“This way I could read it without upsetting him.”
He scratched his head, still looking uncomfortable. “How would that work, exactly?”
“We could meet for coffee. You’ll bring the file. How is that difficult?”
He smiled. “All right, Miss Sophie.”
Chapter Eighteen
Jude
Cravings Meter: 4 and Escalating
Winter was beautiful in Vermont. I’d forgotten how nice our town looked with a little snow on the porches and Christmas lights in the trees. I put wreaths over both garage doors—real ones, with red bows. It was all part of my plan to perk up the garage and attract more business.
I finished painting an interior wall of the garage. Somehow another sober week was strung together—all seven days.
On eBay, I sold several Porsche parts. Packing and shipping them kept me busy for at least a whole hour. My PayPal account was accumulating blood money, and I needed to mention it to Sophie. I kept putting it off, though. My time with her was precious and reserved for better things.
The following Wednesday went down much like the last one. After working the church supper, I went home and showered, leaving the door open. This time when Sophie arrived I was already on my back in bed. When I heard her footsteps on the stairs, I lifted my arms overhead, tucking them behind the pillow.
She opened the door and spotted me there, stretched out, my chest on display, the sheet tented over my erection. She gave it a pointed frown. “You started without me?”
“Maybe.” I dropped a hand down to my dick, stroking my fingers up the underside through the sheet. “Didn’t know for sure if you were coming over.” That was teasing talk, of course. We’d exchanged several hot glances over various food preparations.
I don’t think we were subtle, either. We must not have been, because her boy Denny had looked grouchy as hell tonight.
Sophie stripped out of her jacket and hung it on my doorknob. She kicked off her shoes and then stood there a second just watching me. “Pull the sheet down,” she demanded.
As I tugged it off, she knelt on the bed. One second later her lips closed around my dick. I threaded my fingers through her hair and forgot all about car parts on eBay.
*
After another very satisfying hour together, she lay in my arms and drowsed for a while. “Tired tonight?” I asked her, kissing her forehead to help her stay awake.
“So tired.”
“I wish I could just tuck you in and let you sleep.”
She’d sighed. “Me too.”
But we couldn’t do that, and we both knew it.
“Wednesday is the best day of the week,” she whispered, trailing the backs of her fingers over my face.
“They don’t call it ‘hump day’ for nothing.”
She laughed and gave me one more smile. “Maybe we could see each other over the weekend.”
“How?” We had to be so, so careful. Her father would freak if he knew we spent time together, and I didn’t want to make Sophie’s life any more difficult than it already was. Even our Wednesday trysts made me feel guilty.
“Stowe is ninety percent open already. Want to go snowboarding?”
I did. Lift tickets were probably almost a hundred bucks, though. And there was another problem. “I can’t. No board or boots.”
“Where are they?”
I pulled Sophie closer, and it killed me to answer honestly. I did it, though. “I sold them for almost nothing because I needed a hit.”
Sophie inhaled too sharply. It was the gasp of someone who understood more than they wanted to. But this conversation was absolutely necessary. Part of recovery is learning to get this shit off your chest and admitting to the people you love all the ways you’ve hurt them. “I did a lot of shit I’m not proud of. Hate telling you about it. But you should know.”
“What else?” she asked, her voice an uncomfortable scrape. She might not want to hear these things, but Sophie was wise to learn exactly what I was capable of.
Just in case she dabbled in the same kind of improbable, romantic thoughts that occasionally got the better of me, she needed to know who she was really dealing with.
At yesterday’s NA meeting we’d talked about all our “never’s.” As in—the shit an addict says he’ll never do and then does anyway. We all have them.
“Before I went to prison, I did painkillers, right? I snorted them. But in prison that shit was too expensive for me. The only thing I could afford was heroin.”
She stiffened in my arms. “Like, with needles?”
“Just like that. I shot it in between my fingers to avoid track marks and in between my toes. Anywhere I thought it wouldn’t show. It was the last thing I thought I’d ever do. And then I was still trying to hide it.”
Sophie was silent for a minute. “You can just buy heroin in prison?”
“Yup. I bought cigarettes and food with my paycheck and traded them for heroin. The prison doctor gave out clean needles. It’s a very efficient little economy they have working in there.”