Chapter 6
Six
Nick
I stood in the liquor aisle, begging myself not to grab the whiskey and drown myself in it.
Some days I do just fine. Others, I want to say fuck my sobriety and flush it all down the toilet for a cheap bottle of whiskey that I’d throw up come morning.
It’s been months since I stood here, wanting to do this and somehow always walking away, but I wasn’t sure I was strong enough to do that this time.
Three weeks ago I had the best night of my life, and like the coward I’d always been, I let it end with nothing.
Not even a fucking phone number. I told Mya no strings, and I meant that.
My life was messy. I couldn’t promise her I’d stay sober, and no one deserved that.
So… one night. That was it. But now she was all I could think about.
She was the one I looked for every time I walked into a room.
One night wasn’t enough, and I was a selfish bastard.
I stood there staring at the bottle like it had something to say.
Jack Daniels. Cheap, fast, and familiar.
My fingers hovered just over the label, and I could already feel the burn down my throat, the slow numbness that would follow.
The silence it would give me. The reminder of Mya gone from my head.
It wasn’t about the taste. Never was. It was about forgetting. About taking a wrecking ball to the part of my brain that still replayed that night with Mya like it meant something. When I knew, I’d made damn sure it didn’t. I had no business wanting more. But God, I did.
“Nick?”
I flinched, instinctively tensing, and turned slightly toward the sound. Lilly stood a few feet away, her expression unreadable but not unkind. For a split second, I braced myself for judgment.
Lilly was my brother Sean’s girlfriend, though “girlfriend” didn’t really cover it.
She’d been in a car accident caused by a drunk driver that should’ve killed her.
Slipped into a coma, unresponsive for weeks.
Most people would’ve walked away, written her off as a lost cause.
But Sean stayed. I knew she wasn’t just another patient to him.
He sat by her bed every night like she could hear him.
And maybe she could, because when she finally woke up, it was like she already knew him.
I hadn’t expected her to become such a fixture in our family.
But she had. And the first night I met her?
Well, Lilly was the only person there that understood me without a single word spoken.
She understood my tiredness in a way the rest of them didn’t.
Not just the physical kind, but the deeper stuff, too. The kind that lived in your bones.
She was standing at the edge of the aisle, holding a basket full of boring groceries: eggs, bananas, and oat milk. Her eyes dropped to the bottle I hadn’t picked up yet and then back to me. She didn’t say anything. Not at first. Just looked.
I cleared my throat and forced a smile that didn’t reach my eyes. “Didn’t think the ICU doctor would let his miracle out to the grocery store alone.”
She tilted her head, gave me a tired kind of smile. The kind you offer to someone who’s bleeding but pretending they’re fine. “Didn’t think you still came down this aisle.”
“Just looking,” I muttered.
“Right.” Her tone was soft, but not na?ve. She took a few steps closer, stopping just beside me, close enough to read the label I wasn’t holding. “Rough day?”
“Something like that.”
She didn’t pry. She didn’t lecture me or act like she was above it. She just stood next to me, like she had every right to. If it had been one of my brothers who found me instead, it would’ve gone down differently.
Connor would’ve lost it. Thrown a punch first, asked questions later.
And honestly, I would’ve deserved it. Ben would’ve panicked.
Tried to crack a joke, then called Tyler like he always did when things got too heavy.
Let someone else clean up the mess. And Sean…
Sean would’ve looked at me with that same face as our dad.
The one that said he was trying so hard to understand, to fix it, even if he didn’t know how.
I dragged a hand down my face, the shame hitting me harder than I expected. “It’s been months since I even thought about buying a bottle.”
“Okay.” She dragged out slowly.
Lilly was good at getting you to talk, and that’s exactly why the words left my mouth before I could even stop them. “I miss her.”
Lilly didn’t ask who. Which surprised me, considering no one knew about my night with Mya.
“I told her no strings, and now strings are all I want.” My voice cracked just a little, and I hated it.
“I wanted to protect her from me. From this.” I gestured vaguely at the aisle, the ghosts, and the bottle that still hadn’t moved.
“You think she needed protecting?” Lilly asked gently.
“I know she did.” I swallowed hard. “I’m not… I’m not the kind of guy someone builds a future with. I’m the one you spend one night with and hope you forget before it ruins you.”
Lilly nodded slowly, her voice calm. “Then maybe don’t be that guy anymore.”
