Chapter Sixteen
Damon sat in the car, eyes on the lights of the restaurant and on the solitary figure in the dark field, and cried. There were a hundred things he was thinking, but one particular frustration stood out above all the rest.
Why? Why him?
One of the first things he’d demanded after showing up in rehab was why. Why did he rely so heavily on alcohol? Why did having one drink make him want ten more? Why did life only exist in technicolor when he had a drink in his hand?
Grant, his sober coach, had looked at him frankly during one of their first sessions and had told him that there wasn’t an answer to any of his questions, and that Damon was going to have to find a path to sobriety a different way.
That had pissed him off, and subsequently, he’d spent the last four years pissed off that he didn’t know why. He’d gotten sober anyway, with determination and with Grant’s support, but the whole time the questions had burned away inside him.
The questions were why he’d been out in the pouring rain, ripping up the vines in the first place. The questions were why, after Rachel, he’d been determined to stay single so that he wouldn’t ruin any other lives besides his own.
For a little while, falling in love with Xander had brought happiness and joy and hope to his life, wrenching it from his boring black-and-white existence, and transporting it into technicolor reality for the first time since rehab.
It had been hard enough to find his way to sobriety and leave all that brightness behind when booze had been responsible, but love was a lot tougher to turn his back on. What he wanted was something he had no right to demand, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself.
Xander didn’t even know why Damon had walked away; it wasn’t because he “fucked up” and said some stuff he wanted to take back. It was because the stuff he’d said brought all Damon’s fears into the forefront.
There was a part of him that wanted to go see his father and demand an explanation, or maybe even apology.
But he’d covered that after rehab. Nathan Hess took zero responsibility and had zero fucks to give that his son was an alcoholic.
No amount of ranting or threats or tears were going to change his mind.
Damon had stopped looking for answers from his father a long time ago because there were never any to find.
He glanced down at the phone in his hand and realized his fingers were trembling.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen them shake like this—then it hit him.
The last time, he’d wanted a drink so badly he could nearly taste the wine pooling on his tongue.
Or the beer. Or the whiskey. He hadn’t particularly cared what it was, only that it promised oblivion from feeling like this.
He couldn’t pinpoint the time or the day, or even the month. It had become part of him, a background haze that he could ignore now because he wanted to be better more than he wanted the emptiness alcohol brought. But today?
Today and the fight with Xander had just reminded him of how easy it was.
Damon knew what he had to do. He called the person who had seen him at his worst and had still never judged him.
“It’s been a long time, Damon,” Grant answered, only letting it ring twice. “Is everything okay?”
Right after the two months Damon had spent in rehab, he and Grant had talked every day—sometimes multiple times a day.
He’d supported Damon going to collect his vineyard inheritance when nobody else did.
Grant’s phone calls and texts and emails had gotten Damon through a lot of bleak nights, but in the year since first meeting Xander, they’d dwindled, especially as Damon became more confident in his sobriety.
By the time he hired Xander, he and Grant were only exchanging emails once or twice a month.
And before, that was perfectly okay. Damon was fine, he didn’t need Grant’s help.
The last email from Grant had mentioned that sometimes there were other, uncovered issues that stemmed from alcoholism, and he’d encouraged Damon to find a regular therapist.
Damon had thought Grant was full of shit until now. But clearly he had issues, or else why would he have left the man he loved to deal with the restaurant opening by himself? Why else would he have walked away tonight, even though it had hurt like hell to do it?
“No,” Damon answered truthfully. “No, it’s not okay. I’m not okay.”
“Are you drinking?” Grant asked, his voice careful. “Do I need to come get you?”
“I’m sober.” He took a deep breath. “In love. But sober. I just don’t know how to deal with it. Sobriety I know, love is a complete fucking mystery.”
Damon felt Grant’s knowing smile over the phone line. “We talked about this. What happened with Rachel wasn’t entirely your fault. Marrying so young, you’d already begun to drift apart by the time you started drinking more heavily.”
