor says. “I’m fairly capable of knowing when and how to walk out of it.”

  “The media may get worse,” I remind him, but I forget that Connor has probably weighed all the possibilities in his head, and maybe even created a mental spreadsheet of the pros and cons of the situation.

  “Yes, and you’ll need someone who doesn’t curse every five words to handle the press.”

  Ryke rolls his eyes, the dig clearly referring to him. “Journalism major,” Ryke says, pointing to his chest. “I know the press better than you, Cobalt.”

  “And do you really plan on doing anything with that degree?”

  Ryke says nothing.

  “Exactly.”

  “What about your mother’s company?” I ask Connor.

  “Cobalt Inc. isn’t a household name. People don’t associate us with our products like they do Hale Co.—your name is on the label of every baby shampoo and diaper package. We deal with manufacturers and subsidiaries.” Like MagNetic, I remember. “My affiliation with you or Lily won’t hurt the company, and for that, my mother won’t care. And plus, if she’s outside of the scandal looking in, she enjoys the drama from time to time. It keeps her days interesting.”

  I wonder if that’s how he sees us sometimes. Interesting. Entertainment. Something to make each day unpredictable.

  I also can’t imagine the woman who spawned someone like Connor. She seems as fabricated as a character in one of my comics.

  “Like I said, Lo,” Connor finishes, “I know how to use the door.”

  Ryke nods to me. “You going to give me an out too?”

  “No, if I’m going down, you’re burning with me.”

  “Does that qualify as a brotherly obligation?”

  “For me, yeah.”

  Daisy fumbles with the remote and it drops loudly on the hardwood. “Sorry,” she mumbles and continues to stare at the black television.

  I want to watch the news and figure out how much the media already knows. Finding the leak has become a second priority. Our first task is to clean up whatever blowback we’re about to receive. I suspect Greg Calloway and possibly my father are already working with a team of lawyers to subdue the crisis. One of the many reasons they’ll want to talk to us.

  I don’t trust them. But I do trust the people in this room, and that’s enough to put me at ease for the current moment.

  I realize Daisy is still in the dark—about a lot of things. It’s not fair to her, especially since we’ll be talking freely now. “Do you have any questions, Daisy?” I ask, slouching on the couch.

  She places the remote carefully on the coffee table and sits cross-legged on the floor.

  “I do have a beanbag,” Ryke says.

  “I see it.” But she hugs her knees loosely, making no move. Her eyes flit to me. “I have hundreds of questions, but I can wait to ask Lily. I don’t want her to be upset if you reveal something that she wants to keep secret.”

  “You’re going to hear it on the television or the tabloids anyway,” I tell her. “She would prefer if you knew the truth from me.”

  She hesitates. “I can ask anything?”

  Anything is a strong word, but I’m confident in my ability to deflect the too-personal questions. I agree with a nod.

  “If this is going to be a Q&A, then I have a couple questions as well,” Ryke says.

  I smile bitterly. “Of course you do.”

  Daisy throws the nearest pillow at him. “This is my Q&A.”

  He catches the pillow. “Now you’re throwing my things, but you won’t sit on the damn beanbag?”

  “You’re pushy—did anyone ever tell you that?”

  “I do all the time,” I say. “He never listens.”

  Ryke raises his hands like what the fuck. “I’m sorry if I can tell that there’s an uncomfortable girl on my fucking floor, and I know how to fix the problem.”

  “Don’t,” I warn him. We’re not opening those floodgates ever, ever again. I can withstand him being friendly to Daisy in tiny microscopic doses, but when he starts talking about girls on floors and fixing shit, it makes me nervous.

  Daisy asks the first question, which doesn’t necessarily lessen any tension in the room. I’m not sure anything can after the leak. “Have you and Lily been in an open relationship?”

