chapter SEVEN
Therapist: You’ve mentioned your friend, Mikka, before. Is she just a friend? Even after what happened that night?
Jay: She’ll never be just a friend. She’s a colleague that I trust with my career and a woman that I respect.
Therapist: Anything more?
Jay: A lot more.
Jay
Rehab had been near the hardest thing I’d ever done in all my life. Every day, every hour, and every minute felt like a weight of anxiety now hung around my neck.
I couldn’t let anyone down again. I had to nail this movie role and to do that, I couldn’t fall victim to the one thing I thoroughly enjoyed while living in the city.
Partying had been my life for years. Drugs were always a complementary friend that tagged along. Withdrawing from it had pushed my body to limits I wasn’t capable of understanding before being an addict.
All of that seemed easy, though, sitting next to a woman I considered so close to me and knowing that she had been sucked dry of her life force.
Mikka was the epitome of perfection. If you thought of her as a bug, she was a butterfly; if a cat, she was a tiger; if a dog, she was a purebred. She walked into a room and instantly you knew she was the most intelligent, put-together person there. Then she opened her mouth and her hunger to be better made you strive toward your best too.
Perfection.
And all of it was gone.
Rehab had been easy.
Seeing my friend broken wasn’t.
Her infectious energy to live and fight her way to the top had been extinguished. The moment I saw her, I knew. She’d lost weight, put on more makeup, and approached me like a wounded animal seeing a friendly face. When I’d hugged her, her body froze up like every part of her might be bruised.
She ran ahead of me and shoved me back, desperation in her brown eyes. “Jay! Stop.” She whispered the last word, “Please.”
Her hands didn’t leave my chest as I stood there, a fury I hadn’t felt in a long time coursing through my veins. “Mikka, what do you expect me to do? I stood by and let it happen before to Aubrey. You know what that does to a kid? To let his best friend go home to a dad that beat her?”
She winced at my story. “It’s not like that.”
“What’s it like?”
“I go back willingly, Jay. I’m an adult. I… It’s not like I have nowhere else to go. When things get out of control, if he hurts me, he doesn’t hurt me like that.” She tripped over her words, none of them really making sense.
Reining in my anger was like taming a wild beast. “Are you hearing yourself? It doesn’t make sense. If he hurts you, he isn’t? Meek, if he’s hurting you, the rest is black and white.”
“No! It’s murky, and mixed up and a mess, Jay.” She swiped at her cheek furiously as one lone tear escaped from her dark eyes.
“Little Pebble, you could be with someone so much better,” I murmured.
“Like who? You?” she shot back.
I wanted to nod but didn’t get the chance.
“You can’t commit to a meeting with me, let alone a relationship!” she spouted. “Dougie’s committed and that says a lot about a man.”
“Any man would commit to you.” I meant it. “You’ve got a million things to offer.”
“Jay, you kissed me, flirted with me in my mother’s porn shop, and then went to party with another woman the next day. You hung out with me and my mom, flaunted your abs in my face and acted the complete gentleman with her, only to turn around and have your hands up another woman’s skirt later that night.”
“Meek, we weren’t… I wouldn’t have done that had I thought I stood a chance with you.” I ran a thumb across the path of her tear to wipe the remnants away. “What do you expect from me?”