Chapter 20
Emmett
The man that walked into my hospital room, clad in his leather jacket and armed with the ability to calm a complete stranger, is not the same one that’s sitting next to me now.
His knee bounces. His gaze only leaves Hatley to glance at the host in the front as he drones on about finding God and reaching out for help.
That he’s glad we all chose to come here tonight.
Tristen’s been picking at his nails, running the one on his thumb beneath the others, and jerking at every scrape of a chair leg on the cracked tile floor. Jolting at every creaking seat and sudden sneeze.
The body of the moth tattoo on his throat bobs with his swallows, drawing my sight repeatedly to the way the insect dances on his skin.
I try to focus. To listen for the message in the speaker’s words. To hear anything other than the repetition of my own voice admitting shit in my head I had no business saying out loud to anyone else.
Tristen’s only the second person I’ve ever told.
I’d wholly expected him to kick me out of Hat’s bed, tell me to leave his house, and never come back.
And when he didn’t?
When he made a joke instead? Then invited me to stay every night since …
It made me want to never tell another soul ever again.
Swallowing hard, I turn back to the front, just as the speaker is asking for anyone with weight on their chest to step up.
A Janet takes his place. Tells us that she’s thirty days sober, even though she looks the exact opposite. She talks of kids she hopes to see one day. That it was a boyfriend that got her hooked and left her to die.
It makes my stomach pinch.
Richard replaces her and says that it was money that drove him to drink. That he would have never ended up like his father if he’d just walked away before the greed set in.
That pinch becomes an ache as face after face stands in front of the crowd and admits their faults in a room full of strangers. How mothers abandoned children to chase the high. Brothers become only children and still used.
And yet, they chose to try and make it better. To stop doing the things that made them numb to the life that moved on around them. That begged them to come along.
I’m barely holding my tears back when the original speaker gets back up to the podium and somehow has a smile on his face and a tissue in his hand.
“If there’s anyone else that would like to come up, we have just a few more minutes. No pressure.”
I expect the meeting to finally come to an end. For asses to stick to seats until the speaker delivers his final thoughts and sends us back into the night to face our demons with the messages we found within these old church walls.
I’m not an addict.
There’s no part of me that craves the pills for the high. No part that’s looking for the escape.
I’m looking for the end.
My stomach flips as I wait, the neck of the hoodie trapped between my teeth as a silence that hurts my ears blankets the communion.
“I just want to—oh—”
Tristen stands, interrupting the guy and my stomach rolls so hard with the insinuation of what that means.
No. Not him.
“No, wait. Don’t go up there,” I whisper, my voice lost, my heart dropping to the turbulence in my stomach.
“Come on up,” the speaker says and steps away, but I can’t focus on anything except Tristen’s back. The stretch of leather across his shoulders. The tattoo I’ve never noticed on the back of his neck.
Don’t go up there. Don’t go. Don’t go. Don’tgodon’tgo.
“He—”
Deep brown eyes find mine as he clears his throat and my chest aches so deep that I fear I might actually pass out.
Nonononono.
“—Hi. My name’s Tristen,” he says with a paleness to his cheeks that makes me sick as he wets his lips, his normally stoic voice cracking. “And I was born an addict.”
“Hello, Tristen,” several members mutter weakly, and I hold back the sob that lodges in my throat.
Not him, too.
I press my cloth-covered fist to my mouth and bite it so hard, I know I’m leaving marks as he explains that his father gave him anything he could to keep him sedated as an infant.
That he was already exposed in his mother’s womb, and nothing but whiskey would settle him.
That he was born two months too early, and his mother had no idea she even went into labor when she had him.
Breaking skin when he says that his teenage years became self-medicated. Putting holes in a sweatshirt that doesn’t belong to me as he says words I never expected to hurt. To have waves of guilt rolling through me.
“I’m twenty-two and I finally hit two years sober. I almost broke it. The craving was so deep, I—” he shakes his head and looks down at his hands where he’s doing the thing with his nails again, “I know I’m here to help people. So here I am, trying to help them and myself.”
Was that why he found me in the hospital?
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I mutter and dart from my seat, except my wrist is caught. Pulled. And when I look down at the intensity in Hatley’s bloodshot gaze, I freeze up.
“He needs to say this. We both need to listen.”
I swallow down the bile burning my throat and pry Hatley’s grip from my arm. “Okay. Okay.”
“Ten needs you here,” he says, pinning me to the spot with a look that floods my system with even more adrenaline. “He wants you here.”
With my jaw gritted and my hands fisted, I drop back into the seat and face front.
I don’t hear the rest of what Tristen says.
I can’t hear anything over the whooshing in my ears and the pulsing of my rapid breaths.
I’m so fucking selfish. Just like my mother always tells me I am.
It’s not until Tristen’s crouched in front of me, the ring in his nose glinting in the light, and a sad look in his eyes, that I finally blink.
Register the scraping of chairs behind him that are being put away.
Notice the scar jutting through his brow, interrupting the hair growth over his left eye.
“Em, bub, they’re clearing everyone out. We have to go.”
His hand hovers over my knee, the heat connecting between us like an invisible touch, and I focus on it. Feel its proximity. See the veins on the backs of his hands, raising the ink there like it’s just as alive as he is.
“I think it’s burrito time, man,” Hatley says beside me, his voice taking on just a smidge more of his usual character, but there’s still an edge. A rasp to the words as he knocks his shoulder into mine lightly.
Tristen shoots him a look and grumbles through gritted teeth about me. That I don’t like to be touched.
And he’s right. I don’t. Its never led to anything good.
It always hurts.
So why does my chest scream with the ache for the opposite?
“Let’s go grab some food, bub.”