Addicted to You (11 page)

She gave Leah a quick, dismissive glance
before refocusing on the TV where a fashion news anchor was
reporting on the latest celebrity scandals.

“How’s school?” she asked in that tone of
voice people used when they were just being polite and didn’t
actually care about the answer.

Leah didn’t bother answering. She sat beside
Helena on the loveseat, adjacent to her mom. “We need to talk about
Elijah.”

Her mom’s eyes narrowed slightly, and she
could tell by the way they unfocused on the TV that she was at
least partially listening. “What about him?”

Leah took a slow breath before saying, “I
don’t like him here home alone all the time. You need to reconsider
letting him move in with me.”

Her mom rolled her eyes. “Don’t be
ridiculous. He’s fine, and he’s old enough to entertain
himself.”

“He’s nine,” Leah said evenly. Raising her
voice never worked except to ignite her mom’s stubbornness.

“Exactly,” she said, her gaze sharpening on
the TV again. Apparently, the conversation was over.

Leah ground her teeth. This was the last
straw. She was taking Elijah whether her parents consented or
not.

Warm fingers closed around her fist, and she
looked over to see Helena giving her a tight, encouraging smile.
Slowly, she relaxed her jaw.

“By the way,” her mom said, “there’s a party
this weekend. It’s being hosted by some friends, and they asked us
to bring Elijah.” Her tone of voice suggested this particular
condition annoyed her. “I’ll need you to go as well to keep an eye
on him.”

Leah glowered, but her mom was so intent on
the news anchor that it did her little good.

“You want me to watch him at a party full of
people, but you think he’s fine on his own in an empty house?”

“Well, I can’t have him causing trouble at a
party, now can I?” Incredulously, she made it sound as if Leah were
the one being unreasonable.

“Elijah doesn’t cause trouble at all,” Leah
said, her voice rising in spite of herself. “If you were around
more often, you’d know that.”

Now, her mom did look at her, with an
expression filled with ice. It was the same look Leah sometimes saw
reflected back from a mirror. She felt suddenly cold despite the
burn of anger in her chest.

“My life involves more than sitting around
and looking at stars,” her mom said coolly. Her gaze flickered to
Helena, who was pretending she wasn’t listening by flipping through
a pamphlet she’d picked up at the observatory. “You will attend the
party.”

“Let Elijah move in with me.”

“This is not a negotiation, Leah,” she said,
a warning in her voice.

“Then I’m not going. And you’ll just have to
look after your son like a real mother for once.” She was bluffing,
of course. She would never leave Elijah to wander a party alone.
Knowing her parents, they would drop him off in a corner, order him
to stay put, and then disappear for hours.

Her parents never asked her for anything—the
one good thing about them—so she had to take advantage of it
now.

Her mom gave Leah a scrutinizing look. Very
little in the way of genuine emotion passed over her face even
though Leah had just accused her of not being a real mom. Not that
Leah was surprised. Their deal in regards to Elijah had, after all,
essentially released her from any obligations to him.

The deliberation in her mom’s eyes wasn’t
for Elijah. It was for herself and Leah’s dad. How badly did they
want to impress these so-called friends of theirs?

“We’ll consider it.”

Apparently, the answer was ‘a lot.’ That was
the most leeway she’d ever given Leah on this subject.

Leah nodded. She was willing to leave it for
now instead of pushing harder and risking setting off her mom’s
contradictory nature. Her mom hated being told what to do and
sometimes did the exact opposite just to spite the offender.

With nothing else to discuss, she and Helena
said their good-byes. They couldn’t get out the door fast
enough.

Having avoided directly interacting with his
boss for a week (it helped that Will only went into the office
Mondays and Fridays, and he’d called in sick on Monday), Will was
beginning to feel the weight of his conscience. James had responded
by email to last week’s notes with a terse, “Let’s discuss when you
come in.”

