Page 15 of Beautiful Lies
You’d never know I was a millionaire. My one-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint looked like a college dorm room. My mattress and box spring sat on the floor in my bedroom, next to a crate that acted as a bedside table. In the living room, a worn plaid sofa sat across from a flat-screen TV flanked by battered wood bookcases heaving with well-loved books. A sound system, speakers, and crates stuffed with sketchbooks and art supplies, rounded out the décor. Despite the shabbiness of my apartment, everything was neat, tidy, and clean. I should take pride in that, applaud myself for turning a new leaf.
Rising early and keeping my life organized were two of those baby steps I’d taken. Yeah, I was going places, I thought, as I headed out the door, and strode two blocks to the motorcycle garage where I parked my Harley. I put over three hundred miles on my bike yesterday. I rode up to the Hawk’s Nest Highway and got my adrenaline rush from shooting through the curves and taking the crazy hairpin turns. The winding road hugs the rock face, and the views of the mountains, river, and valleys gave me a natural high. Always a good thing.
At 7:55, Tate and I entered the church basement for our weekly NA meeting. Tate was in his mid-forties but looked older, with a craggy face and graying brown hair he wore long and pulled back in an elastic. Lean and wiry, he was a good five inches shorter than me, but he was tough as they came. Back in the day, he was in a motorcycle club and served time for armed robbery. His heroin addiction had started in prison. With seven years of sobriety under his belt, I was the first person he’d ever sponsored, and he was the only sponsor I’d never tried to bullshit.
We walked past the table laden with donuts and a vat of coffee and took our seats on folding metal chairs.
“Christ, it’s hot in here,” Tate grumbled like he did every week. Even at this early hour, the air was suffocating and smelled like mildew. The fans in the corners of the windowless room sounded like helicopter propellers but did jack shit to cool it down.
I sat back in my chair and tapped out the beat of the song playing in my head—Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song”—on my thigh. My theme song for today’s meeting.You said it, Bob, mental slavery is a bitch.Emancipate yourself, brother.
During the meeting, Tate used a toothpick to clean the motor oil and grime out from under his fingernails. He was a mechanic and owned a garage, and the grease gathered in the cracks of his hands that never looked clean. As we sat in the stifling heat of the church basement, I half-listened to people’s addiction stories. I rarely shared my own story at the meetings. I was tired of rehashing the events and personal issues that had led me to this point in my life. These meetings were more of an accountability thing for me, an hour and a half in my weekly schedule that reminded me I was like everyone else gathered in this room.
My name is Connor, and I’m an addict. I admitted that I was powerless over my addiction, and my life had become unmanageable.
Fun times.
I hadn’t done drugs in eighteen months. Technically, I’d been clean for that long. But a year ago, my doctor prescribed opioids after the operation to repair my broken jaw with titanium plates and screws. Why he’d given opioids to an addict was anyone’s guess. Ava doled out the Vicodin as per the instructions on the bottle. She kept the pills locked in a drawer at Trinity Bar and counted them every single time to make sure I hadn’t broken in and stolen them. That was what we’d been reduced to. She’d become my keeper, the trust so fractured that she needed to count fucking pills to make sure I didn’t relapse. She couldn’t even look at me without crying. And I couldn’t look at her without remembering all the shit I’d put her through over the years.
Sobriety was a bitch. It forced you to take a moral inventory and look at everything more clearly.
I tried to focus on the meeting, but my thoughts wandered to the memory of Ava kissing Zeke. Son of a bitch. He’d wanted me to see that he’d staked his claim. Why had I gone into the bar Zeke co-owned, the bar where Ava worked, asking for his help? Fucking masochist. Ava and Zeke had come in the door laughing like they didn’t have a care in the world. Which they didn’t. Without me, Ava’s life was better. Easier. Happier. The minute she saw me, she’d stopped laughing. When was the last time I made her happy?
I pictured us at eighteen, the summer Killian and I had moved to Park Slope. We’d rented a brownstone apartment across from Prospect Park, nicer than any place we’d ever lived before. Ava was lying on my bed, naked, her long white-blonde hair falling around her shoulders. Her creamy skin and that tiny, perfect body on full display. She propped her head on her hand and licked her cherry-red lips, her gray eyes heavy-lidded with a desire that matched my own. Muse’s “Hysteria” blasted from my speakers, and the early-evening sunlight filtered through the open windows, making her porcelain skin glow.
Ice on fire, that was Ava.
“You can’t sit around half-naked and expect me not to be tempted,” she said. “I want you now.”
I want you all the time. “Not done yet, Ava Blue,” I said as I sketched her naked body, the curve of her hip, her flat stomach, round breasts with rose-tinted nipples that begged to be worshiped by my mouth, my tongue, my teeth.
She pouted, but I caught the wicked gleam in her eye before her eyelids closed and she slid her hand between her legs. “Guess I’ll have to take care of myself then.”
I tossed my sketchbook on the floor and stalked over to the bed.
“Oh, you want to join me now?” she asked as I pushed down my shorts.
I crawled up the bed, and she spread her legs for me, knowing I’d take care of her first. We’d learned everything together—how to play each other’s bodies, how to prolong the pleasure until we were blinded by our need.
When I was buried deep inside Ava, her body wrapped around mine, I didn’t think about the Oxy hidden in my closet. Or how I’d get more pills when my supply ran low. Ava didn’t know about it. Neither did Killian. Not yet. I was still in denial, telling myself I wasn’t an addict, and I could quit anytime. It was a slippery slope and I lost my grip on it a year later when I smoked heroin for the first time. It didn’t take long before I was hooked and started shooting up. My relationship with Ava ended, and we’d never been able to get back what was lost.
Ava was my true love, but heroin had been my mistress. Tempting, forbidden, and demanding. More. More. More.
But that day, when we were eighteen, the possibility of what we could be seemed infinite.
“I see the way girls look at you. Are you ever tempted?” she asked me later, her head resting on my chest, her leg slung across my waist.
“Never,” I said, running my hand up her calf. “You’re the only girl for me.”
“I want to be your forever girl.”
“You’re my everything girl.”
“When I graduate from college, we’ll get our own place. Just you and me.”
“We can go anywhere. Where do you want to live?”
“California. Or anywhere. It doesn’t matter.” She placed her hand over my heart. “Your heart is racing.”
