SADIE
Ishould have stopped two rum and cokes earlier, but oh well. No sense dwelling on the past. I hadn’t felt the need to drink my way through this anniversary in a few years, but after the shitshow this morning I needed some liquid courage before facing Drew again.
I might have overshot it a bit.
“Hmm?” Drew asked as he pulled a couple of Adirondack chairs off a stack on the back porch.
“Wastha?” Vomiting in front of men I’d slept with wasn’t at the top of my list of favorite things, but I had to admit I was thankful for it. I was already starting to feel better after purging the contents of my stomach out front. Apparently, my speech hadn’t quite caught up yet though. I tried again. “What’s that?”
“Wasn’t sure if that ‘oh well’ you just muttered was for me or if you’re talking to yourself.” He directed his words at the porch wall. Standing next to the stack of chairs, he carefully folded the tarp that had covered them into a small square then set it on top of the stack.
I ogled his ass for a minute before reminding myself I was mad at him. Not for lashing out at me this morning. If there was one thing I understood, it was the desire to bat away any hand trying to pull you up when you were down in the muck, because you were afraid of anyone seeing how ugly things had gotten where you were.
I was mad at him for not being able to see himself the way I did.
A wave of melancholy washed away the anger when I stared at the stack of chairs. There had to be at least ten of them. I wondered when he’d last had the opportunity to use more than one. I imagined a past life where he sat around in a circle with his buddies in these chairs, drinking beers and shooting the shit. Now they collected dust under a tarp. Like the rest of his life.
But I wasn’t going to read him the riot act. And I wasn’t going to try to coax him into change, since that strategy had obviously backfired. I was going to give him what I’d unintentionally stolen from him. A history.
My history.
It wasn’t fair I got to hear about Drew’s worst moments from someone else, even if Ivy was tied to the event. It robbed him of the chance to tell me himself. Not that he’d have been likely to tell me himself anytime soon. But it still put us on an uneven playing field and put him on the defensive.
So, I was going to give him my dark and dirty. The stuff I didn’t like to talk about. And show him in the process that it was still possible to live the life you had left after an unimaginable loss.
At least, that was what I hoped he’d take away from this.
I sucked in a deep breath and slowly blew it out. There wasn’t enough alcohol in the world to make this next part easy.