I had to laugh. No, I didn’t know those California types at all. I didn’t know them except for the addicts and alcoholics that had come through our doors. So, if I compared Erik to those California types, he sounded exactly like all the others who had been through the treatment center. I probably shouldn’t have compared him to others, but the way he was talking was very familiar to patients who just weren’t ready for treatment.
“I’ll hold my opinion on this whole conversation for right now. Are you done with your project?”
He placed his scissors back in the bin and I gathered everything up and opened the locked cabinet to put them away. We had just made up from my previous yelling at the poor guy; I wasn’t about to tell him that everyone seemed to think they didn’t have a problem with drugs or alcohol when they showed up.
“You are one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen,” Erik said as he stood behind me near the cabinet.
My breath caught in my chest as I realized his body was closer than I had expected. Normally, I would have pushed him away. Normally, I wouldn’t have let a patient get as close as he was. But there was something different about Erik. There was something different about how I was around him. I didn’t feel like I had control at all when he was around.
Chapter Eight
Erik
The words had come out of my mouth before I could sensor them. I had been thinking she was the most beautiful woman I had seen in a very long time, but as she stood there, my mouth spoke before I could stop myself. I really wasn’t the type of guy who gave out compliments to women. It even caught me off guard.
At first, I wasn’t sure if I had actually said the words out loud or not. She turned to look at me and then back toward the cabinet. I expected her to say something; I wasn’t sure what I thought she would say, but surely she would have some sort of response to the compliment I had just given her.
I had an overwhelming urge to kiss her. To be honest, I had felt that way since I had first laid eyes on her, but now I felt like I couldn’t hold back. I shouldn’t have gotten so close to her because the second I walked over to the cabinet to hand her the stack of papers that were left on the table, I was close enough to smell her. Close enough that my senses had taken over and the words had escaped me before I could hold my control over them.
A light, flowery scent combined with what I thought was cinnamon made Cassidy smell good enough to eat. Oh, how I would have loved to nibble on every inch of her body. Seriously, I didn’t know what had come over me. I didn’t nibble on random girls. I screwed them. I wasn’t a flowery kind of guy. I wasn’t a crafting kind of guy, yet there I was, crafting and thinking about the flowery scent of this girl.
“Here are the papers,” I said as I handed the stack of collage paper to her and tried to totally ignore that fact that she hadn’t responded to me telling her she was beautiful.
“Thanks.”
She turned around to face me and then quickly back to the inside of the cabinet and stayed there for much longer than she needed to. My hand reached out to touch her shoulder, but then I decided not to. I wasn’t thinking straight. She was only being nice to me because she worked there, nothing more and nothing less. I had to be imagining the chemistry going on between us because I had been away from women for so long.
Cassidy was still close to me. She didn’t push me away. She didn’t seem to mind my close proximity to her. There was a primal urge that had me wanting to press her up against that storage closet and bang her. My body was hard with even the slightest possibility of feeling her wetness around me. My brain could only think about sex in that moment. All reason was long gone, and somehow, I felt like the possibility of having this girl was real.
“We should get you back to your unit,” she said as she expertly closed the cabinet and stepped away from me at the same time.
She didn’t look at me as we walked back to the unit, and I tried not to look at her. But it was impossible not to watch her as she walked in front of me. Her ass was insanely perfect in a pair of tight, black scrub pants. I physically had to hold onto my own hands to prevent myself from reaching out and grabbing her ass cheeks.
It wasn’t like me to have to control of myself. Normally, I was the center of attention. The girls would throw themselves at me; they wanted to land me just as badly as I wanted to land them. Girls literally showed up naked in my bedroom, just wanting to screw and take a selfie of us together in bed.
I wasn’t complaining. Most guys my ages wouldn’t complain about the number of women I had. But it got old. The same lines all the time. The same women, even. Well, not literally the same women, but they all tended to blend together. The women at my parties laughed at my jokes, dressed in tiny outfits, did drugs with me, and any sexual thing I asked of them. When I would get bored, I would come up with random things to do in the bedroom, just to see if they would do it.
“Pour that shampoo all over yourself and roll around on the tiles,” I had said to one girl when I was drunk.
She didn’t even hesitate. Before I knew it, she was slipping all over the ground.
It wasn’t real, though. That was the problem. The girls who showed up in my bedroom weren’t there because they had gotten to know me and thought I was a great guy. They were in my bedroom to say they had slept with Erik Levy, the Silicon Valley tech millionaire.
I didn’t blame them. I was much more at fault than they were. I could have said no. I should have said no on many occasions. But I was caught up in the drugs, booze, and girls at the time. There were plenty of guys in the Silicon Valley who were millionaires and didn’t act like total jerks. They had a normal life with friends and family, but I was on a totally different road.
Now, as I watched Cassidy walk, my primal instincts flooded back to me, but my clear head also brought a bit of sense. I knew I couldn’t have this girl. I knew that it didn’t matter if she was beautiful and intelligent; she was out of reach for me. It was an entirely new feeling for me. I didn’t normally feel like a girl was off limits, but Cassidy had to be.
A girl like Cassidy wasn’t going to fall for a guy that was in treatment, anyways, and definitely not a guy who was barely participating in treatment. If I ever wanted to land any sort of stability in my life, I really had to take more control of my decisions.
Certainly, I felt like people exaggerated my drug and alcohol use. I still felt like I could control myself. But maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to hang out at Paradise Peak through the end of the program. The staff was nice, even the other patients seemed pretty enjoyable. Suddenly, the idea of making the most of my time at the rehab center seemed like the best possible option.
I wouldn’t have to be alone at Christmas or feel bad for not going home to visit my father. The idea of staying at treatment was much more appealing than I had imagined it would be. It gave me the excuse
I needed not to deal with my family.
Not only did I feel a little more motivated to explore what Paradise Peak had to offer me, I was also going to avoid the uncomfortable holiday season back at my big house all alone. It was perfect and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t realized it earlier.
“All right, there you go,” Cassidy said as she walked me onto the unit and then turned to leave.