In the Nick of Time (45 page)

…One week later

“Why am I
in here?”

Frieda shuffled a few papers around on her desk as if the damn things were playing musical chairs, her expression blank. A man dressed in a dark suit stood to the left of her wearing an insincere crooked grin as he rocked back and forth on his heels. He recognized the guy—Head of Security.

What? Am I supposed to be scared?

“Officer Nick Vitale, I need for you to—”

“Wait, hold on.” He smirked and raised his hand in the air as if trying to stop traffic so that he could cross over a busy intersection. “Why so formal? You’ve never called me that before.”

“Well, I’m trying to tell you.” She leisurely removed her brown and black tortoise shell glasses from her face, set them down, and glared at him for a second or two.

“It came to my attention that you and Ms. Jones have a relationship that exceeds a friendship.”

And then, she said nothing more for several seconds. Her face remained the same, completely unchanged, and so did his own.

“You’ve been fraternizing with a client, a resident here at Firststone… the same one you were warned about previously.”

The room drew silent, arctic, like the slicked streaks of ice that covered the frames of the windows.

“And what type of fraternizing are you referring to?” He decided to play it cool, call her bluff. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He leaned slightly forward, while the corner of his lip itched to morph into an all-out grin.

“Don’t play these games.” She rolled her eyes. “You know we have rules, which you’ve already been notified about.” She opened one of the folders and removed a sheet of paper, then slid it across the desk towards him. “And they state that there should be
no
intimate contact between residents. You signed this.” She tapped the top of the paper, as if he needed to be reminded about the incident in question, shown his signature for good measure.

“Like I said, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He sat back, legs open and posture relaxed. Leaning to one side in the chair, he casually glided his index finger across his chin.

You can do what you want with me, but Taryn is staying right here. You can’t pin shit on us… You’re lying. I can see it in your eyes.

“I know that you are experienced with intensive investigation work, Officer Vitale.”

“I’m patrol. We do limited investigative work, only take preliminary statements. I’m not homicide.”

“I know your history, your background, if you will. You may have been patrol, Officer Vitale, but I understand that if you were a first responder, many times you were able to get the truth out of people, better than almost any of your counterparts. You are gifted in extracting information from people, and knowing what triggers to push. I have information that leads me to believe that you were quite adept at it. Therefore, I knew this conversation would go similarly to how it is going at this time.” She took a deep breath, sat a bit taller, and clasped her hands together. “So, I’m not going to beat around the bush and entertain what you’re doing right now. You are denying the obvious, and you and I both know it. This is not your beat. This is not your occupation. This is
therapy
. This is drug rehabilitation treatment. You have to be honest; it is part of the process.”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about…” he repeated, not flinching or breaking a sweat.

She laughed lightly, shook her head, then clicked her tongue against her lower teeth.

“Okay, let me try this in a different way… No, we do not have actual proof of this, which you are already using as your escape card, so to speak. That’s why you keep saying that because you know I need you to
admit
to wrongdoing. As stated, you know how to play this game. Unfortunately I am not an expert at such things. Regardless, we all know that it occurred. First of all, Nick, you—”

“Oh…so now we are back to Nick, huh?” he taunted. “We’re friends again, Frieda?”

“This is a pivotal time for both of you. I’m going to be honest with you and explain my concerns, removing the broken rules out of the equation completely. You could be opening another door, inviting in more self-destruction. What I am saying is that you may be replacing one addiction with another. It is not uncommon. Sex addiction is often used to replace other addictions once they have been removed as viable options.”

“I’m not a sex addict,” he stated dryly.

“I’m not saying that you are, Mr. Vitale, nor am I accusing Taryn of being a sex addict, either. Listen to me very carefully.” She glared at him, speaking slowly, patronizing him in her manipulative way. “We have to protect the recovery of
each
and
every
one of you and these sorts of situations hinder our goals. Romantic relationships during rehabilitation are often distracting, taking the focus off of recovery. It has been proven that, on average, being in a romantic relationship during early recovery increases chances of relapse by over fifty percent.”

