long, but she’ll do, at least I think she will.
But as soon as I think it, my thoughts drift back to my apartment where there’s already a beautiful blonde. I wonder what she’s doing. If she’s okay. Why did I just leave her like that?
“Hello, are you listening to me?” the blonde in front of me says and I blink out of my daze.
“No, sorry, I can’t hear you over all the noise.” I gesture around at the machines flashing around us.
She nods, biting on her lip. “Well, maybe we could go somewhere quiet.”
I want to but all I can think about right now is how I bailed on Lila because my emotions were getting the best of me. Because I wanted to kiss her in the truck and then take her upstairs and fuck her again. I want to be with her and for it to be more than just a one-time thing. I want to break my rules for her. The last person I broke my rules for was London, and I wanted her to be my last, at least I did at one point in my life, but now I’m not so sure.
The sounds of the slot machines are driving me crazy, along with the music playing. I could go with this woman somewhere that’s less noisy, like a hotel room. Stay there for a few hours until I’m sweaty and temporarily content. Yeah, I could do that.
“Sure, we could go some place else.” I smile at her, but I feel anything but happy on the inside.
She tells her friends she’ll be back in a while and we head up the strip, weaving through the people. She starts telling me about her life, but I barely listen. I just keep nodding my head, thinking about Lila and how I feel about her, and every time I reach the same conclusion. That I don’t think I can think about being with her completely yet, not without thinking about London as well.
I’ve always been good at controlling my actions and emotions, but they’re out of control at the moment, a wild reckless tornado sweeping through my body. I can’t think straight. Lila. London. Lila. London. The slutty girl in front of me. I have no idea what I want and the truth is, whether I want to admit it to myself or not, I’ve been dependent on the idea of London, holding on to her and on to the guilt I felt for walking away from her that day. I can pretend all I want, but all the sex and numbness I’ve been seeking, just like I’m about to with this girl, was just covering it up, not getting rid of it. And now I’m trying to do the same thing with Lila because I feel guilty over having feelings for her. I think until I can let London go, I won’t ever really be able to be with Lila on a complete emotional level where I’m just thinking of her. And that’s what she deserves. Not my halfhearted attention or my moodiness where I run off to avoid what I’m feeling through sex. It’s a revelation. A big, painful revelation and I have no idea what to do with it, although my original instincts say to go fuck this woman and forget about stuff for a moment.
I suddenly stop in the middle of the strip and people run into me.
The woman I’ve been walking with slows down, looking confused. “What’s wrong?”
I blow out a breath, raking my fingers through my hair, thinking about how bad I just want to fuck her and momentarily feel better and how Lila is probably at home feeling the same way about taking pills, especially with how sad she looked when I bailed on her. “I have to go,” I tell her, backing away from her through the crowd. I may not be able to have a relationship at the moment with Lila, but I can be her friend and I can walk away from having sex with this woman because I really don’t want to be with her.
“What do you mean you have to go?” she calls out, but doesn’t follow after me, probably because she doesn’t care enough to try. We were simply two people looking for something in the wrong places and we didn’t even bother to get each other’s names.
When I make it back to my truck, I try to call Lila but she doesn’t answer, so I make tire-ripping veer onto the road and floor the gas pedal, pushing the speed limit until I get back to the apartment. I’m worried about what I’ll find and feel guilty that I’ve bailed out on a girl
When I open the door, my nostrils are instantly flooded with the scent of paint thinner. Or nail polish anyway. Lila peers up at me from the couch, her damp hair a veil around her flushed face. She has her foot propped up on the coffee table and she’s painting her toenails as music plays in the background. My eyes instantly go to the half-empty beer on the table.
“It’s just a beer,” she quickly says as she swipes the paintbrush on her toenail.
“Is it the only thing?” I hate asking, but I need to know.
She blows out a breath, her bangs fluttering up from her face. “What do you think?”
I shut the door and toss the truck keys next to the lamp. “Whatever you tell me, I’ll think.” I hope though that, like me, she was able to stay away from the one thing that helps her numb the stuff she doesn’t want to feel. I hope she still feels her emotions right now like I am. Because seeing her sitting here makes me realize that even though I still have a lot of shit to work on, mainly with figuring out how to let London and my guilt for her go, walking away from that woman on the strip was the right thing to do.
She puts the brush into the tiny bottle and twists it on, screwing it tightly closed. Then she sits back in the sofa, staring at me with an unreadable expression. “I didn’t take anything, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
I lower myself down onto the armrest and I’m overwhelmed with the scent of nail polish and her shampoo. “I’m not getting at anything, Lila. I just walked into my apartment.”
“Yeah, but that’s why you came back, right?” She scoffs. “Because you thought I was going to do something stupid.”
I let out a stressed breath. “Look, I know things have been weird between us, but—”
“Weird,” she says, cutting me off and throwing her hands into the air exasperatedly. “Ethan, you almost kissed me in the truck and then that night… that night we refuse to talk about…” She shakes her head, discouraged. “I don’t even know where we stand anymore.”
“I don’t…” I struggle for words, surprised by how she tossed it out there so openly. It throws me off and I struggle to get my balance back, but I’m hopelessly falling to a place I’m unfamiliar with and I need to regain my footing before I do anything drastically life-altering. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I don’t either,” she says. “And it’s been driving me crazy, because I have no idea what I want or what you’re thinking. I’m going so crazy that I seriously thought about using again. Every single thing is driving me crazy!” She balls her hands into fists, about to scream. “I can’t take it anymore. I’m going to lose it. I seriously think I’m losing my mind. I mean, maybe I need to be on pills. Maybe they were what was keeping me sane and now all of my insanity is out there for the whole world to see.”
She doesn’t have to explain. I know what she means. I thrum my fingers on the side of my leg, racking my brain for something that will make this situation better. I need to calm her down and make her understand that she’s not in this alone. “Did I ever tell you about the time I ran my truck into the ditch?” I have a vague idea of where I’m going with this, but honestly I just might be rambling.
“What?” She gapes at me, dumbfounded. “How does that have anything to do with what I just said?”
I slide off the armrest and down onto the cushion, leaving a little distance between us as I kick my feet up onto the coffee table. “It happened two days after I decided to clean up my act. I was pretty much insane and my mind was all over the place. I seriously thought I was going crazy.” I omit the fact that a major part of this had to do with London, because even though I’ve realized my issues with holding on to London, I’m still not ready to talk to Lila about her. “I ended up dozing off and ramming my truck into a ditch. I was completely sober, and that in and of itself can be even more complex than getting high. It’s distracting, you know. And hard.”
She taps her foot on the ground, refusing to look at me. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because”—I lean closer to her and start to shut my eyes when I get a whiff of her perfume, but quickly blink my eyes open—“I want to let you know that I understand how you’re feeling and that sometimes things do feel all crazy, but it’ll fade.”
She sighs begrudgingly. “How long?”
“Until what?”
“Until it goes away completely?”
I stare ahead at the wall in front of us. “I’m not sure it ever does go completely away. It’s always kind of there, you know. Like a sleeping beast or something, but the intensity of the cravings fades away.”
She turns her head toward me. “Did the beast ever wake up for you? I mean, have you ever slipped up?”
I nod. “Once. About a year after I stopped doing drugs.” The day I saw London again. It was too much to see her like that, a shell of her old self.
“And then what?” Lila asks. “You just fixed yourself again?”
“Pretty much,” I say, again omitting the truth. That I was afraid of myself when I do drugs. Afraid of what I