  I like to refer to what we had as a “fake” relationship, but when we became a pretend couple, we were a couple. I had everything with her that a boyfriend would have. Except the sex. But when I think of open relationships, I picture swingers and people who have multiple partners. I’m sure the term is vague enough to encompass a variety of situations. Just not ours.

  I don’t have a yes or no answer for Daisy, so I have to go into explaining what we did. How we lied to her and everyone around us. How our friendship turned into something more but still remained something less.

  “Wow,” Daisy says when I finish. “All to hide your addictions? Couldn’t you have just, I don’t know, moved to Europe?”

  “We contemplated it.”

  Her face falls. “I was joking.”

  I shrug, indifferent about it all. “Lily and I never ignored you because you’re younger. The phone calls we didn’t pick up, the lunches we canceled, all of that was because we’d rather drink and have sex than be around people. Especially ones that we’d have to lie to.”

  “That’s messed up,” Daisy tells me.

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “Actually, I told you it was fucked up,” Ryke clarifies.

  Daisy ignores him. “Why is she a sex addict? Is there something that caused it?”

  My throat goes dry and my eyes flicker to the bedroom door.

  Lily and I haven’t discussed the cause of her addiction, but I know she’s been trying to sparse through the past with Allison.

  Lily shuts down when it comes to her childhood, refusing to look at her relationship with her family for what it truly is. I can touch her painful memories without being terrorized by the hurt, and in turn she can focus on mine without bearing the guilt. It’s a symbiosis that I’ve come to recognize after hours and hours of therapy.

  Whether we allow ourselves to open up to our own feelings—well that’s something we’re both working on.

  My silence lingers in the air as I try to focus on a suitable answer.

  Ryke grows restless by the quiet. “I’ve read that eighty percent of sex addicts are abused as a child. Did Lily—”

  “No,” I cut him off, my tone defensive and edged. My eyes bear the same heat, and I wonder if this is why Ryke has never asked me that question before.

  “I’m not the only one who will fucking ask that,” he snaps. “You’re going to have to start being less sensitive.”

  I glower at that word…sensitive. It makes me sound weak and fragile. It’s one of those words in my father’s arsenal. I wasn’t living up to my potential when I failed a sixth grade math test, when I had to do a group project alone after no one picked me, when I lost a Little League game. He told me I was worthless, and as a kid I didn’t know how to stop those tears. Don’t be so sensitive, Loren. You’re being too sensitive, Loren. Why are you so goddamn sensitive, Loren? So I stopped crying. Now I just get mad.

  My eyes are on Ryke and my mouth moves before I can stop it. “I’m not sensitive,” I deadpan. “You’re the one who flinched every time I called your mother a cunt.” Granted, that was before I knew Sara Hale was his mom. I just thought she was mine, the one who abandoned me.

  On cue, Ryke cringes at literally the only cuss word he can’t stand.

  I watch the way his face flips through emotions, and in a quick second he settles on one: Guilt.

  I expected rage, a battle of words, something to perpetuate the turmoil spinning in my stomach. Not his eyes to cloud with remorse, as if he was the one who spitefully slandered his mother.

  He knows me. He knows what I was thinking, why I say the things I do. Between the aggress
ive attitude and foul language, I often forget Ryke has a brain, probably one that works better than mine.

  “Not sensitive,” he says softly, almost hesitant. “I think guarded and defensive are better words.”

  His eyes fill with apologies, not wanting to hurt me like my father does. Ryke doesn’t have the same fear as me, the one where I turn into Jonathan Hale. But for a moment, Ryke must have tasted what it was like to be him. I personally know it isn’t pleasant.

  After a deep breath, I say, “I can’t help it. I’m always going to be defensive when it comes to Lily.”

  “We’re her sisters,” Rose pipes in. “Everyone in this room loves Lily and you. We are the last people you should be guarded around.”

  Something burns inside of me, words that ache to be released. I’ve never talked to any of Lily’s sisters about their childhood. I only know what I’ve seen and what Lily has told me. If anyone can fill in the blanks and help me answer Daisy’s question, it’s Rose.

