“That’s so incredibly shitty.”
She made a tell me about it face and sipped her drink, wincing at the sting. She hadn’t tasted liquor in ages. Not since before she’d met James. Not since Lime. She set the glass on the edge of the dresser, done with it.
“So what was really happening?” Casey prompted.
“I was all over, crashing on people’s couches. Working menial jobs sometimes. But . . .” She took a deep breath. “But it was easier for me to rely on men. And I don’t mean I was selling my body. I mean I’d date older guys, the types who’d take care of me, let me stay with them, lend me money.” Sugar daddies was the term, but she refused to speak it aloud.
“Some of them treated me fine. Maybe they were a little creepy, with me being so young, but they didn’t exploit me any more than I was expecting or willing to be exploited, you know? Others weren’t so good. I got smacked around a little.”
Heat flared in Casey’s eyes.
“I left those guys as quick as I could. I’d spent so much time feeling controlled by my father, I only wanted that stuff on my terms. With guys I felt like I had some control over.”
“Sure,” he said, looking a touch nauseous. “So how did you wind up in Nevada? And with Ware?”
“Things took a bad turn when I moved to Arizona with a guy. We fell apart, and I wound up dating a friend of his. That was a bad scene, and I was in a bad way. I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere. Like there was no home for me to run back to. I even wrote to my mother one time, about two years after I’d left, and asked if I could come and see her—just her. She told me no. That my dad was having heart issues and he couldn’t handle it if he found out. She also told me my grandma had passed away. I loved my grandma, so much. I took her last name—my mom’s maiden name—when I ran away.”
“Price.”
She nodded. “And she lived in Abilene.”
“Gotcha.”
“It broke my heart, hearing she’d passed. And worrying maybe the stress I’d caused everyone might’ve had something to do with it. After that letter, I just had to accept, I had no home to go back to. Nobody. This was about three years ago. I went into a really dark place, and I started to just . . . drift. I worked on and off, and I . . . I tried heroin, then. For the first time. And not the last.”
Casey’s fist squeezed his glass—she could tell from the way his knuckles blanched. He’d not expected drugs, she thought. The possibility had never crossed his mind, and she wasn’t surprised. Junkies weren’t meant to be shy, or liable to blush at cuss words, or indeed chubby. She didn’t fit the bill.
All he said was, “Jesus.”
“It was bad. It was really bad. It started slow. I worked and used and mostly functioned for a year and a half. I wound up in Lime, through somebody who knew somebody, who knew somebody.”
“That’s where you met Ware?”
She nodded. “But not how you might be picturing. He saved me, actually. He was probably the only man who ever saved me, without wanting anything out of it for himself—sex or some hero complex or any other thing.”
“Oh.”