Overtime(16)

Nodding his head at Portia, Jordie smiled. “I’m good. No need for a drink at all.”

“Good,” she said with a grin. “Is the guitar playing helping with the late-night cravings?”

“Yeah,” he said with a nod. “A lot. Keeps my mind off everything.”

In the last week, they’d discovered that when he was alone with nothing to do was when he craved a drink the most. She suggested playing an instrument, and since he had some experience with the guitar, he chose that. He was happy he did too; he loved playing and it really did help him at night.

“I saw you in church this weekend. That was nice.”

He smiled sheepishly as most of the guys looked over at him. The whole time he had been there, he had fought tooth and nail about going to church. When he was a kid, religion was forced on him constantly by his mother, and he never really wanted anything to do with that. But Portia’s thing was to pray on it. It was easy to say that Jordie had been praying a lot and figured that going to church was the next step. He didn’t hate it, didn’t love it, but he went.

“I mean, don’t get ahead of yourself, Portia. I won’t be turning into some damn holy roller. I like sex and cussing way too much.”

She smiled as she shook her head. “Wouldn’t expect you to stop those things, of course.”

“Never,” he said with a wink.

“So you feel you need sex then?”

Ah, sneaky little shit. Rolling his eyes, he leaned back in the chair, crossing his arms over his chest. “I don’t need sex, I love it, and I’m damn good at it.”

A couple of the guys laughed while the others, who were holy rollers, rolled their eyes. Portia, still with a small grin on her face, asked, “When was the last time you had sexual intercourse?”

He grinned. He knew what she expected him to say and he wouldn’t lie, but he was excited to see her little face filled with shock once she heard his answer. The thing about Portia was she was a save-the-world kind of girl. She wanted to diagnose everyone and fix ’em. She’d had the inkling that Jordie was addicted to sex since he’d first gotten there. There was a huge difference between being addicted and just liking it. He was addicted to alcohol in some sense, in that he went for it to stop feeling what he was feeling. He had sex because he wanted to. Minus his trip to Louisiana, he had never had sex to get rid of what he was feeling. He’d tried to f*ck his feelings for Kacey out of himself, which was very stupid, but the whole time he was drunk. He was pretty sure he wouldn’t have made a lot of those decisions if he hadn’t been drunk through it all.

“February was the last time.”

“February?!” she almost shrieked.

“Yup,” he said proudly, which really that wasn’t something to be proud of, but small victories, he guessed. “When I was in Louisiana.”

“Really? That surprises me, honestly,” she admitted and he grinned. “Why is that?”

“Sex means nothing to me anymore if it can’t be with the person I want it to be with,” he said slowly, avoiding eye contact. He felt the gazes of everyone on him, but he ignored them, sucking in a deep breath as flashes of Kacey’s gorgeous naked body appeared. As much as he wouldn’t mind plowing into a female at the moment, he wanted more. He wanted Kacey, and he was cleaning up to be the man she needed. Not just for him, but also for her and for Karson’s child. There was a huge possibility that she had moved on—he fully expected her to—but he needed something to get him through this fight. Knowing that he soon would be a man worthy of her love did that for him. It made him fight as hard as he could against his sickness.

“Not the answer I expected,” she said, and he looked up at her. “So your visitor, Natasha Gallagher?”

Where was she going with this? “Yeah?”

“Are you two in a relationship?”

Natasha, the doctor he’d slept with in Louisiana, had been visiting him since he was admitted. She was doing a work-study up in Colorado and she wanted to support him. He hadn’t expected her to, or even asked her; she just started coming every Saturday. If he was honest, it was nice to talk to someone who wasn’t trying to pry his head open and find out all the bad inside. Despite her offering her body to him every single time, their visits were the highlight of his week.

“No, she’s just a friend.”

“You don’t have friends.”

He grinned. “I have a few, but really, just a friend.”

“But you’ve slept with her?”

“Yup, she’s got killer tits,” he said before laughing along with his group while Portia just stared at him.

“But not in the last six months?”

“No, it was a one-time deal.”

“But you stayed friends?”

He shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”

She eyed him slowly and then shook her head. “You are a very confusing man, Mr. Thomas. One minute I think I have you pegged, but then you hit me with that. How is it that you don’t do relationships, but you are friends with a girl you’ve slept with? You aren’t having sex until it can be with someone you want it to be with, which is very uncharacteristic of your personality. You give off a very careless, playboy image that I have slowly but surely discovered is just an act that is covering the real you.”