by Roxie Noir
I go quiet for a moment, coming up to the edge of my memory of that night.
“I remember Allen thought Liam had gotten quite a lot,” I say softly, staring off into the distance. “And Liam said he was celebrating being able to speak the language again, and besides, it wasn’t much more than we’d been doing. But I took a bit less anyway, since I knew I had to stay upright for the show and couldn’t hide behind a drum kit.”
I swallow and rub my face with my hands. For a long time, I thought about that night constantly, but in the past month or so it’s started to fade, just a little, at least until right now.
“We, you know, did the thing, shot up, and as it’s going in the last thing I remember is thinking holy shite this is fucking strong.”
I look over at Marisol. She’s just listening, cheek against her knees.
“And then I woke up in the hospital a several hours later, strapped to a load of machines. Liam woke up in another twenty-four hours. They told me Allen was dead of an overdose when they found him. And then... the record label along with Darcy and Trent made it quite clear that my options were to enter rehab or have no more Dirtshine, and you know the rest.”
Marisol considers this all for a moment. I think she knew the basics already, because it’s not exactly a secret. It was in the news.
“Who found you?”
“Trent. He came to find us for the show, because he knew we were probably getting high and couldn’t get ourselves there, and when we didn’t answer the door he kicked it down.”
Her eyebrows go up.
“Trent kicked down a door?”
“He did.”
“He seems so... chill.”
I laugh. I’ve seen Trent do some spectacularly un-chill things.
“He has hidden depths,” I say.
“It must have been hard for him,” she says.
“It was,” I agree. “He came to visit me during my first stint and we talked it through for a good long while.”
I pause for a moment.
“We both cried,” I admit. “I think I cried more. Darcy cried when she visited too, though she shouted at me first. I did deserve it.”
“And Liam?”
I crack the knuckles on my left hand, because this particular relationship is nothing if not complicated.
“Liam was my other half for nearly twenty years,” I say, looking off into the distance. “He may as well be my brother. Dirtshine is his as much as it’s mine. Just about everything I’ve ever done he’s been a part of and vice versa.”
“But?” she says softly.
“But when he left rehab his first stop was at a liquor store,” I say. “We needed different things. I needed the band and he needed an escape, so I guess we both got what we wanted.”
I swallow.
“And all the same, I couldn’t turn him away when he showed up at my doorstep, even though I knew it was a bad idea. Because I always thought that, somehow, we’d get through this together. Even after I knew we wouldn’t, I wanted us to. Going on without Liam just feels a bit... wrong.”
Marisol reaches over and takes my hand. She doesn’t say anything, just holds it. After a bit I lie back on the blanket and she joins me, staring up into the branches. I force myself not to think about how close she is right now, how I haven’t seen her in over week, or how if I simply rolled over her body would be beneath mine, soft and warm and fucking irresistible.
“I don’t really know Liam, but I think he feels the same way,” she says softly. “And I think instead of getting better himself, he’s trying to hold you back with him so he’s not alone.”
“Have you been talking to my therapist?” I ask.
“It’s not exactly rocket science,” she laughs.
We look up at the tree and the sky beyond together. She shifts her hand in mine, settling her fingers between my knuckles, and then, finally, she looks over at me.
“Tell me what happened after I left before I lose my nerve,” she says, her deep brown eyes close to mine.
I kiss her. I can’t help myself.
“You can’t evade the question,” she says when I pull back.
I turn my face skyward again and steel myself, because while everything that happened before was Past Gavin, this was me. This wasn’t some drug-addicted arsehole who hurt people. This was me, hurting Marisol.
“The very first thing I did was chug half a bottle of vodka,” I start.
I list everything I remember mechanically, staring up at the sky. I can’t look at her, even though I feel her eyes on my face.
Tequila. Coke. The girl in Liam’s room, pills, something else, whiskey, more whiskey, putting up the blanket in the spare bedroom. Sitting around drunk as fuck and high off our asses, reminiscing about wretched flats in London when we were just starting out. Huge chunks of time completely lost to my memory.
And then: walking in on Liam with the needle in his arm. Him tossing me the baggie before he nodded out.
Me being completely trashed, recklessly high, but still with that ceaseless, gnawing emptiness inside that I couldn’t fucking get rid of, so I took it, only to find that snorting heroin off my bathroom sink didn’t fill it either.
I stop talking. I don’t tell Marisol that the gnawing emptiness faded when I got her first letter, that it shrunk when she wrote I think I love you. It’s not fair to let her think she’s in charge of keeping the darkness at bay.
She detaches her hand from mine and rolls over without talking, and for a moment I’m certain that she’s leaving, but instead she straightens her dress and lays on her stomach, her right side touching my left. I reach up and stroke her cheek with one knuckle, still waiting for her to say something, my heart feeling as if it might burst from my chest.
After a bit, she takes my hand and pulls my arm in front of her, tracing my veins and tattoos and scars with a fingertip absentmindedly, like she’s trying to put something into words and it’s not going well.
“Is that it?” she finally asks.
