Chapter 36 Larissa
LARISSA
Babe, are we okay?”
Mike had cornered me in our room. It was almost dinnertime. I’d somehow managed to mostly dodge him for the last six hours.
He was looking at me now, standing in front of the bed, his expression worried.
I wondered if it was even worth trying to discuss this. How much had he already had to drink today? Four drinks since I’d been here. At least that I’d seen.
I was the kind of person who counted drinks now.
I felt wrung out. Like I’d aged ten years in the last three days, and five of them were on the car ride up.
“Are you mad at me?” he asked. “You’re kind of off.”
“Mike, do you really not remember the other night, before you came to the cabin?” I asked.
He gave me a searching look.
“I came home and you were drunk. You passed out. You…” I had to gather myself to tell him this. “You peed all over the floor. You slept in it.”
I watched his face transform. The color creeping up his cheeks.
“Do you remember buying the bottle of vodka?” I asked.
He nodded slowly. “I remember,” he said quietly.
He stared at me for a long second. Then he turned and sat on the bed.
“Mike, I will not be with someone who does this,” I said to his back. “I can’t.”
“I know.” He stared at a crocheted dream catcher on the wall. “I’m sorry. I don’t even know what to say. It just got away from me.”
“Got away from you how? You were home alone, drinking by yourself? I mean, I could see if you were at a party or something, but… alone?”
He didn’t reply.
“Do you… do you do this a lot?” I asked.
He blew out a breath. “Sometimes.”
I wrapped my arms around myself. “How long has this been happening?”
He paused. “Off and on for a couple of years.”
My arms fell. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It helps.”
“Helps with what?”
“Everything? Sleeping. Talking. Being me.”
I didn’t reply.
“You didn’t deserve this. I’m embarrassed and I’m sorry,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”
When I didn’t reply, he turned to look at me.
I licked my lips. “Are you an alcoholic, Mike?”
“What—babe, no!”
“You said you had a migraine when you left. When you tell me you have a migraine, is it really a migraine? Don’t lie to me.”
But he didn’t have to. I could see the answer on his face.
The truth spilled out like red wine on a white carpet.
That’s how many times in the last ten months he’d drank so much he couldn’t function?
This had been going on since the beginning—the day my mom was in the hospital, the day I’d been lost in the park with Chris, all the times he didn’t answer his phone in the morning. While Chris had been out there, clearing snow off my car—that’s what this was? He was hungover?
I was horrified. I felt catfished. Lied to by omission. And Mike had lied, right to my face.
He lied the way Dad lied.
“Mike, I don’t think I can do this with you…”
Panic ripped across his expression. “Babe, what—No! Just give me a chance to make this right—”
“I can’t.”
“You’re gonna break up with me? For this? I can stop whenever. It’s not a big deal. I fucked up, I admit it. It’ll never happen again—”
“You lied to me,” I said. “And if it wasn’t a big deal, you wouldn’t have hidden it. You have a problem, Mike.”
“I don’t. I can stop whenever I want. You’ve seen me do it. Please,” he begged. “Just don’t leave.”
He cracked on the last word.
I’d never seen him cry. I’d never seen him break his happy, charming facade. A little piece of me shattered.
I put my face in my hands. “You know what I grew up with,” I whispered.
“I know.”
“I cannot do the secrecy and the self-destruction. I can’t do it.”
“Larissa, just let me fix it. I can fix it.”
I peered at him, weary. “How? I feel like I don’t even know you—”
“I fucked up. I was just trying to deal with stuff on my own. I just get in my head. I was anxious about you moving in—”
“Then why’d you ask me?!”
“It’s not that,” he said. “I want you to be with me. It’s like… it’s like I’m so scared you’re gonna fucking leave—”
I threw my hands up. “Why would I leave?”
“Because I’m not good enough for you!” He looked at me with tears in his eyes. “I’ve got nothing. I barely have a job, I’m not smart like the other guys. My brain won’t shut up, I’m trying to read this book for you, and I can’t even pay attention. I’m trying and I can’t…”
“Mike…”
“You have all these ideas and I know you’re gonna be something and I’m not, and you’re gonna leave me.”
“You have Tony! You’re a plumber, Mike. What do you mean you barely have a job?”
He didn’t answer.
My face fell. “You’re not going to work for him, are you.”
Silence.
“You let me believe that, and you never were,” I breathed.
The pained way he looked at me was the answer.
I felt sick.
Someone knocked on the door. It was Samantha.
“Larissa? We’re getting in the hot tub.”
“I’m coming. I’ll meet you there,” I called, trying not to let her hear the fracture in my voice.
Mike’s eyes searched my face, and I looked away from him.
“Did Chris know about the drinking?” I was almost afraid to ask.
“No,” he said.
“Are you sure?” I asked, turning back to him.
“Maybe a little of it. Not all of it. Please. Don’t break up with me.”
“I need to think, Mike.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
I had nowhere else to go now. I was living with this man.
I didn’t even have the safety of my own home to get some distance between us so I could think straight and make a rational decision about what to do next. I was trapped.
How did I end up here? I swore I would never be this woman.
I should have been better at recognizing the signs by now, but I wasn’t and that was the hardest reality of all—that I couldn’t even trust my own judgment, that my instincts were this broken despite all my experiences with men just like this one.
Men who were drowning and refused to kick.
I grabbed my bathing suit, walked around him, and left.