I looked at her. She had this stillness about her, not because she was fragile, but because she’d been through hell and came out stronger. She didn’t pity me, never had.
“You ever think,” she said after a moment, “that the reason you’re still standing here, without that bottle in your hand, is because part of you wants to try?”
My jaw clenched. “What if trying isn’t enough?”
“Then try again tomorrow.”
I stared at the bottle one more time. Then I turned and walked away.
Lilly followed me out of the aisle, leaving her basket behind. We were silent at first, but when we hit the parking lot, she glanced sideways at me.
“You should talk to her,” she said.
I shook my head. “She’s probably already forgotten me.”
Lilly gave me a look that said she didn’t buy that for a second. “You’re not easy to forget, Nick. No matter how hard you try to be.”
And then she opened her car door and left me standing there with a full chest and empty hands.
* * *
I had just gotten into bed when my phone lit up on the nightstand. Tyler. For a second, I thought about letting it ring. It had been a while since we actually talked. He was the only one I never really wanted to disappoint. If I ever had a reason to get sober, it was him. Long before the cancer.
In my other hand, I was holding the wristband from the night I met Mya.
The one she couldn’t get off, so I bit through it and shoved it in my pocket like a goddamn lunatic.
I didn’t know why I still had it. Maybe I just liked torturing myself.
Some cheap plastic reminder of the one good thing I never should’ve touched.
Even though I didn’t want to deal with this right now… I picked up.
“Yo,” I said, voice rough.
“Didn’t think you’d answer,” Tyler remarked. “But I’m glad you did.”
I didn’t say anything. What was I supposed to say? Yeah, I wasn’t going to, but I’ve already disappointed you enough, so here we are?
He gave it a second, then kept going. “I ran into Mark at the gym,” he said. “Told me he saw you looking at whiskey. That true?”
I sighed. “Yeah. I mean… yeah, it’s true. I looked. But I didn’t buy it, for what it’s worth.”
Tyler didn’t say anything for a second. Just his breath through the phone. “That’s big, Nick.”
“I don’t know about big. I shouldn’t have been standing there in the first place.” I rubbed the back of my neck.
“No, man. It is big. You used to drink like it was the only thing keeping you alive. Seeing you sober has been a good change.”
“Because it was. For a while, it was the only thing that made sense.” I swallowed.
“I think about it a lot,” he said. “About you. About the old days. About everything.”
I didn’t know what to say, because I thought about it all the time, too. At least the things I remembered.
“There was a long time when I didn’t even want to be in the same room as you.”
“I know,” I admitted.
“You’d come around drunk. Loud. Mean. Always picking a fight. Once you told Mom her lasagna tasted like regret and divorce.”
“Shit. I don’t even remember that.” I winced.
“Exactly. You don’t remember half of it.
You got blackout wasted at Ben’s high school graduation dinner.
Showed up two hours late, hammered. Slurring your words, stumbling around like you didn’t even know where you were.
You gave some rambling speech about how much ‘family meant to you’ and then puked in the bushes.
Ben cried after. Said he didn’t want you there if that’s who you were gonna be. ”
“I didn’t know.” And that felt like a punch to the fucking chest.
“And Dad’s birthday? You punched a hole in the garage wall because Sean told you to slow down.”
“I remember that one,” I whispered.
“You drove drunk. A lot. Scared the hell out of Mom. You told me once you didn’t care if you wrapped your car around a pole.”
Hearing that again stung. Lilly almost died from a drunk driver. I think that’s why, in some twisted way, I felt so close to her. She was proof of what I could’ve done.
“You slept with people just to feel something. Lied to all of us. Said you were sober when you weren’t. Stopped showing up. Hell, you disappeared for a week and didn’t answer your phone.”
“I didn’t think anyone would notice,” I mumbled.
“I noticed. I noticed every single time.”
“I was a wreck.”
“Yeah. You were.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” Hearing it all out loud made me want to crawl out of my skin.
“Because you’re not like that anymore.”
“You sure?”
“I wouldn’t be on the phone with you if I wasn’t. You worked your ass off to get here. You earned a better life. You show up now. You look people in the eye. You apologized. That guy back then? That wasn’t you.”
“I still feel like he’s in me,” I muttered. “Like I’m just one bad day away from being him again.”
“But you’re not. You’re fighting now.”