Chapter 2
VALENTINA
“Blackberry wine,” I rasped, clearing my throat like a woman who hadn’t seen a glass of water—or her dignity—in a while. “Yeah, two boxes. Oh, and a pack of Marlboros. Red. The long ones.”
José’s dark brown eyes locked onto mine.
I took him in, eyebrows raised, silently judging his latest Hawaiian shirt: bright orange, loud enough to offend even the blind, stretched tight over the beer belly he’d cultivated from years of loyalty to Corona.
He wasn’t tall—barely taller than me, really—but he walked around as if he were six foot, which I respected.
Confidence made up for a lot, even if it couldn’t hide his receding hairline.
He sighed my name. “What’re you doing?”
What was I doing?
I was having the existential crisis of the century, right there in the fluorescent glare of José’s bodega, but I wasn’t about to wax poetic about my spiral to the man who sold me Cheetos on credit.
“Por favor, José,” I found myself pleading, digging my heel into the floor. Fatigue scraped its nails down my throat. “I thought we had an agreement.”
Our agreement: I paid on credit since I didn’t have money of my own. It wasn’t formal—nothing written, nothing signed—but it worked.
Or at least it used to.
José had a soft spot for people like me.
The “hard-luck cases,” he called us, as if we were scratched-off lottery tickets scattered on his floor, worthless but still worth a second glance, just in case.
As long as I eventually showed up with a fistful of crumpled bills or a pocketful of change, he figured we were square.
“That was before Max got involved.”
“Max?” I complained. “What about him?”
“He wants you sober.”
That two-timing son of a bitch. I’d pay good money—money I definitely didn’t have—to see the look on his face if someone ripped that precious Macallan 18 out of his grip.
Max and his rules. Max and his god complex. He’d probably shrivel up and die if someone dared tell him no for once in his entitled life. Sobriety was easy to preach when his liquor cabinet cost more than my electric bill, and even easier when he got off on controlling everyone else’s misery.
Max had his claws in everything now, including the bodegas. Word had gotten out about me, and apparently, my wine-and-cigarette habit was just another casualty of his control.
“I am perfectly sober. I’m just trying to enjoy a drink here and there.”
“Do you know it’s nine in the morning?” José asked.
Yeah, I knew.
But time didn’t mean much when your life was a mess. The only thing that mattered was finding something, anything.
Nine in the morning, nine at night—what difference did it make? All I wanted was a little peace, even if it came at the bottom of a bottle.
“Do you think Hemingway checked the clock before pouring himself a drink?” I argued, though I knew full well José wasn’t the type to appreciate literary excuses for bad habits.
Still, a girl had to try.
“But you’re not Hemingway,” he said flatly. “Hemingway’s dead.”
“Listen,” I tried again, softening my tone because I was running out of gas and pride in equal measure. “I just need to get through today, okay? Tomorrow, I-I-I’ll be a new woman. I’ll drink water. I’ll eat a vegetable. Hell, I’ll start meditating. But right now I need you to give me a break.”
His eyes told me no.
I could feel desperation clawing at my throat.
I wasn’t proud of my nicotine and wine habit, but I wasn’t in the mood for moral lectures, and I knew José was going to give me one.
“You know how this works. No one’s going to sell to you.”
Still, I tried. “I’ve practically worn through the leather on my heels trying to find a sip,” I mumbled, tracing a worn groove on the counter, with a pout that felt utterly pathetic even to me.
His expression softened for a moment. Then he glanced at my scuffed-up heels and raised an eyebrow.
“I’ll pay double,” I offered, because desperation sounded better if you threw imaginary money at it. “Triple.”
“Honestly, if I knew you had the money to pay me back, I’d let you. But you don’t. You haven’t paid me back in weeks.” He shook his head with something that looked an awful lot like, dare I say, disappointment. “You wear desperation like a perfume. And it stinks.”
I forced a laugh—a laugh as dry as the Sahara. “But it brings out my eyes, don’t you think?”
José didn’t laugh. “Go home,” he said. “Get some rest. Drink some water.” His face didn’t budge. “Maybe go to a meeting.”
Asshole.
“Oh, I’ll go,” I said sarcastically.