“Uh huh, I see.” He ran his finger across his lower lip, pretending to be interested in her point of view. “I’m not sure why we are discussing this. This doesn’t pertain to me.”

Frieda apparently didn’t know who the hell she was messing with. Nick understood how to deceive the seemingly undeceivable. Not once, not twice, but three fucking times he’d passed a lie detector test designed to catch him in a falsehood. Many believed a lie detector machine couldn’t be beat, but that was complete bullshit. If you divorced yourself from emotions and accountability, convinced yourself that your own lies were true, you’d beat that damn machine into the ground, leave it smoking. He’d become a temporary sociopath along his walk in life, and pretending he was something he was not had become second nature.

For he was a monster…

He knew how to stick to a poker face until his opponent fell the fuck over. He was adept in bluffing, lying and breaking criminals down to the core, just like she’d stated. In his work, he played for both sides of the field—he was one of the good guys and the bad guys, too, all within a day’s work, embodying inside the same fucked up, dangerous man.

Try me if you want to…

His secrets and mendacities were dark, but his truths proved darker. He’d been there and done that, he wore the shiny badge, and had the filthy cocaine stash to prove it. He could look the Devil dead in the eye and convince him there were no souls to take over, consume, ruin, and destroy for eternity. He’d been deceiving the world since he was a young child, and hellacious habits like that died hard.

“Okay, look, Nick.” Her frustration peeked through like nipples under a sheer bra. “You and Taryn have been assisting one another in a positive way as well, I won’t deny that. Since you’ve been here, her attitude has greatly improved. She didn’t necessarily have a bad attitude before, but she’d allow her triggers to cause her to spiral out of control more frequently. Now, she is more open and is volunteering for more therapy sessions and all sorts of programs, taking the initiative. However, she is still at risk. What if you two break up? In the next day or so, just hypothetically speaking? She could lose control or vice versa. That is one of the main reasons we discourage this sort of thing!”

She paused, waited for something, for him to mess up and slip, defend himself and his woman, to be idiotic enough to waltz right into her flimsy trap and fall flat on his face.

This shit is comical.

He grinned wide from ear to ear, and watched the lady squirm about in her seat, regardless of the fact she wasn’t moving. He knew her cool exterior was simply an act, and as he sat there and listened to her speak, her mannerisms and lack of consistent eye contact told on her. It became clear to him that the woman was not illustrating the complete picture…

She’s up to something…

Regardless, the entire scene was the most entertainment he’d had all week.

“The reason for this rule, Officer Vitale, is due to the fact that it can negatively influence recovery,” she began again, taking another crooked, dull stab at the matter.

“You’ve already said that…”

“Yes, but you still don’t seem to get it. It’s not because we don’t want residents to get along, form friendships, and care for one another. It is because—”

“Just stop.” He sneered as he put his hand up, sick and tired of her going on and on, stating the obvious. “I
know
the reasons, okay? We’re not children, and things will happen that people have no control over. You can’t police love, tell it when to start and stop. It doesn’t work that way. People fall in love all the time. Bankers, fools, teenagers, strippers, ministers, and drug addicts…we
all
can fall in love, Frieda. I’m not admitting to anyone
anything
except that yes, I do have a relationship with Taryn and we care about each other a great deal. Doesn’t mean we’ve done anything.” The lies started tasting good to him. He’d just eaten her pussy that very morning, made her ride his fucking face as his hands gripped her soft ass and drove her further onto his roving tongue. In his mind, he could still hear her cries of ecstasy; oh, how he wanted to hear that song again…

“You know what?” He leaned to the far right in his seat, crossed his legs, and smiled at the woman. “I’m going to do you a favor… I will go one step further; tell you a thing or two. Now look,” he said coolly. “I didn’t walk in here expecting to make friends, let alone fall in love, but it happened. Now, with that being said it seems to me, Frieda, that you and Mr. Men In Black here have
bigger
problems than some love affair between two consenting adults on your campus.” He hitched his thumb in the direction of the closed and locked door.

