Addicted (Ethan Frost #2)(73)

It should have worked. It really should have worked.

Except it turns out, it was all an illusion brought on by one indisputable fact. I can’t be fixed. I can’t be made unbroken. Not then. Not now. Not ever. I’m as jumbled of a mess as I ever was, the pieces of me too cracked and torn up and jagged to ever, ever, ever fit together again.

I don’t know how I could ever have thought differently—even for a moment. Or how I could have believed that Ethan—Ethan—would be the one to help me hold the pieces together. Not when, at every turn, I find out another way he’s been the one tearing me apart.

A laugh wells up inside me, loud and powerful and real. It batters against me from the inside, strikes out at me with clenched fists and sharpened claws, desperate to get out.

Desperate to be free.

I hold it in with sheer will alone. Sheer will and fear, because I know—I know—that once I start laughing, I’ll never stop. The edges of madness that I’ve been skating around for so long are right there, beckoning for me to step over the edge into oblivion. And if I do, this time if I do, I’m smart enough to know I’ll never find my way back.

And yet, there’s a part of me that wants that. That wants to let go and give up. That wants to stop fighting, stop trying, stop trusting, because it hurts too goddamned much. It rips you open, tears you up, leaves you bleeding out from a wound you never saw coming until it’s far too late to stop it.

Far too late to save yourself.

That’s me, now. Ripped open. Bleeding. Unsalvageable.

And then there’s Ethan. Beautiful, brilliant, duplicitous Ethan. My obsession. My addiction. Until this moment, my everything.

But not anymore. Not now. Not ever again.

The knowledge grounds me, helps keep the pain at bay. At least until my phone starts buzzing, letting me know I have a text. I don’t need to look at the screen to know it’s from Ethan. Just like the one that comes in next. And the one after that. And the one after that.

Suddenly I can’t handle it. Can’t stand this connection between us, no matter how tenuous, for one second more. I yank my phone out of my back pocket, carry it over to the garbage disposal. Drop it in. And then turn the thing on.

Like everything else in this kitchen, the garbage disposal is heavy duty, industrial grade. Though it makes a terrible noise, it only takes seconds for it to break my phone to pieces. To break it down to its most basic, rudimentary form.

Like me. Always like me.

I pause at the thought, at the knowledge that every broken thing has something in common with another broken thing. Here, now, I am that broken thing, the pieces of me as ill-equipped to deal with my environment as the remnants of my phone now are to deal with theirs.

Ethan’s mom watches the drama and its aftermath with raised brows and pursed lips and a hint of glee in the depth of her eyes. Just a hint. It’s enough to make me stop, enough to make me stand perfectly still in the middle of the kitchen and pretend for a moment that my world hasn’t come crashing down around my ears.

She waits it out, trying to decide—I think—what crazy stunt I’m going to pull next. When I give her nothing, when I hold myself together with a very short shoestring and an even shorter prayer, she shrugs, seems to give up. And then she’s shaking her head, walking out of the kitchen. “Stupid, ignorant, pathetic girl,” she says as she heads down the hall. “You never even stood a chance.”

I should probably be offended, but I’m not. Because she’s right. I didn’t. The odds were stacked against me from the very beginning and I never even had a clue. I almost leave. I almost pack my one, measly pathetic bag and walk out of Ethan’s house, and his life, forever. I could do it. I should do it. There’s enough cash on Ethan’s dresser to pay for a cab to the airport. And if I feel icky about taking that—which I tell myself I don’t, but it’s just another lie—there’s always Rodrigo and Lucia. If I ask them for a ride, I’m positive they’ll take me.

I almost do it. I plan on doing it. I walk out of the house and even make it halfway down the hill to the wine-making barns where Rodrigo normally works, when I can’t go any farther.

I’m stuck, filled with a crippling sense of sadness and an even more crippling sense of what could have been. What should have been if this was a different life, if I was a different person, if Ethan … if Ethan wasn’t such a goddamn f*cking liar.

It kills me that I can’t leave. Kills me that I still care, that I can’t treat him as callously as he’s treated me over and over and over again.

Oh, I know there’s a lot of good in him. Just like I know he’s treated me right in almost every way a man can treat a woman. But the ways that he’s treated me wrong—the ways he’s been wrong—they’re just too big. Just too much. I can’t live like this, knowing what he’s done. And I sure as hell can’t stick around and wait for the other shoe to drop. I already feel like a whole store filled with steel-toed boots has fallen on me. I’m not waiting around to see what else falls down. I may be stupid and naive, but nobody ever said I was a masochist.

And yet, here I sit on the family room couch watching the second hand spin the clock around. Watching the minute hand creep farther and farther around the face of the clock, until it, too, spins itself around. There’s a startling feeling of déjà vu, of having done this before.