“More or less,” I say. “I woke up face down on the grass Wednesday morning and got halfway through a bottle of Jim Beam before I finally had the nerve to check myself in here again.”
She presses her fingertips against pockmarks on my arm, one by one, until her hand is splayed out.
“Is it going to happen again?” she asks softly, not looking at me.
We both know the truth, which is that I don’t know. I didn’t think it would happen this time. All I do know is that, right now, I’d sooner walk through a burning building than relapse again. But I also know that for once, I need to lie to her.
“No,” I say.
Marisol nods, still thinking. Finally, she looks at me.
“Gavin,” she says, her voice shaking. “If you’re going to destroy yourself, tell me now, because I can’t watch.”
I take her hand in mine and roll onto my side.
“I promise,” I say, and kiss her.
She feels soft and small, her mouth trembling just a little as she kisses me back. It’s the most vulnerable I’ve ever seen her, even worse than when she thought she was dissolving, and it turns something inside me to steel.
It can be easy for me to forget that this is her, too, fragile and wounded. I’m furious at myself for being the one to do this, because I should be doing the opposite. I should be protecting Marisol.
“I love you,” I say, and take a deep breath. I don’t know what I’m going to say next, because beyond that I don’t even know what I can say.
Marisol swallows hard.
“I’m not asking you to take me back,” I say slowly. She looks up at me, her eyes wide, bloodshot, and shining. “I don’t deserve that. You could walk out of here right now and never speak to me again and that would be what I deserve. And I know it.”
“Gavin, I…”
She trails off, because I don’t think she knows what to say either.
“All I’m asking is the chance to prove myself,” I go on, an enormous lum
p in my throat. “Let me wake up every morning and fix myself slowly, and text you and call you and take you out on dates sometimes. It’s all I want. I don’t give a fuck if we put a tag on it, Marisol, just let me earn a place in your life again. Please.”
Marisol slides a finger under the leather band around my wrist. There’s just one where there used to be a pile.
“You’ve got a start,” she says.
“I kept the rest, being an optimist,” I admit.
“I don't know,” she finally whispers. “I mean, I know I came here, and I’ve been writing you letters and requesting ceramic bowls and everything, but…”
She trails off again, looking away. My breath catches in my throat and I hold it for a moment, then let it out slowly.
“You don’t have to know now,” I say, ignoring the weight in my chest. More than anything, I want her to say yes, I’ll give you a chance, but it’s not up to me.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s just, that – I don’t know, Gavin, this all seems really fucked.”
I kiss her gently on the temple, and she inhales raggedly.
“You don’t have to explain. You don’t have to do anything. You came, you’re here, and since rehab’s all about living in the moment, it’s all I could have wanted,” I murmur into her hair.
“What’s next?” she asks.
“I could have sworn I just said I was focusing on the moment,” I tease gently.
Marisol just frowns at me slightly. The joke doesn’t land.
“I’ve got an extensive recovery plan,” I say. “It’s got benchmarks and dates and check-ins and bullet points and everything.”
I tell her about it. I go into details, I talk about the research and science of recovery, I point out that the books she got from the library are where I got a lot of these ideas in the first place. I tell her Liam’s back in England and I haven’t spoken to him.
Gradually, we fade to simply talking, about finals and her parents and the crazy noises her upstairs neighbors make. I admit that at the last group therapy session, someone broke the talking stick, so I’m excited for tonight’s because it might be pandemonium.
We lie there, on the grass, until visiting hours are nearly over. She still hasn’t said yes or no to giving me a chance, but she’s stopped crying and started laughing. Her dress has fallen against her and I can see every curve of her body in perfect detail, the skirt hiked up her legs slightly.
It’s ten days I’ve been wanking in the shower, and despite myself, I’m disastrously hard.
“I should go,” she’s saying. “I assume that at the stroke of six, they release the tigers or something.”
“One way to find out,” I say.
Marisol takes a deep breath. She’s on her back, looking at the sky, our hands intertwined.
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” she says.
“Don’t,” I say. “You should be studying for finals, not driving to Malibu to see some pathetic wretch.”
“Are you trying to tell me what to do?” she asks, looking at me, a smile in her eyes. She rolls over onto her side.
I grin.
“I would never,” I say. “Only suggest.”
“Do you not want to…”
She catches sight of the huge bulge in my pants, and cocks one eyebrow.
“…see me?” she finishes. “You know I was crying earlier, right?”
“I can’t help it,” I say. “He’s got a mind of his own, I swear.”
I glance down.
“Rude,” I tell my cock. “And fucking inappropriate.”
Marisol laughs, even though her face is still red and splotchy.
“Obviously I want to see you,” I say.
“Obviously,” she says, and gives me a kiss on the lips.
She leaves without giving me an answer. It stings that I still don’t know, and I carry a knot of tension in my chest all night, but she’s coming back tomorrow. She requested another ceramic bowl. Those things aren’t yes, I’ll let you try again, but they’re signs pointing in the right direction.
And for now, it’s enough.
