Page 181 of A Love Letter to Whiskey
I shook my head. “No, it’s okay.”
“But you’re not.”
My eyes flooded. “No,” I whispered. “I’m not.”
He sighed again, just as heavy and deep, and the pain in that sigh told me that it mattered to him that I wasn’t okay — which mattered to me, more than he would ever know.
“Let me get you some water,” he said, starting to rise, but I reached out for him, clinging to his arm.
“No. Please,” I begged, fighting back more tears. “Just stay.”
His brows furrowed, and he nodded, sitting beside me on his bed and wrapping his arms around me.
There was always something safe about Tyler. I’d felt it the first time we laid eyes on each other, my first day of Bridgechester Prep. I was in a completely new school with kids I’d never met before, feeling about as comfortable as a lobster in a boiling pot of water, but somehow, he’d crashed through the noise. I still remembered the way he had stopped in the hallway, how he’d crooked one corner of his mouth in a smile, how he’d said hi, and asked me to sit with him at lunch.
This, on my first day of high school. This, at a school where none of my friends from the public middle school could afford to attend – where I was only able to attend thanks to my aunt knowing someone who knew someone and writing one hell of a scholarship essay for me. This, right after my mother had left me to live with my aunt, checking herself into rehab.
And for the first time in possibly my entire life, I’d felt safe.
He was always looking out for me and Morgan. When we were kayaking on the lake, he was always on alert, ready to jump in and save either of us if he needed to. When we first learned how to drive, he was always with us, making sure we weren’t distracting each other. When we went to our first high school party, he was there, waiting in the wings to make sure no one drugged our drinks and we didn’t get too drunk to know what we were doing.
Tyler radiated care and safety, and so I leaned into the heat of him, his skin still warm and sticky with sunscreen. He must have been lying out by the pool, or doing his calisthenics in the yard. My hand splayed the area where his rib cage met his abs, and I swallowed at the way they felt — hard muscles covered by soft, bronzed skin.
For the longest time, he just held me there, silently rocking me until my tears had dried up. At some point he handed me a tissue, though I couldn’t be sure when. It was like I was in a dream — or rather, a nightmare.
“Did something happen with James?” Tyler asked after a while, and I didn’t miss the hardness in his voice at the mention of my now-ex-boyfriend. He’d broken up with me a couple weeks ago, right before senior prom, and I’d been devastated.
But that was nothing compared to this.
I shook my head, and Tyler let out an almost-relieved sigh.
“Good,” he said. “I didn’t want to have to fight that little bastard.”
I tried to smile, but failed.
After another long pause, Tyler whispered, “Is it your mom?”
My heart squeezed so violently in my chest that I curled in on myself, and I knew that was an answer in itself. Still, I nodded against his chest, and he held me tighter.
My mother was an addict, and had been my entire life. Of course, I didn’t know it — not really — not until the summer after eighth grade when I found her on the floor of our trailer with a needle in her arm and a dead look in her eyes. Luckily, she was just short of overdosed, and she survived.
But it was the rudest wake-up call of my life.
I didn’t know my father, and according to my mother, she didn’t know him, either. She had been sexually assaulted at a rave party in the summer of ‘94, and I was the product of that night — a constant reminder of the most brutal violation that can happen to a woman.
Part of me wondered if I was the reason she turned to drugs so hard, if seeing me brought back that night of her life every day. My Aunt Laura assured me that her habit had started well before I was even born, but I still wondered.
I moved in with Aunt Laura that summer, not too long after the incident, and my mom had been taking the last four years to work on herself. She went to rehab, got a job, and even managed to rent a house in the next town over — though I still didn’t see her often.
