She clinks her glass with mine and gestures for me to drink up.
So I do. Again and again and again, until my head is spinning and my stomach is roiling and the pain … the pain is still there, but it’s cushioned by the fuzziness that comes with having way too much to drink.
“Have another one,” Tori tells me, filling my glass yet again.
I moan a little from where I’m lying facedown on the couch cushions. “I don’t think so.”
“Come on,” she says. “We’re just getting started!”
Warning bells go off deep inside me, not for the first time when it comes to Tori and drinking. After all, she’s had just as many shots as I have and she barely looks drunk while I’m slurring my words and can’t even lift my head off the sofa. I mean, she’s been a heavy drinker for as long as I’ve known her, but this … this is something else. Something more, and I’m pretty sure it’s not a good thing.
“No more,” I tell her again, taking great pains to enunciate my words. It doesn’t work.
“Party pooper.” She takes another shot. I don’t know how many that is—I lost track of my own shots somewhere around number five. And that was a while ago …
My phone rings from its spot on the coffee table. I don’t have the energy—or the fine motor control—to pick it up at this poi
nt, so Tori does the honors. She scowls at the name on the display, then tilts it toward me so that I can see. My eyes are nearly crossing from the tequila, but I squint enough to make out the fact that my caller ID reads Ethan Frost.
“No,” I tell her, burying my face back in the couch. I can’t talk to him, not now. Not when I don’t know what I want to say … or what I want to hear. All I do know is that if I so much as hear his voice, the pain will come rushing back, and this time no amount of alcohol in the world will be able to dampen it.
She nods, sends the call directly to voicemail.
Seconds later, he calls back.
She does the same thing and he calls back a third time. Then a fourth time. And a fifth.
Each time he calls sobers me up a little more, makes me feel a little worse.
The sixth time the phone rings, I reach for it. I don’t know what I’m going to say to him, but this can’t go on. I won’t make it if he keeps calling like this, keeps making me think about him when all I want to do is forget. Forget Brandon and my parents, forget the rape and everything that came after it. Forget Ethan and everything he’s meant to me. Everything he’s done for me.
But Tori shakes her head, refuses to give me the phone. Instead, she answers herself. Without giving Ethan a chance to so much as say hello, she launches into him.
“Hey, dickhead, since it’s obvious you can’t take a hint, let me spell it out for you. Chloe doesn’t want to talk to you right now and she sure as shit doesn’t want to listen to whatever you have to say. If that changes, I promise you’ll be the first to know. But until it does, stop fucking calling!”
She hangs up with a flourish, then turns the phone off so that I don’t have to worry about him calling back—or about him not calling back, however this thing is going to play out.
“Have another drink,” Tori says, forcing one into my hand.
“No—”
“Just one more,” she orders. “Trust me, after all that, you look like you need it.”
I feel like I need it, too. So I take it. And one more after that.
The room starts spinning and I close my eyes, falling headlong into the darkness.
I wake up hours later with my head in a vise and a desert in my mouth. It takes a few moments for me to figure out where I am and what’s going on. Only moments, but those tiny spaces in time are the best ones of my whole day. Because for those moments, I don’t remember. Anything. For those moments, everything is all right.
Sure, my head hurts and my stomach is churning, but everything else is okay. There’s no pain, no rage, no fear. Nothing but my love for Ethan and the knowledge that my world is as it should be. As I’ve always wanted it to be.
And then it all comes flooding back. Not in a trickle, with little drops of information registering on me slowly. No, it comes back in a flood, in a hurricane of regret that whips me into a frenzy and has me clenching my fists and curling into myself in an effort to keep myself in one piece.
“Tori?” I manage to croak out as I shove myself into a sitting position. My hair is in my eyes and I push the long, random curls out of my face before climbing shakily to my feet. I need Tylenol. I need to vomit. I need … something.
I need something I can’t have.
“Tori?” I call again, but she still doesn’t answer.