“What are you referring to, Mr. Vitale?”

His eyes hooded in disgust. He shook his head, glanced lazily at the window behind the woman, then set his eyes back upon her, growing weary of the entire act.

“You
know
what I’m talking about, but since you want to go down this road, let’s start the engine. Okay, first of all, you’ve got drug deals going down every week in here… Don’t look like that, seriously. You can put that fake surprised face right back on the damn shelf ’cause I ain’t buyin’ it.”

The woman abruptly sat back in her seat, crossed her arms, and grimaced.

“I know you know about it, too… I can tell.” His eyes narrowed on her. “Yet here I sit in your office being accused of something that we both realize could have dire repercussions.”

“Then why did you do it?” She smirked.

“Do what?” He rolled his eyes. “Look, I love the woman. Nothing more, nothing less, and let the record show, you just said yourself that Taryn has improved since I’ve been here. I have never been here before, so you have nothing to compare it to, but trust and believe, she has been a remarkably positive influence on my life, too. I would have never been able to stand up in group like I did last week and tell my story about what happened to my best friend without her support. I’ve never told that story in its entirety to any damn body, let alone an entire room full of people! I would have probably relapsed twice by now, instead of once, if it hadn’t been for her.”

“Relapsed?” Her brow rose in confusion and definite concern.

That’s right, Ms. Eagle Eye… You didn’t know shit about it.

“Oh yeah.” He grinned. “The second week I was here, I got my hands on a little sandwich bag filled with Jack Daniels that I paid ten bucks for. That’s all the cash I had on me for a whole damn week, per your rules. I even chilled the thing! It is amazing what you can buy in this place… It’s like a makeshift Wal-Mart for addicts!” He cackled. “There’s deals, sales, and smiley faces galore. Relapse drop on aisle nine!” The woman was clearly not amused. “Anyway, my happiness was short-lived. I felt like shit afterwards. Not just physically, but mentally and emotionally, too. I had let myself down and resolved to not do it again, but that means nothing when it comes to a guy like me and my problems.

“I always meant well, but meaning well and doing the right thing, in the end, are two damn different things. When I decided to get help for my impulsive and destructive behavior and addiction, I would procrastinate, fall back, and make excuses. Not because I’d miss the taste of the liquor—that had very little to do with it. It was because I was afraid of what would be drudged up once I became sober; and let me tell you, Frieda.” He glared at her, his eyes narrowing as his blood seemed to turn cold in mid-flow throughout his veins. “
All
of my fears materialized. I wasn’t paranoid; I knew what the hell was waiting for me on the other side to some degree, but it was even worse than I could have ever imagined. And I’ve had to deal with it, and so much more.

“Had it not been for Taryn reminding me that I was important, that I was somebody, and even if I had no faith in myself, she believed in me, there is no
telling
how many additional false starts, relapses, whatever the hell you want to call them that I would have had to deal with.” He poked himself hard in the chest. “And quite honestly, to sweeten the pot, the fact of me having someone else to be accountable to, to help me out, was a motivating factor. It’s like having a workout buddy, someone that knows how many miles you’ve run and when you come up short, they say, ‘Hey, you’re fuckin’ up!’

“That’s what I needed—help from a damn peer, someone in my same boat, not a counselor, not a director, not a guard, nothing like that! I needed a true blue hard-core addict like myself to say, ‘We are in this together! If you drown, I drown too, got it?!’ and knowing she was looking up to me and I to her, that all of her efforts into me weren’t in vain, only spurred me on. I had someone
else
to do it all for this time, not just me. There’s no one in my life, Frieda.” He shrugged. “I have no children and I made my friends stay away while I get my hands around this thing. I go—”

“I think—”

“No, let me finish! I go home to an empty house. I don’t have problems being alone, and I don’t use women, sex, or relationships as crutches, either. That’s NOT my drug of choice, and you know this! My
woman
was my job, okay?!
That’s
who I was committed to, who I was fuckin’ at night! I made breakfast in the squad car for that lady; put a ring on it, too.