Page 25 of Salvaged Heart
He shot me a look that told me that was the very last thing he would think about me before offering a half-hearted smile. “We are not here for that.” He spoke like he was trying to corner a wild animal. “I thought it would help to attend an Addicts Anonymous meeting. There’s one here that starts,” He checked the clock on his phone, “Well, it started two minutes ago.”
Ah fuck.“Beck…”
“Anders, please. Last night, you promised you wouldn’t fight my help.”
All I could do was nod in response. There wasn’t a single part of me that wanted to walk in through those doors, sit down, and confess all my sins to a bunch of strangers. I had been to a few meetings before, and while the experience hadn’t been terrible, I’d felt isolated and like a fraud. These meetings were for people working hard every single day to continue their sobriety, dedicating their lives to their recovery, racking up chip after chip to commemorate their wins. The longest stretch between using Ihad ever had was seven days. Seven pathetic days. And, I hadn’t come close to it since. I didn’t belong here.
“I don’t know if I can do this, Beck.” My hand drummed a nervous beat on my leg, “I don’t want to negatively affect someone’s journey with all my…fuck.” He reached out and grabbed my hand, slotting his fingers through mine until he was holding it tightly in his.
“You can, and you will do this, Anders. I’ll be by your side the entire time.” The look on his face was so earnest it broke something inside me. Why was he doing this? Why did he even care? I was nothing to him. He didn’t even owe this to my sister. If she were here, she would have thrown my ass on the street where it belonged without a second thought. As if sensing I was shutting down, he added, “Look, we drove over here already…”
“Under false pretenses,” I grumbled.
“One meeting, Anders. If you hate it, we don’t have to come back, but you do have to try for me. Okay?”
He was so fucking lucky he was pretty. “Fine. One meeting.”
The grin he gave me in response was almost worth it. Understanding that all it would take was a half-second hesitation from him for me to take flight, he spun on his heels and dragged me towards the entrance, his hand still firmly grasped in mine.
13
BECKHAM
JULY
The sky exploded with reds, blues, pinks, and greens, raining showers of fizzing yellow light down all over the lake. I watched the fireworks out the window in Anders’ room. His head, topped with a mop of slightly matted brown curls, lay on my thigh. When he woke again, I would make him shower and help brush out the worst of it, but for now, I was content to comb my fingers through the sections that would allow it.
I’d come up here to see if he felt good enough to sit on the shore of the lake and watch the celebrations together, but to my dismay, he’d been like I found him most nights—in a fitful sleep, half knotted up in his blankets and drenched in sweat. Some nights, he would cry out for hours. Others, he would toss and turn, tears silently rolling down his cheeks. For all of them, I laid next to him, trying to hush and soothe away the worst of it. In the mornings, I would wake to him pressed up against me, arm thrown over my body, clinging on like I was his last lifeline. I would extricate myself from under him, slipping back to my mattress on the floor before he woke.
We didn’t talk about it.
There was nothing to say.
The days that followed his confession had been long and hard. Each morning, I coaxed him out of bed with coffee blacker than tar and attempted to force food down his throat, most of which he threw back up within the hour. We attended AA together and sat much like we had the first day, silent and hand in hand, Anders fidgeting with a silver chip someone had pressed into his palm on his second visit.
Twenty-four hours sober.
He'd dismissed it as not an accomplishment, but the fact that he carried it everywhere with him told me otherwise. Multiple times a day, I glanced over and caught him staring down at it like it was the greatest thing he’d ever owned.
He had yet to speak to the group, but the other members were kind to him, stopping by to check in and slip their phone numbers to me in case we needed anything. One woman in particular, Kara, had called me every day, feeding me assurances that if I just persevered and kept hanging onto him tightly, he would start to come out the other side in a few days or so, by no means cured, but through the worst of the crippling withdrawal symptoms. I think she was checking in more for my benefit than his.
At least once a day, I dragged him outside for fresh air. Sometimes, we walked the small path leading around the edge of the lake. Others, we simply sat on the bank looking out over the expanse of glittering blue water. I’d offered on several occasions to do yoga with him, a thought that made him laugh this weak and brittle laugh, but he dismissed my request each time with a “Maybe later.”
The renovation had mainly fallen to the wayside. I worked a little each day while Anders took one of his many naps, but he didn’t sleep well without me close by, and I'd find him wandering the house, overflowing with restless energy. Laureltexted or called daily, and I alternated between missing her calls or feeding her generic, vague updates about the state of things. I wouldn’t be able to hold her off for long, but hopefully long enough that Anders would be back on his feet and able to channel some of that restlessness into the project.
He hadn’t once asked me for the drugs or alcohol I’d taken from his room. I worried he had found where I stashed it, but I counted the pills every night, and all were accounted for. Each morning, I told myself that day would be the one when I finally conceded and flushed it all down the toilet, and every day, I failed to follow through. I don’t know why I clung to it. The poison needed to be eradicated from this place, but a small, nagging voice in the back of my head told me to keep it. A suffocating fear that if he asked for them and I couldn’t provide what he needed, he might threaten his life again, and that was something I could not risk.
I must have drifted off at some point. The next thing I knew, the bed shifted below me as Anders’ head moved from my lap. “Shit, Beck. I’m sorry.”
I opened a heavy lid and peeked over at him. His face was flushed with a color I hadn’t seen on it in almost two weeks. The bags that usually darkened underneath his eyes seemed to have lifted, and he had this dorky half-grin on his face, both playful and embarrassed.
“Didn’t mean to snuggle you.”
“It’s alright.” I stretched out my limbs. Sleeping sitting up in bed had done nothing good to my already abused shoulder, which ached fiercely. I tried to rub out the worst of the discomfort and finally forced open both my eyes to the bright room. “How are you feeling?”
“Better than you look, that’s for sure.” He laughed, and it was the most magical sound I’d ever heard.
“Yeah?”
