“I’m sorry,” I say again, the hand that isn’t latched onto a handful of Wyatt’s shirt swiping tears off my face. “I’m so…so stupid…fucking…the worst. I’m sorry.”
“Shh,” he murmurs, and his arm circles properly around my shoulders, drawing me in close. “The Uber will be here in a second. It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.”
“ ’M not. I fucked up. I’m…It’s so…”
I give up talking. What words are there, anyway, to describe how I feel right now? The only way to make Wyatt understand would be to plunge my fist into his chest and start shredding organ meat. I can’t even blame Dvora for wanting nothing to do with me. Turns out she was right, anyway. All it took was this one setback, and here I am again, a drunken shit show. Back on my bullshit.
Taking bets on how long until I’m injecting smack between my toes in a grimy subway station somewhere.
The car pulls up at the curb, and Wyatt hustles me forward, holding open the door while I slide in across the leather back seat.
“She’s not gonna puke, is she?” says the driver.
Wyatt glances at me, one brow raised, and I shake my head. “She won’t,” he says. “But I brought a bag, just in case.”
I wish just one thing about this night would be less than 110 percent humiliating. I never should have dragged Wyatt into my mess. I should have called Ophelia, or Diego, or even Michal—anyone else. Instead here I am, needing him to baby me and pat my shoulder and take me home because I’m too much of a wreck to take care of myself.
“I’ll pay you back,” I mutter. “For…for the car.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Wyatt says firmly. He leans across me and presses the button to roll down the window. The fresh air feels good on my face but not as good as that one moment felt, where Wyatt was so close, bracketing me in against the car seat, warm and safe.
I doze off at some point during the ride, blearily aware of the different sound the car tires make when we cross onto the bridge, the briny scent of the East River assaulting my nostrils as we leave Manhattan. And then Wyatt is gently shaking me awake, and I’m blinking myself back to reality. The bright city lights are gone, replaced by the dimmer glow of the outer boroughs.
“We’re here,” Wyatt says, and he offers me a hand, helping me crawl across the seat. “Careful—don’t rush. You got it. There.”
The solid ground feels strange under my feet. I’m like a sailor who’s been aboard ship for nine months straight for whom dry land is now vertiginous and uncertain.
“Where are we?” I ask eventually, once I’ve reoriented myself enough to realize I have absolutely no clue where we’ve ended up. This street isn’t like the streets in Astoria. It’s got fewer trees, for one. And the buildings are taller.
“Bushwick,” he says. “I took you back to my place. I hope that’s okay. I just don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go home alone right now.”
God, sober me would be delighted. Drunk me, however, can only muster a weak mental fist pump.
Wyatt lives in a third-floor walk-up, which normally wouldn’t be too bad, but drunk me also needs an elevator. The banister does a lot of the heavy lifting in getting me up to Wyatt’s floor, where I slump uselessly against the wall while he unlocks the front door. I swallow down the urge to apologize again. I’m pretty sure he knows how sorry I am at this point.
I wish I were clearheaded enough to appreciate the interior of Wyatt’s apartment once I’m in it. As it is, I can detect a blur of hardwood floors, furniture upholstered in dark colors, a bunch of books scattered around the place. Normally I’d be cataloging all this the way I do whenever I go home with someone, judging them by their reading taste and how clean they keep their water glasses.
Wyatt helps me over to the sofa, where I gratefully collapse against his array of fluffy throw pillows. Wyatt, perennially too good for me, brings me a glass of water with a little lemon slice floating happily among the ice cubes.
“Fuck, you’re bougie,” I say after I take a sip—because it is, of course, sparkling water.
“We could have the great Sanpellegrino-versus-LaCroix debate again, but I don’t think you’re in the right headspace to argue your points.”
“I’m sober enough to know this isn’t Pellegrino,” I say.
There’s something tight about the set of his smile, but I’m too out of my gourd to know what it means. I sip my water and try to focus on something solid in the room, something to anchor me against the way my head feels like it’s pinned on a merry-go-round.
“We don’t have to talk about it right now,” Wyatt says after a moment, his voice so carefully soft, so gentle, like I might shatter. “But if you want to…at some point…”
And that gentleness is what breaks me, really. My chest clenches and a fresh heat swells in my eyes: another humiliating round of tears. I tip forward and bury my face in both hands so Wyatt won’t see. Ridiculous, of course. He’s already seen. And I’ll never be able to look him in the eye again after tonight.
His hand finds my back, rubbing soft circles against my spine. I only wish I’d done anything to deserve this kindness.
“I’ve ruined my life,” I mumble against my palms. “My family hates me. My friends are…are better off without me. And now I’ve gone and fucked up and—and—and made it even worse. Because that’s what I do. I make things worse.”
Wyatt is silent, the motion of his hand on my back the only rhythm I can cling to.
My next breath shudders into my lungs. “I don’t even have a good excuse. I don’t…. It’s not like I had a terrible childhood or I was abused or horribly traumatized in some way. I have no reason to be the way I am. I just—I’m broken. Something in my head isn’t right. But I have no excuse.”
“There’s never an excuse,” Wyatt says. He touches the crown of my head, and his fingertips are light, so light, like birds resting on my skull. “You don’t need one. Addiction is a disease. It’s…chemical. Your brain doesn’t work like other people’s brains work.”
“You’re damn right about that,” I mutter, and manage a wet little laugh.
Other people have excuses, though. Chaya was a lesbian living in a culture that would never accept her. My first sponsor was horribly abused as a child. I used to get high with a girl who had grown up in foster care and been homeless since she’d turned eighteen. Shannon got addicted after a back injury.
Me? Nothing. No sob story. I was the blueprint for every fucked-up antidrug propaganda piece about not giving in to peer pressure. I had no self-control.