All at once it’s like he can’t meet my gaze. He stares down at his napkin, shredding the corner of it between his fingers.
“Do I have you?” I ask.
He tears a long strip off the napkin. Then, at last, he looks up. “Yes,” he says. “You do. For whatever that’s worth.”
Something warm tightens in the pit of my stomach. He means he’s here to support my sobriety, obviously. But some part of me refuses to read it that way. Because he’s still watching me, his eyes big and doe-like, and I keep mentally circling last night, how he took me home, the way he was this morning—like I meant something to him. Like I was worth protecting.
The moment lasts just a beat too long. I have to tear my gaze away under the guise of taking another sip of coffee and examining the menu. I’m almost relieved when the waitress shows up again to take our order. I ask for eggs Florentine, even though I don’t like hollandaise sauce. I can’t fucking think straight around this man. It’s a problem, and my taste buds are about to pay for it.
“I should have seen this coming,” I say once the server has gone—dragging the subject back to safe(r) ground. “I had a few mistakes leading up to it. A glass of champagne, a few sips of tequila, that kind of thing. I just kept telling myself it was okay.”
Wyatt shakes his head. “People think it gets easier the longer you’ve been clean. And it does, obviously, but…there are different challenges. Like you start to forget how bad it used to be. You start lying to yourself, thinking how things might be different this time.”
Pretty much. And I wish I’d been right. I feel like I’ve been fighting my whole life just to be normal—the kind of person who can handle herself. Handle shit going wrong. Instead I’m intense, like Chaya told me during the worst of our fights. I feel things too much. I don’t know how to tone it down, or shut it off, or whatever it is other people do to keep their minds sailing along on an even keel.
“I volunteer at a place in Midtown every Tuesday,” Wyatt says abruptly. “It’s a harm reduction organization. They have a needle exchange, counselors, you name it. It helps me remember why I’m staying clean. And it lets me give back. You should come sometime.”
“Yeah. Yeah, sure. I’ll try to make it next week.”
Wyatt reaches over and finds my hand, curling his fingers tight around my palm. And suddenly that heat is back, flushing beneath my skin. “Listen. You got this. Okay? Don’t let yourself get stuck here. You can choose to keep fighting. And I’m not gonna let you give up. All right?”
I don’t know why, but right now, this feels like the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. I press the heel of my free hand against my eyes, trying to scrub away the tears threatening to slip free. Wyatt rubs his thumb against my knuckle and squeezes my palm.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks softly. “What happened?”
“I told you,” I mumble. “I slipped. It just…spun out of control.”
“It’s usually more than just that. It might not be obvious what, but something made you feel like this was a solution. You wouldn’t have made it four years clean if it was as simple as giving in to temptation.”
I wipe another wave of tears off my face and meet his eyes across the table. I feel like I’m desperate for that life vest he’s offering: An excuse for why I’m such a shit show right now. Something sympathetic. A sob story that makes me more than just an addict who fell off the wagon.
It’d be so easy to blame it all on Dvora, but the truth is, I lost control before I made that phone call.
“I don’t really have an excuse,” I say. “I’m just a piece of shit.”
“Don’t say that. You’re not. You’re one of the strongest, stubbornest people I know.” Wyatt’s leaning in across the table, clutching my hand between both of his now, as if he could press his brow against mine and will me to believe him. “You don’t deserve what you are doing to yourself.”
The waitress chooses that moment to reappear with our food. I take the chance to discreetly scrub my face with my napkin; there’s nothing less attractive than dripping snot into one’s side of hash browns.
“I do, though,” I say once the server is safely out of earshot. “I’m not a very good person. I’ve…I’ve fucked up. A lot.”
One of Wyatt’s brows goes up. “And you think that isn’t everybody?”
“I killed someone.”
There’s a part of me that grimly relishes the way Wyatt’s expression falters. It’s not about trying to sound shocking—or okay, maybe it is, a little bit. But of course Wyatt never thought I’d ever actually hurt anyone. He thought when I said I did bad things, I meant stealing my mom’s credit card or cutting class or getting into stupid fights over drug money. And I let him think that. Because I couldn’t stand the idea of him knowing the truth. Because if he knew the truth, he wouldn’t want anything to do with me.
“What do you mean?” he says at last, carefully, as if using the wrong words might shatter me.
“My best friend, Chaya. I got her into drugs. I made her use with me. She fucking…she died. She overdosed. Because of me.”
“Ely…”
“It was my fault,” I press on. I’m crying again, but this time I don’t bother trying to wipe the tears away. I grab my fork and stab at my eggs Florentine, puncturing one of the poached eggs and splattering its yellow contents across my plate. “I bought some cheap Percocets. Turns out they weren’t Percs at all. They were laundry detergent laced with fucking fentanyl, and she…she…”
Wyatt passes me his napkin, and I take it with my shaking hand only to ball it up in the pit of my fist.
“If she’d never met me,” I whisper, “she’d still be alive right now.”
“You don’t know that. You can’t possibly know that. And even if it’s true, that doesn’t make it your fault. She made her own choices, just like you did.”
Did she? Did any of us really? Maybe if I’d let Chaya go after we had our biggest fights, things would have turned out differently. If I’d gotten clean, if I’d never had those pills in my room to begin with…
Did she really choose to use, or did I make our friendship dependent on it?
“Anyway, that was kind of it, for me. Chaya’s parents never forgave me. Everybody in the community knew what happened. So my dad told me it was probably best if I went away. He gave me a thousand bucks, which I spent on bus tickets to LA and a shitload of heroin.”
Wyatt hasn’t touched his waffles. They’re starting to go soggy under their lake of syrup, but he doesn’t even seem to notice. He places his hand on the middle of the table, palm up, and after a moment I reach over and let him lace our fingers together. That simple point of contact is grounding. My heart rate gets a little slower; my chest feels less like it’s caving in on itself.