Not only did Will not want to disappoint his
boss, he didn’t want to disappoint himself, and this shoddy work
would do him no favors. But analyzing whether the counselor’s
methods were working (in his opinion, no) while trying to make his
own diagnoses and treatment suggestions by dissecting their mental
and social behaviors meant he’d have to dissect the girl who’d
taken over his every spare thought lately.

This wasn’t what he meant by wanting to get
to know her. Studying her, breaking down her parts like a specimen
beneath a microscope would be like twisting the knife with which
he’d backstabbed her.

Especially after what had happened last
Friday. His behavior still surprised him. He was appalled that he’d
been ready to take her in the nearest broom closet, never mind that
she’d been perfectly willing. She drove him crazy, and he didn’t
even know her name.

Next time, he’d do it right. He would bring
her here, into his bedroom. He would lay her down across his bed
and show her that the only addiction she needed was him.

Hopefully, there would be a next time.
Finn’s outburst hadn’t helped him any.

And on top of everything was the
increasingly pressing fact that he had yet to tell her the truth.
He should have told her in the theater, but every time he’d opened
his mouth, he couldn’t say it.

Bonny bumped her face against his jaw. He
sighed and gave her chin a scratch. With a purr of contentment, she
settled back into his lap, her tail curling around his forearm. If
only everyone was so easily appeased.

He glanced at the time in the lower right
corner of his screen. He’d had a sandwich for dinner hours ago and
his stomach was grumbling again. Maybe Finn would want to go out
for a burger.

Before shutting down his laptop, he pulled
up the website for his bank account and logged in. His balance was
pitiful, but at least it matched what he’d been expecting to see.
He transferred everything except fifty dollars—enough to get by
before his next paycheck from James—to the account he’d opened for
his parents, which he noted sat at a balance of twenty-three cents.
He didn’t much care what his parents spent the money on, so long as
they stopped flooding his inbox at the end of every month with
emails that were simultaneously nice and resentful.

The first time they contacted him after he
came to America was by phone, and it had caught Will completely by
surprise. More surprising had been when his dad told him he was
proud that his son was not only attending University, but that he’d
come to America to make a new life for himself. For the briefest of
moments, Will had felt … elation.

He should have anticipated what was coming,
but he’d been blindsided by a hope he hadn’t known he was holding
onto. His dad went on to say that if Will had the means to attend
University in America, then he should do what he could to help his
parents as well. What sort of selfish son would leave his parents
to live like paupers in their wee neighborhood while he lived the
American dream?

Will had worked three jobs—two to save up to
leave Scotland and the third to supplement his parents’ income.
Most days, he’d been so exhausted that he could barely speak, and
his dad knew that. He had made it this far on his own merit and his
own refusal to fail, and yet, listening to his dad, for a moment,
Will had believed him.

Maybe he’d been selfish for leaving them.
Selfish for wanting his own life, for wanting to be more than a bus
driver like his dad. Coming all the way to America had, perhaps,
been a bit extreme. He could have just gone to Edinburgh or London.
Or anywhere else in Europe.

He supposed his dad had been right in one
thing—Will had been running away. And remaining anywhere on the
same continent just wouldn’t have been far enough.

But that particular conversation had
happened almost three years ago. Will had long since made his peace
with it. He was happy here. Even though his parents hadn’t been
around much, it didn’t matter who they were as people because they
were still his parents. And he was still their son. He had a
responsibility to help them if he could.

Money transfer complete, he closed his
laptop and rubbed his temple. He needed a drink. He reached for his
cell phone.

As it turned out, Finn was already a step
ahead of him.

Half an hour later, Will met his friend at a
nearby bar. Finn greeted him with a rough pat on the back and
immediately shoved a mug of beer into his hand.

“Where’s everyone else?” Will asked,
glancing around the bar. He hadn’t been out with the guys for a
couple weeks, and one of them had caught him after psych the other
day to remind him to come out that weekend.

“Just me,” Finn muttered into his drink.

Will shrugged and took a gulp of cold beer.
“Are you drunk already?” he asked.

“No, but give me another hour.” Finn tossed
back the rest of his beer and then refilled his mug.

