Fade Into You (Shaken Dirty 3)

Rolled the cool glass between his fingers.

Listened to the clink of ice cubes against the sides.

Watched as the amber-colored liquid shifted and rolled.

And tried not to feel like a total fucking asshole.

It didn’t work, but then again, he really hadn’t expected it to, had he?

Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath and sucked the harshly sweet scent of the tequila deep inside of himself. As he did, he couldn’t help remembering what it felt like going down. The burn in his throat, the ache in his chest, the sweet warmth and lassitude that started spreading through him as soon as he finished his second drink.

He wanted it bad. Wanted all of it so fucking bad.

Lifting the glass to his lips, he told himself to go for it. Told himself he was just going to fall off the wagon eventually. Why shouldn’t it be today? Why should he keep fighting on what was rapidly turning into one of the worst days of his life?

He’d quit the band, after all. Had walked away from more than a decade of friendship because he was a gigantic pussy who couldn’t take the heat. But he’d been running from his past—from himself—for so long, he didn’t know any other way to handle his shit.

Nine million dollars.

That’s how much it had cost his friends to buy him out of his latest fuck-up. Nine million dollars. It was hard to fathom, considering a few years ago they’d all been living together and still had trouble coming up with the nine hundred dollars for rent each month.

And yet they’d done it. They’d fucking ponied up nine million dollars because they were loyal no matter what, and this was how he was repaying them. By sitting in a bar with a glass of tequila and throwing away three months of hard-won sobriety.

It would have happened sooner or later. Everyone knew it—Bill Germaine, who had said as much on the phone call this morning. His friends, who didn’t think he could be trusted around so much as a bottle of beer. Fuck, even his counselor at rehab had told him it was going to happen. Admittedly, he’d used it as a cautionary tale about why Wyatt needed to deal with all the shit he carried around, but the message was the same.

He was going to fuck up.

He was going to fail.

He wasn’t strong enough to stay sober.

And they were right. They were all right—every last one of them. And all he had to do to prove it to them was tilt this glass a little and take one long, glorious swallow of the tequila he craved like most people craved air.

“I gotta say, Jennings, I was glad to get your phone call. I was starting to think you’d disappeared off the face of the earth.”

He looked up from his drink in time to see Rollo slide into the chair opposite his.

“Rehab. Got out the other day.” He went back to studying the tequila.

Rollo must have heard it all before, because he didn’t look surprised. He also didn’t comment on the irony of a guy sitting in a bar waiting to buy smack less than seventy-two hours after getting out of said rehab.

God bless drug dealers. As long as you had money, they were so much easier to deal with than shrinks.

“Your friends were looking for you.”

Wyatt’s gaze shot from the tequila to the guy whose number he’d had on speed dial for way too long. “What’d you tell them?”

“What do you think I told them? That I hadn’t heard from you in months. It’s not like it’s really a lie, now is it?”

Wyatt nodded as he continued to roll the drink between his hands. As he continued to stare into its depths and imagine the sweet burn of oblivion that it promised.

“Have you decided how much you want?” Rollo asked, voice low and hand in his pocket. He wasn’t nervous—they’d done this hundreds of times before—but he was cautious, his eyes darting toward the door and around the room in a never-ending loop that made Wyatt tired just watching it.

“Three grams should do it,” he said, and tried not to think about what a coward he was. What a fuck-up. What a goddamn, pathetic excuse for a human being. Pretty hard to avoid it, though, when the voice in his head was doing a damn good job of cataloging the million and one things that were so very, very wrong with him.

Rollo looked surprised. “That’s all? You don’t want anything for the rest of the week?”

Fuck. How much of the stuff had he been using before rehab that Rollo didn’t think three grams would last him longer than a day? He knew he’d kind of lost track there at the end, but still. Fuck.