49
Marisol
The next Saturday, I’m sitting in the same lounge where I first saw Gavin a week ago, waiting for him to finish up some exit paperwork.
My mind is racing. The past week was insane, and now that it’s over I still can’t get myself to relax. But I finished my finals, wrote all my papers, completed the research project I was helping a professor with, and did all my graduation paperwork.
And I got the job at Ramirez & Chabon, the immigration firm where I interviewed the day before everything went to hell. A huge relief, but bittersweet, because when I got the call, more than anything, I wanted to tell Gavin but had to wait until he called me with his allotted time.
I said yes. Despite the voice in my head telling me that it was stupid to give him another chance, I did. He’s not my boyfriend, at least not yet. He won’t be meeting my parents any time soon, and I won’t be attending any functions with him. We’re not official.
And he knows that this is it, the only do-over he gets. I can’t let him break my heart like this again, so this is the last chance.
But I’m here, picking him up from rehab and taking him home. Because maybe it’s a mistake, and maybe my heart is stupid, but I do love him.
Plus I missed him. I’ve gone through an astonishing number of batteries in the past two weeks.
“I’m free,” Gavin says, walking into the lounge, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder.
I haven’t seen him since Sunday, so I practically leap into his arms and give him a long, long kiss. The duffel bag drops to the floor and he wraps both arms around me, one hand traveling down my back and then even lower, cupping my ass and pulling me against him.
This time, there’s no one else in the lounge, but it’s completely open, anything but private.
“Ready to go home?” I ask, hoping I sound sultry, that my undertone of home is where the bed is comes through.
Gavin kisses me again. He’s already rock hard, and despite the setting it stokes a fire inside me, too, and then I’m on my tiptoes, crushing myself against him, my tongue in his mouth.
Someone walks by and I pull back, surprised. Gavin doesn’t even laugh, just looks at me with an expression so intense it’s almost unreadable.
“I think I left something in the room,” he says, his voice rough and low.
That’s not what I was expecting.
“Okay?”
“Come help me look for it?”
Gavin winks, then takes my hand and pulls me along. We walk past a nurses’ station, down a hall, and then into a room with two perfectly-made twin beds.
“What was it?” I ask, looking around.
He pulls me through the room and into the bathroom on the far end, closes the door and locks it.
Then he pushes me against the counter, his hands on my hips.
“Only door that locks,” he says into my mouth. “I don’t know if I’ll make it all the way home.”
A charge of electricity goes down my spine as Gavin presses his mouth against mine hungrily and I press back, feeling as if I’ve gone up in a whoosh of flame. I buck my hips against his hard length and he groans softly, curling his tongue around mine, my hands in his hair.
Then he pulls back, and I catch his bottom lip between my teeth.
I swear he growls at me, the sound low and raspy and pure, delicious, primal sex, and suddenly this can’t happen fast enough.
Gavin shoves my skirt up over my hips and I grab him by the belt, unbuckling it as he tugs my underwear off, shoving one hand between my legs and sliding his fingers through my wetness. I hook a leg around him and unbutton his jeans, our mouths together.
I unzip him and he pushes his fingers inside me, the flat of his hand against my clit, and I gasp, taking his length in my hand and stroking him from root to tip.
He leans in and bites my earlobe, his fingers curling inside me as I
bite back a moan.
“More,” I whisper.
He chuckles into my ear and it makes a shiver run through my whole body.
“Marisol,” he says, his voice low and rough and demanding. “I love you and I’m going to fuck you over this counter.”
“Good,” I whisper back.
He pulls his fingers out and turns me around, my hips braced against cool marble. We’re facing a huge vanity mirror, Gavin behind me, and I lock eyes with him as I brace myself against the counter.
I wink.
Gavin grins at me, then lowers his mouth to my ear, still looking me dead in the eyes.
“You saucy minx,” he says.
The head of his cock is against my slit, and I bite my lip and hold my breath, just anticipating the moment when he’s finally inside me again, when he sends a shockwave all the way to my toes. But he slides it down, between my lips, spreading my wetness to my clit and sending a tremor through my body.
I swallow a moan, my hands curling around the edge of the countertop.
“Come on,” I whisper.
He circles my clit once, slides back, and then he drives himself inside me so hard and deep that I grunt and put one hand on the mirror to steady myself.
“I fucking love that noise,” he growls.
“I fucking love your cock,” I gasp.
“Jesus,” he whispers, and drives himself in again, crushing my hips against the countertop.
This isn’t sweet, it isn’t gentle, it’s fast and hard and needy. It’s what I craved, the pure expression of sweaty, moaning, desperate togetherness.
I’m going to have bruises tomorrow, but right now it feels so damn good that I’m already losing control, every thought in my head dwindling down to the single point of white-hot heat that’s building inside me.
He grabs my shoulder, hooking his hand around me and pulling me closer and I arch my back, my hand in his hair. I think I’m moaning, or at least making noise, and my eyes slide shut again.
“Make me come,” I whisper. “God, please.”