  “Why was Lily allowed to spend nights at my house?” I ask.

  “You were her friend.”

  “Rose. What friends at twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old spend the majority of nights at someone else’s house?”

  She narrows her eyes. “It was usually on the weekend.”

  Holy shit. Someone has taken a sledgehammer to my stomach.

  By the look on her face, she has no idea how many nights Lily slept at my house when we were children. But how many activities did Rose’s mother bombard her with? Ballet, horseback riding, piano, French.

  Off my shock, Rose starts shaking her head fiercely. “I would have known. I would have seen her walk through the front door in the mornings…” Her face falls, and Connor reaches for her hand while she stares off dazedly.

  “You never saw her in the mornings,” I say what Rose is thinking. “My father’s driver always took us to school from my house.”

  “I had club meetings in the morning. I left early all the time, so I just thought she was asleep.” It wasn’t Rose’s duty to take care of Lily. She’s only two years older. “How many nights did Lily sleep at your house?”

  “In middle school, about four days a week, and then she just kept coming over more and more until high school…” I shake my head and cringe. It’s my fault. A huge part of what happened, I know, I caused. “…in high school, she slept over almost every night.”

  “I didn’t know that either,” Daisy admits. I’m not surprised. Daisy is a lot younger, and when she turned about eleven, her mother started pursuing acting and modeling agencies for her. And for the majority of Daisy’s tweens, I remember how she always looked exhausted, eyes heavy-lidded and yawning more than talking.

  “Our parents couldn’t have known about your sleepovers,” Rose says. “They would have never allowed it.”

  “Are you sure?” I ask.

  This is where my chest constricts, where vile resentment starts to pound in my head. I didn’t have these feelings towards Samantha and Greg Calloway until I went to rehab. Before that, I thought they were the coolest parents for letting their daughter, my best friend, spend an exorbitant amount of time with me. Sitting in therapy for three months and becoming sober has cleared the dust.

  I’m beginning to understand what happened.

  Connor’s mouth slowly parts in realization, letting me know he’s put the pieces together. Why Lily is the way she is.

  Rose is clouded by her own relationship with her parents. She sees a mother who inserts herself into her daughters’ lives to the point where compassion transforms into suffocation. She sees a father who loves his children, buying them fancy things and sending them to exotic places to show his affection.

  “Loren,” Rose says, “finish what you have to say.”

  “Every day, Lily asked her mother if she could spend the night at my house. The answer was always the same. And then when Lily was fourteen or fifteen, Samantha finally told us to just stop asking, that she’d approve no matter what.”

  I remember Lily crying onto my pillow that same night. She never told me straight out, but I knew the only reason she even asked her mother in the first place was because she wanted to hear the word no. A single sign that her mother cared about her the same way that she did Poppy, Rose, and Daisy. That she wasn’t undeserving of her mother’s time and attention. Her mother doted on her other sisters. She put all her excess energy into them, skipping right over Lily as though she was worthless of that affection.

  And so she tried to find it down the street. With me. And when that wasn’t enough, she tried to fill it with other men. With sex. With a high and an intense burst of emotion.

  “You know why Lily was allowed at my house at night?” I ask Rose, starting from the beginning again.

  Her cheeks concave, her back goes rigid, and a familiar chill fills her eyes. “Because you’re a Hale.”

  That’s what I thought.

  “What does that fucking mean?” Ryke asks.

  “Lily didn’t need to be good at anything,” I tell him. “Her mother passed over her because she was my friend. I was her future.” The heir of a multi-billion dollar empire. Her mother concentrated on Daisy, on Rose, who could be more successful in other facets. But Lily—her worth centered on a guy. Me. And I think, somewhere in her head, she believed it herself. That she would never amount to anything more than pleasing other men. That she was destined for a life less than her sister’s.

