“You said your addict days were behind you. They aren’t. And you know it.”
But the thing is, I didn’t know it until now. I’ve been making too many excuses, too much justification for years. As long as I kept my career, as long as I wasn’t on the streets, as long as I seemed okay to everyone else, then it wasn’t backsliding. I wasn’t like the junkie anymore. I wasn’t powerless and enslaved to something beyond my control. I wasn’t Lachlan Lockhart.
Sometimes it takes years to realize the truth. Sometimes it takes a moment.
My truth is this and it’s immediate: I’ll always be Lachlan Lockhart.
And I’ll always be fighting a very bloody war.
“You’re going to break my heart,” she whimpers, tears streaming down her face that she wipes angrily away.
“No,” I tell her, shaking my head. I stride to her, grabbing her by the shoulders desperately. “No, no, no.”
“Yes,” she cries out, avoiding my gaze. Up close her heartbreak is terrifying. “Yes. If this continues, yes. You will break me. Or I’ll break myself first.”
“Please,” I beg her, the tightness in my chest suffocating me. “We can work through this. I promise you, promise you we can.”
“No,” she says, shaking her head quickly, her lips pinched together. “We can’t. We aren’t strong enough. I’m not strong enough.”
“Yes you are,” I tell her. “You’re the strongest person that I know, Kayla and I know it’s a lot of pressure I’m putting on you, just asking you to even put up with me, let alone move here, but please. I love you. I love you so much that I can’t see straight and it’s destroying me. You’re ruining me to the very ground, can’t you see, but there’s nothing else I want more than to be at your feet.”
I collapse to my knees, holding her around her legs. “I can’t lose you. Don’t walk away from me. Don’t leave me. I’ve finally found you. You. I don’t want to go through the rest of this life without you at my side. I don’t even think I can.”
She’s rigid in my arms and I sob onto her thighs, holding her so tight because I feel that if I don’t let go, she can never leave. I’m just a ravaged mess of a man at the feet of the woman I love and begging for her to stay.
When her hands find their way into my hair, her fingers touching tenderly among my scalp, I nearly cry with relief. Her touch, her affection, soothes me like a bandage on a wound and I melt against her.
“Please,” I mutter against her legs. “I’ve never been more serious. I’ll do whatever it takes.”
“Rehab,” she whispers. “Or counseling. Something Lachlan, you need something and it has to be more than what I can give you.”
“Yes,” I tell her, even though the idea of going back to rehab for alcohol, more than a decade after going to rehab for meth, is embarrassing and shameful. Even though there will be no secrets if I go, that the world will find out and know just what kind of person I am. But I would do it for her. “I’ll go.”
“You have to want to go,” she says.
I stare up at her, resting my chin on her thighs. “I want to go,” I tell her.
“But you can’t do it for me,” she says.
But I would be doing it for her. I’d do anything for her, anything at all.
“I don’t want to be like this anymore,” I admit, voice choked with my pain. “I don’t want to be the man you hate, only the man you love.”
She sighs heavily and I can feel how heavy her heart is. I hate that I’ve done this to her, my beautiful, happy girl. “I just don’t know…” she trails off. “This relationship is just so new and…shouldn’t it be easier than this?”
I swallow hard. I have no answer. Because even though loving her scares me, not loving her scares me even more. How can love be easier? How can it not be anything but absolutely terrifying?
“Loving you is what’s easy,” I tell her after a beat. “That’s the only thing I know.”