Dauntless (Sons of Templar MC #5)(66)

On that note, I stormed out of the room as fast as my combat boots would take me, praying that the ocean of tears brimming at the corners of my eyes wouldn’t escape. ’Cause if they did, if I gave in to that sorrow, I knew for a fact I’d drown. And no one, not even the hazel-eyed biker I’d done everything to forget, could save me.

I knew I was expected to stay longer to be ‘cured.’ The concept was laughable. I would never be cured.

Clean.

It did its job. I was ‘clean’ in the sense I no longer had drugs coursing through my veins. The need for them would always course through. It was about managing that need.

I guessed my relapse hadn’t been precisely that, considering I had been forced to take the drugs I had previously kicked. My body didn’t know that, though. The only thing it knew was that it had been robbed of the thing it needed.

So my body needed to be stuck somewhere it couldn’t get the better of my mind and suck me into a hole of addiction.

Because I knew if I touched any drug again, it was the end. Those three weeks broke me, and I knew drugs would shatter me.

I was in pieces, but I wanted to carry them around a little while longer.

Which was why I was there.

And why I was leaving.

I could barely stand being stuck in my own crazy, barely managed to fight my own demons. I didn’t need to be surrounded by other people’s. I didn’t need to know that some guy had been so high that he left his two-year-old daughter in a hot car for two hours. Didn’t need to think about how a woman had nearly killed a whole busload of people while driving drunk.

Luckily it wasn’t some sort of prison where they locked the doors and stopped you from leaving.

I knew I wanted to leave but didn’t know where I could go. I wanted to go nowhere. Be nowhere. Feel nothing. Problem was nowhere wasn’t a place. As much as I wanted to disappear into the sunset and make everyone’s life better for it, I couldn’t.

So I went back.

Rosie, insane as she was, not only let me move back in to where I had been living before but had insisted on it.

Like I said, I didn’t like it, spreading my dirt around good people, but I didn’t have much of a choice.

I had money saved, thanks to not spending every cent of it on drugs, and earning a crap-ton more than I had stripping at the Sons’ club than I did with Carlos.

It wasn’t enough, though.

So my plan was to somehow work up the nerve to work again, get enough money, and then disappear.

When I was strong enough to walk out the f*cking door, that was.



“Want to talk about it?” Rosie asked, speaking for the first time since she’d yanked me into her arms an hour before. She glanced up at the rehab building, shuddering. “Let’s break you out before Nurse Ratched comes out and drags us both in.”

I kept staring at the rain trailing down my window. Mother Nature matched my mood. How adorable. “Really, really don’t,” I replied. My words were clipped, and I probably should’ve cared about not being a bitch to the person who had dropped everything to pick me up from rehab when I’d called on the edge of breakdown two hours back. Actually, I should’ve been groveling at her feet considering she hadn’t asked whether I really should be leaving or requested some certificate of sobriety before bundling me into her car. I just didn’t have the energy. I was using everything I had to inhale and exhale, and to brace for the pain that came with that motion.

I saw Rosie’s curls bob in my peripheral vision. “Fair enough,” she replied, her voice light. “How about a cheeseburger?”

I glanced at her. I didn’t smile, but I tried. “I’d kill for a cheeseburger.”

Rosie grinned back. “Well, let’s get you one before you get into a state penitentiary just hours after I sprung you from rehab.”

If the prospect of holy matrimony didn’t turn my blood, I would seriously consider marrying that woman.

Comfortable silence descended. Rosie could talk better than any politician I’d ever met, but she also knew when to shut up. I’d learned that living with her in the months… before. I’d also learned she had a different date every weekend, and a different persona to take with her on each one. Her easy sense of humor and filthy mouth had her quickly becoming one of my closest friends. Plus the rest of the women who came along with the family Lily had adopted. Despite all my reservations and hatred for groups of girlfriends who had perfect lives and eyebrows like the ones in said family, I’d liked them all. I’d tried to keep my distance but it didn’t exactly work, especially with Rosie.

I chewed over all of this on the drive. I hadn’t seen any of them considering I’d been delirious the first few days of my freedom, and then when I was lucid enough to understand how I’d be suffocated by kindness, I’d convinced Lily I needed the confines of rehab. I was pretty sure I’d broken her heart by demanding to be taken to a facility full of shrinks and addicts instead of letting her ‘take care’ of me. She’d insisted she could do it, but I couldn’t let her. She was married, went school, had a life. Lily was finally coming back to life. I wasn’t sucking that vibrancy from her.

I could see it happening, even through the film of my despair. The way her eyes sparkled with agony every time she was around me. It was f*cking horrific. Not just for her—I wasn’t that much of a martyr—but for me too. I’d probably be heading for a long stay in the loony bin if I had to see the effect of my shit on my best friend. See the reality of it.