“I know,” I tell her. “But it’s different now. I’m seeing a psychologist. I’ve been sober. I spent a few weekends at rehab. I’m making the changes, I really am. I want to be a better man, not just for you, but for my family, for myself. For life.”
I can feel her smile against me. “Good. That…that brings me relief like you wouldn’t know.” She sighs heavily. “But it’s done. You know? I don’t think we can come back from it. Or, I can’t come back from it. Not now. Not with my mom…it’s too hard. I don’t know how I’m going to get through tonight, let alone tomorrow. And the next day. And the next. How am I even going to put one foot in front of the other. I’ll fall. And I’ll stay down on the floor. I can’t ever pick myself up from this.”
“Kayla,” I whisper to her. “Take your time. There’s nothing to rush through. I’m always going to be here for you, always going to feel the same. I will wait.”
“But I don’t want you to wait for me,” she says, almost sharply.
I close my eyes, absorbing the pain.
She’s breaking.
I’m breaking.
“Okay,” I say hoarsely.
“It’s not fair to you. I have my own shit to deal with here and I can’t deal with any more guilt than I already have. I can’t deal with knowing you’re across an ocean, waiting for me, loving me, when I know I’ll give you nothing. I can’t give anything anymore. Don’t you understand?”
I nod, knowing completely what she means and hating it. Hating it. “Aye. I understand. You know, there’s something about me I never told you.”
She stills against me, waiting for my confession. I bite the bullet. “When I decided to get clean, when I decided to come back to Jessica and Donald and beg for their mercy, to take me back in, it wasn’t a gradual choice. It was an immediate one. I had a friend, Charlie. A junkie just like me. All his bad faults were due to the addiction. If you took that away, he was a kind, charming young man. Funny as fuck. And he was loyal, though his loyalty was always to the drugs, to that high, first.” I lick my lips and realize that the story isn’t ripping me apart like I thought it would. The pain and shame and guilt of what was done has been pushed aside. “Charlie really wanted to get into heroin. I never did it, though Brigs and a few other people think otherwise, but I never did. Not that that makes me anything special – meth is just as disgusting, maybe more so. But I didn’t do it and when Charlie wanted to get high that way, I refused to help him. I didn’t want any part.”
I pause and look down. She’s listening, wide-eyed. I go on. “But then I saw him shoot it up and saw how happy he was and then when he came down, it didn’t seem like meth. It seemed harmless. I told myself that. I told myself a lot of lies. So when he wanted some more a few days later, I told him I’d get it for him. We helped each other like that and now, well, now I believed I was really helping Charlie. So I went to some people I knew, the wrong people, but they had it and I got it for Charlie…used money I made begging on the street. It felt better than using it for food. We rarely fucking ate, you know. We could but it just wasn’t important. There was only one thing that was. The bloody high. So I went back to Charlie, gave him the smack. He shot it up in front of me. But…I don’t know what went wrong. Maybe he used too much, maybe it was bad stuff, maybe his body couldn’t take anymore. The problem was, I was so fucking high on meth myself that I had no idea what was going on. He died in front of me.”