Will gave the nearly empty pitcher a curious
look. “What happened?”

“I’m a fuck-up, that’s what happened.” He
made to toss back another mugful of beer, but Will put a hand on
his forearm to stop him.

“Unless you ran over someone’s dog, I’m not
sure I see how you could have screwed up badly enough to need …” He
made a nebulous gesture at Finn’s current near-drunk state. “All
this.”

“Excuse me?”

Someone tapped Will’s shoulder. At the
interruption, he swiveled around in his bar stool to find a pretty
girl standing before him, tucking ginger curls behind her ear.

“Hi,” she said, smiling. She had freckles
across the bridge of her nose.

“Hello,” Will returned.

He glanced back at Finn, who rolled his eyes
and muttered, “I keep telling you it’s the accent.”

“I’m Sara,” she said and held out her hand.
“Do you go to REU?”

He shook her hand to be polite. She really
was quite pretty, and under normal circumstances, he probably would
have been glad to continue talking to her. But Finn had that ‘I’m a
shadow of a man’ look, and Will hadn’t come here to meet
someone.

Besides, there was only one girl he wanted
to be with at the moment.

“Sara, it’s nice to meet you. And I’m really
quite sorry, but my friend here is having a bit of a night so
…”

She seemed to take the hint because she put
up her hands, and her cheeks were pink even beneath the yellow bar
lights. “Oh no, it’s okay, I—er, sorry for bugging you.”

She made a hasty exit back to the booth
where her friends waited, all leaning forward to watch their
exchange. Since they were staring—and now glaring—he gave them an
apologetic smile before turning back to his friend.

“So tell me what happened,” Will said.

Finn, meanwhile, had emptied the last of the
pitcher into his mug and was staring into its murky depths like he
was searching for life.

“Kat hates me.”

Will waited for him to elaborate. When he
only continued to stare sullenly into his beer, Will shook his
head.

“All right, but we already knew that. How
does that make you a fuck-up?”

Finn covered his face and mumbled into his
palm. “Because her boyfriend kissed me.”

That was, quite possibly, the last thing
he’d expected Finn to say. Will tilted his head and squinted a bit
to try and make out Finn’s expression behind his fingers.

“Did you just say …”

“Yes.” Finn rubbed his palm down his face
and gave Will a look that was decidedly bleak. “Her boyfriend
kissed me. I sort of wondered if maybe he was curious because this
one time, he kept staring at me, but I convinced myself it was just
because he knew I wanted his girlfriend. But last night, he—”

“This happened
last night
, and you
didn’t tell me?”

“I’m telling you now. Let me finish.”

Will waved for him to continue. He
definitely needed to hear how this happened.

“I was out barhopping with the other
guys—”

“On a Tuesday night?”

“Are you going to let me finish?”

“Sorry, sorry. Carry on.”

“Anyway, we ran into Seth—that’s Kat’s
boyfriend—at the fourth bar. I was already kind of drunk, and Andy
was giving me shit about wanting a girl who hated my guts so I was
a little pissed too. So Seth sees us, and he comes over and starts
talking to me like we’re friends or something. And then he asks to
talk to me in private, and I think ‘sure, why the hell not,’ so I
follow him back toward the bathrooms and—” He covered his face
again.

“And he kissed you.” Since when did college
become a soap opera?

Finn nodded miserably. “And I might have
kissed back.”

Will didn’t even know how
to respond to that. Other than to ask, “
Why
?
”

“Because I’m an idiot!” he
shouted. Several people nearby, including the bartender, glanced
over. “I thought … I thought maybe that was it, you know? Maybe
kissing him was the closest I would ever get to kissing Kat, and
since she hated me anyway, why the hell shouldn’t I kiss him
back?
He
started
it.”

“You do realize that’s a shit excuse?”

“I know. What an asshole.
I can’t believe he’d do that her. I can’t believe
I’d
do that to
her.”

Because there was nothing adequate to say,
Will asked, “So what are you going to do?”