36. Alex
THIRTY-SIX
Alex
One month later
A fter my gig ends, I drive straight home, making a point not to order a drink from the bar afterwards. It’s tempting, so fucking tempting, but I’m trying hard not to start drinking again. After seeing Opal with that guy, I drowned myself in alcohol for the next three days. Barely bothering to leave the house unless it was to buy more beer.
My problem isn’t that I always want to drink, but if something triggers me emotionally it’s the only way I know how to quell those negative feelings. I’d rather drink until I black out than deal with the consequences of my own choices.
“Have you seen Opal again?” My dad is sitting in his chair when I walk inside. He’s nursing a beer and watching the news. No real greeting from him, instead he greets me by interrogating me. Some things never change.
“No,” I say flatly.
“Why not?”
I scrub a hand down my face as I walk through the living room and into the kitchen, not bothering to come up with an answer for that question. It’s time for him to take his meds. Again. If I wasn’t here I know he probably wouldn’t take them.
I shake the pill bottle until the correct number of pills fall into my hand, and then I do the same thing with two more bottles, before grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge and handing all of it to him. He grunts as he takes them from me, and I hover over him, making sure he actually swallows them.
It almost feels like I’m the parent now. When Dad told me he was sick he mentioned it off-handedly, like it wasn’t even a big deal, like he could care less. Maybe that’s the truth, but I couldn’t just stand around and let him wither away and die. He and I have never gotten along well, but he’s still my father. He’s the only family I have left.
He swallows the pills and takes a swig of water before slamming the water bottle down on his side table with a little too much force. “You didn’t answer me.”
“Nope.” I start to walk away before he can say anything else.
“You’re gonna fuck everything up again, Alex.”
Story of my life. I’m a fuck up, and he never has any trouble reminding me of it. “I haven’t fucked anything up. We decided to catch up that night because we hadn’t talked in years, what’s wrong with that?”
“Don’t give me that bullshit. She’s still in love with you and you know it.”
A sudden ache spreads through my chest cavity. “No, she isn’t.”
It feels weird to admit the fact out loud to someone. For the last month I’ve been trying to convince myself that I don’t have any feelings left for her. That what happened between us was just sex and nothing more, a half-drunken hookup between two people that used to know each other.
I know that it was so much more than that, but I also know that for her that’s all it can be. She’s with that dude, and no matter how much of a douche he may appear to be, she deserves to be happy with him without me getting in the way.
He sighs and grabs the remote before muting the tv. “Alex, I know for a fact you didn’t wander back here for me. You wanted to see her.”
That isn’t entirely false, but it doesn’t matter. “I am here for you. To take care of you because you refuse to do it yourself.”
He scoffs and shakes his head. “I can take care of myself just fine. I don’t need your ass, what’ve you ever done?”
I pinch the bridge of my nose and walk away, knowing this conversation won’t lead anywhere productive any time soon. I collapse onto my childhood bed, a twin sized mattress in a small, mostly empty room.
The only things on the walls are a few polaroids of Opal and I as kids, an old Rolling Stones poster, and a large map hung above the bed with thumbtacks. There’s tons of circles written on the map in Sharpie. At some point in high school I circled every city I wanted to visit one day, now I’ve visited almost all of them, played shows in at least half of them.
So why do I still feel so fucking empty?