Page 98 of Bad & Bossy

“I don’t know how to fish.”

“You can watch me then. Go put on clean clothes,” he said, placing one hand against the center of my chest and pushing me back into the house. “If you have any.”

————

It was barely spring. The trees were just beginning to grow their leaves, the birds chirping and playing in the little patches of snow that remained. The water, crystal as could be in the center of the lake, shimmered its reflection of the hanging sun and the open blue sky.

Gray had stopped at a local pizza place on the way, the level of grease nearly turning my stomach when he told me to eat half of it. I’d thrown up on the side of the road before he told me to eat some more, shoving a giant bottle of water in my face.

I was hitting the lows, that level just slightly above sobriety when I felt shaky and angry. The ache in my chest was all-consuming, but I watched as I sat across from him on the small fishing boat, taking in every stroke of his hands as he hooked a worm and cast his line. We sat in silence.

The longer we sat, the more sober I felt, and the more grounded in reality I became. Three months. I’d missed Drew’s first Christmas, missed Dana’s birthday. I’d miss Easter, too, at this rate. I couldn’t help but think about how many Christmases, how many Easters and Halloweens and Fourth of Julys and birthdays my parents had missed when they left me.

But I’d had plenty of celebrations with my aunt. Those were the holidays I cherished the most, not the ones where I was spoiled with gifts and left to play with them alone. The Christmases where it was just me and her, and she got me the things I needed and a handful of things I wanted. The ones where we watched movies and drank eggnog, laughing about something that McAllister kid did even though we’d seen it a million times.

Dana would be that for Drew. That pure kind of love where you only want the other person to thrive, to be happy, to turn out the way you hope for them. I’d had that with Aunt Kathy, and the longer I sat there on the lake, the water nearly making me sick, the stench of a bucket of worms nauseating me to my core, the more I realized that I’d had it with Dana, too.

And I’d ruined it. I’d been the one to tear it down. I’d been the one who put myself in this position. I had the chance to have a family, to have love in a way I’d been craving for most of my life, yet I’d thrown it all away. And for what?

“Cole?”

Shit. Reality rushed in again and my cheeks were damp, a lump forming in the back of my throat as I shuddered in a breath.

“Hey, man, it’s okay?—”

“It’s not,” I croaked, hastily wiping my face as if he hadn’t already seen it. “Oh my god, Gray, it’s not okay.”

He hooked his pole into the side of the boat and crossed over to me, making my stomach churn even more with the rocking of it. He placed a hand on my shoulder, his gaze nearly ripping a hole straight through me.

“I lost her,” I said, and everything became too much, too loud, too hard. That was why I drank, to avoid this. This, and the reality of my goddamn agonies being infinite when sympathy wasn’t. That ran out quickly from everyone I met. Everyone but Gray. “I fucking lost her, and I lost him.”

“You don’t know that?—”

“I didn’t want this,” I sniffled, wiping my eyes again as if I had any control over when they’d stop leaking. “I don’t want this. God, Gray, I don’t want this. I want my life back. I want Dana, I want my son. What the fuck has happened to me? How have I lost three months?”

Gray shifted on his feet and the boat rocked again, sending the pizza straight up my esophagus. I twisted on a dime, hurling everything up over the side of the boat. I gagged, over and over, one hand clutching the only clean shirt I had left and the other clinging to the rail of the boat. I felt like it would never end, but every second that passed with Gray holding my shoulder, it felt just a tiny, minuscule amount better.

“You need a plan,” Gray said softly. “We’ll do it right this time. No disappearing, no running away. You’ll stay in town and you’ll keep in touch, you’ll be made accountable. And you’ll keep up with your fucking AA meetings this time, you understand?”

I nodded as another wave of vomit spewed from me. “Okay,” I coughed. A tissue entered my line of sight, and I took it from him, wiping off my mouth and chin.

“First thing we need to do is get rid of Bobby.”

If I had anything left to hurl, it would have come up then.

For once, I agreed. Bobby had gone down the relapse hole with me and hadn’t done a single thing to try and get better, though neither had I. But if I stood a chance at all, if I genuinely wanted to try, I needed to be away from him and I needed him out of my fucking house.

“Yeah,” I conceded, slowly turning myself back into my seat instead of staring at the water below. “Bobby has to go.”

————

After a bit more food and zero fish caught, Grayson walked me up the driveway, a plan and an end in sight.

We both stopped in our tracks the moment we realized the front door was open.

“Did I…?” I asked, pointing to the empty space.

“No, I double-checked for you,” Gray said. He took the few steps in front of me until he reached the door, peeking inside to see if anything had been broken.

---