We both knew it was a lie, because, let’s be honest, lying was much easier than admitting I couldn’t even get through the door of one of those places without feeling like I was choking on my own failure.
With a quick, dismissive wave, I turned on my heel and trudged toward the door. My heels scuffed the linoleum in a way that grated on my nerves.
The second I pushed open the door to the bodega, the cold outdoor air hit my hands. Quickly, I shoved them into my coat pockets. One pocket had a hole so big my fingers brushed against my thigh. I’d told myself I’d fix that weeks ago. I hadn’t.
As I sat down on the steps, my jacket slipped off one shoulder. I didn’t bother to fix it. What was the point? I was shaking too much anyway.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out my body was rebelling.
I vaguely remembered the warning signs from one of those eye-strainingly bad AA pamphlets—the kind with graphics so poor they’d be right at home in a low-budget nineties infomercial.
The main takeaway? Quitting cold turkey was a terrible idea.
“Severe withdrawal can lead to very real physical dangers,” it had droned on, as if I needed another reason to dread the process.
I’d scoffed at the time, tossing the pamphlet on some dusty shelf. Who needed advice from a piece of paper anyway?
They made quitting sound so noble, so brave, but they never mentioned how one day you were in control, and the next you weren’t. One minute you had money and a semblance of free will, and the next you were broke, holding an empty bottle, and bargaining with your own shadow for a few more drops.
Behind me, the bodega bell rang into the stillness. My shoulders stiffened instinctively. I expected José to come out and deliver another sermon about my life choices, but the footsteps that followed were different. Heavier.
I glanced back.
A man stepped out, tall and broad-shouldered, in a black suit. The tie was loosened slightly, as if the tightness had been bothering him.
He must’ve heard every word of my argument with José, must’ve painted me exactly as I appeared: like a spoiled brat guilt-tripping a bodega clerk into giving her one more bottle, one more fix.
He looked directly down at me like I wasn’t worth a second glance. Worse, he looked at me as if he’d been expecting me—as if he’d already decided exactly what I was worth and was just waiting patiently for me to realize it too.
In his hand, dangling loosely, was a freshly opened pack of Marlboros.
Red.
My eyes caught on the shine of foil as he peeled back the edge.
He didn’t say a word.
What the hell did he want? Was he here to gloat? To play some sick joke on the pathetic woman sitting on the bodega steps like the poster child for bad life choices?
If so, he should’ve known better. Angry alcoholics in withdrawal weren’t exactly known for their composure. I was one misplaced comment away from being tomorrow’s headline.
“Can I help you?” I asked with an attitude.
He didn’t react to my tone. He just stared down at me.
His eyes were unnaturally blue. Contacts, maybe.
“Funny,” the man said. “I was just about to ask you the same thing.”
“I’m fine,” I argued. “Thanks for your concern though.”
“Didn’t say I was concerned.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
What do you even say to that?
He tapped the pack against his palm and then pulled a cigarette out. He slipped it between his lips and lit the end.
I watched as he inhaled. The way his jaw clenched after each drag didn’t escape me, as if he were holding something back with every breath.
He looked like the perfect American boy—dark black hair, sharp jawline, strong cheekbones, and a straight nose that looked like it had dodged every punch thrown his way, even though the faint scars told me otherwise.
Clean enough to pass for respectable, but with just enough edge to make you wonder how many rules he’d bent, if not outright broken.
Someone you’d trust instinctively then regret it later.
Men who looked like him usually didn’t stray this far from their high-rise offices or rooftop bars on the better side of town. They stayed tucked away in their clean, shiny world, where women willingly lined up just to have their hearts broken.
“Does that always work for you?” he asked, taking another long drag.
His thumb brushed the filter absentmindedly, as if he were more interested in it than me. But I could tell he was waiting. For what, I didn’t know. Maybe to see how long I could hold out before I cracked.
I stayed quiet. Let him squirm if he wanted an answer so badly.
Then, without asking, he moved to sit down on the small step next to me. His large thigh brushed against mine.
My immediate instinct was to tell him to move, to push him off, but then he leaned closer—not enough to crowd me, but just enough to offer me the cigarette that was between his lips a second ago.
Sharing a cigarette with a stranger was a bad decision, but I’d made so many of those already.