  Daisy frowns. “I thought Lily just got a pass since she was kind of average at everything. I’ve always been jealous of the freedom she gets.”

  I nod. “Lily thinks she should be grateful for the freedom too.” That’s why she has trouble admitting to herself that she’s been hurt by her mother. She could have been suffocated like her sisters. And she wasn’t.

  But there should have been a happy medium between what Lily had and what Daisy is now enduring.

  I pause for a second, these words some of the hardest to produce. “Your mother outwardly loved you, Daisy, and you, Rose,” I say looking to each of the girls. “Even Poppy was showered with this type of overbearing maternal affection. And Lily…she was denied all of that. She was like the runt in the litter.”

  Rose’s eyes glass like she may cry. I’ve never witnessed tears from her. I always imagined that they’d ice over. Her voice, however, is strangely stoic. “I didn’t realize…” She shakes her head. “My mother wanted the two of you to become a couple. I knew that, but I blamed you more for taking my sister away from me. I didn’t realize that she really had nowhere else to go.”

  Well that kind of makes me feel like shit. She makes it sound like I was Lily’s only option. “She could have stayed home.”

  “She would have been alone, Loren. I was barely around because of school and ballet.”

  And then a wave of guilt just annihilates me. “Yeah, well maybe she should have been alone. Look what good it did being around me.” I shake my head, running my hands repeatedly through my hair. My leg starts to jostle in anxiety.

  “You didn’t do this,” Rose tells me. “Our mother should have told her that she loved her for something more than being with you. She could have found her something to do, something to achieve.” A dream, a passion, a hobby, a fucking sport. Sex became all of those things for Lily. And I never stopped her. Not once. I was so consumed with my addiction that I didn’t care what the hell she did, as long as she was breathing at the end of the night. As long as she was by my side—my best fucking friend.

  “You don’t understand,” I mutter. I led her here. Unknowingly, I brought her to this place in her life. If I never even existed, she would have received that love from her mother that she craved.

  “Then tell me.”

  “You don’t get it.”

  “Loren—”

  “She slept in my bed!” I shout, my eyes welling. They burn so badly. “I let her sleep in the same bed as me. Okay, this wasn’t Dawson’s Creek. I never kicked her ou
t after we hit puberty.”

  Rose whispers to Connor, “I don’t understand the correlation.”

  “Dawson and Joey stopped sleeping in the same bed together in the first episode. She said that he was old enough to get an erection.”

  Rose looks back to me. “You didn’t have sex with her every night, did you?”

  “No, but—”

  “You can’t compare your life to a television show.” The fact that Rose is defending me does not entirely help. I’m used to her tearing me down, not building me up. I keep waiting for someone to thrash me with their words, with their feelings. With hate. I deserve that pain. It’s my fucking fault.

  “You don’t get it!” I’m on my feet somehow. “I could have stopped her. I should have walked her down that road every night. I should have done something.” Instead I gave her a bed to sleep in, a place to fill her vice.

  “Loren,” Rose starts.

  “Stop,” I say, placing my hands on my head, these thoughts swarming me in a tidal wave, the guilt so unbearable on my chest. “You should hate me,” I tell her. “I deserve that.” I nod. “I broke your sister.” My face contorts in pain, a hot tear escaping. I want to punch something. To go run until my heart stops, until the breath just leaves me cold and dry.

  No one says a thing. They wait for me to collect my bearings.

  My breathing slows, and I rub my face. When I drop my hands, I say softly, “I wish I could take it all back.” I want to reverse time. To walk Lily right out of my house, down the street and to her own bedroom door. I would tell her that it’s okay if her mother doesn’t love her because her sisters do. And she doesn’t need to avoid her house by being in mine—that she shouldn’t keep searching for love in sex because it will only leave her empty and miserable.

  I should have told her all of these things, but I didn’t know any of them back then. And I was too goddamn drunk to care.

  “It’s not your fault,” Rose says. “You were a kid. We all were.”