“I know,” Damon said, but he wasn’t sure he really believed his own words.
“It doesn’t matter if you have an addiction, Damon. You still deserve good things. Like finding someone to love.”
Damon’s voice was barely above a whisper. “How do I believe that?”
“Probably a lot of therapy, but I’ll get you started since you called me first. Does this person love you back?”
Damon thought of Xander’s destroyed face as he’d walked away. “I think so, yeah.”
“Do you think they’re a smart person? Intelligent? Thoughtful? Do you think they value their own happiness?”
“Of course I do,” Damon snapped. He never would have fallen in love with Xander otherwise.
“Do you think they’d fall in love with someone who wasn’t worthy of their love?”
“I know what you’re doing.” Damon knew the leash on his temper was short tonight; it was almost definitely because it had nearly killed him to walk away from Xander.
Staying away completely had been impossible.
He’d come because he couldn’t be anywhere else.
He’d stood in the garden for hours, watching the lights and the customers pour in, and then pour back out, happy and grinning, full from Xander’s creations.
Anger and envy had surged inside him, nearly bringing him to his knees, but what had actually done it was Xander showing up.
Yes, he’d come here, but he’d never actually expected Xander to catch him.
“Then you know what I’m going to say,” Grant said, always so painfully reasonable. “If the person you love sees something worthwhile and worth loving in you, then it must exist. You don’t have to believe me. You just need to believe in them.”
“I do,” Damon whispered. He’d believed in Xander from the first moment they’d ever met, rain dripping relentlessly through his dark hair.
“Then you have your answer. You just have to choose to believe it.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“It is that easy. You can do this, I have faith that you can. Now, tomorrow morning call one of the therapists I sent you.”
“I almost called my dad, and I’m so glad I didn’t,” Damon confessed. “I’m glad I called you instead.”
“I’m glad too,” Grant said. “He’s a waste of your time.
You’re never going to get a worthwhile answer out of him.
You already know that. But this person you love, that’s a different story.
They deserve better; they deserve your best.” He hesitated.
“And don’t tell me you’re not capable of your best because you’re an addict. We both know that’s not true.”
For the first time in days, Damon felt a spark of what Grant was describing.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”
Grant laughed. “I’m totally right. Now go fix this.”
“I’m going to,” Damon said. “There’s just something I need to do first.”
The security code to the vault was unchanged. Damon supposed he should be surprised, because of the hundreds of dollars of wine stored here, but his father was a creature of habit, and also egotistically believed that nobody would ever dare steal from him.
He looked up at the camera in the corner, and gave his father, who would be watching the security footage hours from now, a one-finger salute.
Nathan was damn lucky that the only thing Damon intended to steal from him was some alone time.
Pulling the door open, hearing the hiss of the pressure release, Damon stepped into the vault, and let the particular smell of wine barrels and dust wash over him. Even though he’d wondered if it might, it didn’t make him desperate to pull a bottle from the shelf and drain it dry.
Maybe he was never going to get answers from Nathan Hess.
Maybe he was never going to get answers at all, but he could still let go of his poisonous anger—and all the frustration that Nathan was never going to apologize.
Not for being a shitty father, not for giving him booze at such a young age, not for making it seem like a perfectly normal part of every single day.
He walked around the vault, pulling out a bottle here, examining the label of another.
The wooden racks didn’t just hold the cream of the Hess collection, but also housed Nathan’s personal wine collection.
Even though Damon had been out of this lifestyle for years now, he could still recognize and appreciate the value of some of the bottles he was looking at.
An idea was beginning to form in his head.
He didn’t know initially why he’d come here—it had seemed like a good plan to go back to the beginning, and this had always felt like the start of it all.
He’d been watching his father come in here for years, ever since he was a little boy, to pick out a bottle for a special occasion or even for a normal Tuesday night.
He knew this place like the back of his hand.
And maybe he’d been wondering if coming here, to the beginning of his own obsession with alcohol, would make it tougher to resist the draw of the oblivion so close at hand.