I took it. I brought the cigarette to my lips and took a deep breath of smoke. It tasted harsh, just like I wanted. It was the relief I’d been craving all morning.
“Does what always work for me?” I finally asked.
I knew I was giving him what he wanted, but still, I couldn’t help it. He’d given me what I wanted after all.
“Acting like a damsel in distress,” he clarified.
He didn’t care if he was insulting me. If anything, he was judging me.
“It worked on you,” I said, raising an eyebrow, gesturing to the cigarette he’d just handed me. “Unless this is your idea of charity.”
“No.” He didn’t smile. “Charity is for people who don’t get themselves into messes like this.”
And there it was: the judgment I’d seen before, as clear as day. Not the kind that came with pity though. No—this was different somehow, as if he were holding up a mirror for me to look at myself.
He wasn’t telling me to get my shit together like others did. If anything, he was making it clear he didn’t care and had no intention of swooping in to save me. He was the one handing me the literal key to my addiction.
“So it does work then. You’ve answered your own question.”
He took the cigarette back, his finger brushing mine for a brief second. His hands were warm, stable, while mine were cold and shaky. I wondered if he noticed. Probably.
“You’re lucky,” he said with an exhale. “Not many people are.”
I wasn’t lucky.
Lucky people didn’t spend their mornings walking five blocks begging for a sip that never came. Lucky people didn’t have their only break come in the form of a shared cigarette from a stranger.
Acting like a damsel in distress didn’t get me anywhere, because I wasn’t acting. The distress was real, fixed in the tremble of my hands and the ache in my chest.
Anything I ever got wasn’t because of charm or wit or some clever ploy—it was because of pity. And if there was one thing I hated more than this gnawing, inescapable craving, it was pity.
But no matter how much I hated it, it didn’t stop me from wearing it proudly, wrapping it around myself like a threadbare jacket. Resenting it but clinging to it all the same.
What else did I have? Pride wasn’t ever going to pay my bills or keep the shakes at bay.
The stranger stood without a word, crushing the cigarette onto the pavement, grinding it out with the tip of his shiny black shoe.
He then reached into his pocket and pulled out the full pack of Marlboros and the light, slipping them into my coat pocket.
He didn’t look at me again as he turned and walked away.
For a moment I just sat there as still as stone. That was it? No parting jab? No smug advice?
When I finally moved, it was to reach into my pocket, half-expecting to find the Marlboros gone, as if he’d changed his mind and taken them with him. But they were there. My fingers brushed the crinkled paper of the pack that was still warm from his touch.
Next to it, I felt something else. I pulled it out.
A hundred-dollar bill.
I stared at it, turning it over in my hand as if it might be a counterfeit or a cruel joke.
But no. It was real.
Cillian used to hand me cash like it was Monopoly money, hundreds stuffed into my purse “for a rainy day,” though it never rained much in the penthouse. Now? One hundred dollars felt like a lifeline. Or maybe just a really pretty insult.
The fact he’d given me anything meant I looked like I needed it.
I didn’t like how that made me feel.
Cheap.
I stood there for what felt like ten minutes, just staring at the cracked pavement under my feet. I thought that maybe if I stood still enough, time would pass me by, and I could take a second to think about what I was going to do with the money.
It wasn’t that I didn’t know what I should do. Of course I did. Buy groceries. Maybe pay off a fraction of something—anything. Be responsible. Take one step toward the person everyone thought I was supposed to be.
But responsibility didn’t come with a guarantee. It didn’t promise to stop the shaking in my hands or the static in my chest. It didn’t offer warmth or silence or the gentle, suffocating oblivion that waited at the bottom of a bottle.
Drinking wasn’t a choice for me—not really. It wasn’t something I wanted. It wasn’t even something I enjoyed anymore.
People love to talk about control, about willpower, like it’s something you can pick up at the corner store, right next to the aspirin and the cheap sunglasses. What they don’t tell you is that willpower doesn’t work when you’re drowning. All you want is air, and you don’t care where it comes from.
I didn’t want to go back into the store. I didn’t want to grab the bottle off the shelf and hand over the money as if it didn’t matter. But I did. I went back in, and I bought my box of wine.