For the Love of a Lush (Lush No. 2) (5 page)

"You’ve got a list. Now you need to decide how you’re going to start on step nine—making amends. And I think you know who you should start with."

"Yeah. I know," I mutter like a kid who’s pouting.

"Even though you just tried to avoid it," he adds, grinning.

"Okay, I get it."

He stands, brushing off his hands. "Good. You feel like drinking?"

I stand too, watching the driveway outside, where Tammy’s car still waits. "I’d kill for drink right now, man."

"You know the drill," he answers as he hands me a shovel, a mallet, and then a handful of wooden stakes from the utility closet nearby.

I feel my back seize up at just the thought of what I have to spend the next several hours doing. "Damn, you’re an asshole sometimes," I tell him.

"Yep.” He seems completely unperturbed by my calling him names. "And tonight when you’re so exhausted you can’t even
think
about getting a drink much less actually drive into town and have one, you’ll thank me."

I scowl at him and stomp off to dig graves. Yes, graves—for animals who die on the ranch and aren’t useful in other ways. It’s the crappiest, hardest manual-labor job in the whole place, and when you’re really jonesing, it’s where Ronny sends you. You work until you’re so physically exhausted you can barely crawl to your bunk. And then, guess what?

You’ve made it another day without alcohol.

Tammy

L
EANNE
S
ILVA
might be my new best friend. Usually that’s a spot reserved for my sister, Mel, and once, a long time ago, for Joss Jamison, but right now, here in the wilds of Texas, I’ve decided Leanne gets the job. Within a few minutes of hearing that I intend to stay, she’s hopped on the phone, found me a room at the little boarding house in town—there are apparently no hotels in the town itself—and hired me to help serve the guys lunch and dinner every day.

"I’m happy to come help out. You really don’t need to pay me."

"Sure I do, hon. I was going to hire one of the high school girls to work at dinner anyway. I’ve needed extra hands in the kitchen for months now. Your timing was perfect."

I just smile and thank her. She probably assumes that it’s a hardship for me to be here without a job for what could be a while, given Walsh’s reaction to me. But for better or worse, money is the least of my problems. Still, I don’t need to tell her that right now.

After giving me the directions to the place in town where I’ll be staying, she says, "Now, I don’t want to see you around here tonight—unless it’s to visit your guy. You just go get settled in your new place and come back tomorrow at eleven. I’ll show you how we set up lunch and get you started then."

After I thank her for the millionth time, then go out to the red Mustang I rented in Dallas. It’s a little flashy, but what the hell. I know Walsh loves them, so I wanted to show up in something that would grab his attention. I look around as I walk between the house and the car, hoping for a glimpse of him, but the place is empty, all the men out working somewhere in the vast, empty acres that roll out from the ranch house for as far as the eye can see.

I take a moment when I get in the car to text Mel.

Me
: Made it to the Double A Ranch. Saw Walsh. Got a place to stay. TTYL. <3 U!

I left Portland without telling Mel beforehand because I was afraid she’d try to stop me. It’s not something I want to admit, but I wasn’t myself after Walsh left. I was already in the hospital when he found out about Joss and me, and that explosion didn’t hasten my recovery any. I shiver at the memory. The doctors said that I’d had a nervous breakdown, and they told me I would need to be in therapy and on medication for a long time.

Luckily for me, my little sister—who I realized at that point wasn’t so little anymore—was with me when all of it happened, and she took me home to Portland and has been staying with me ever since. It was a long time—weeks—in therapy and on anti-depressants before I could grasp the reality of what Joss and I had done while Walsh was in rehab and that I might have to live my life without Walsh because of it. I spent the months before my breakdown trying to deny it to myself, hiding it from everyone else, and irrationally blaming it all on Joss.

Once I came to grips with the fact that I had made the life-altering choice to cheat on Walsh, it felt like an essential piece of me had been stripped away. Sort of like the core of me was missing, and what was left was wrapped around an empty center. With nothing there in the middle, collapse is always imminent.

The therapist doesn’t understand me when I say that. I can tell she’s never really been in love. Or else she’s only had a different kind of love. I’m sure you can fall deeply in love with someone when you’re an adult. People do it all the time. I watched my sister and Joss do it right beneath my nose. But I don’t think it’s the same as falling in love when you’re still a child. I was just beginning to figure out who I was when I met Walsh. He became imprinted into the fabric of me. So far inside me that I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve got a strand of DNA labeled "Walsh Clark."

DNA’s not something you can live without. You can’t excise it like a tumor or amputate it like a diseased limb. It literally is the material of which you’re made. That’s what Walsh is to me. If I don’t have him, I don’t have me. I loved me. I loved my life and who I was for a lot of years.

When Walsh became an alcoholic, all of that came crashing down. Suddenly, we were apart for the first time in our lives. He was in rehab, living through things I couldn’t help with or experience with him, and it was the most fucking frightened I’ve ever been in my life. I truly thought he was going to die or disappear somehow—become someone I didn’t know anymore. I just couldn’t handle it. Every night, when I tried to go to sleep, I’d close my eyes and see him in that gas station bathroom, in the hospital beds, looking desolate as I walked away from him at rehab the first time. When the night finally came that I turned to Joss and slept with him, I did it out of my deep and abiding fear that I’d already lost Walsh.

My phone vibrates with a return text from Mel, jarring me out of my memories.

Mel:
Please promise you’ll check in every day, and keep following your diet and taking your meds. <3 U back!

I smile. She’s become such a mother hen. I’m so damn proud of her that I can’t believe it some days.

Me
: I promise. And you promise me you’ll think about yourself for a while now. I’m going to be ok.

I put the phone away, get my game face on, and start up the car.

T
HE ROAD
from the ranch house to the main road into town winds through about two miles of grazing land. The early spring sun is bright, and it’s already hot here. I can only imagine what it must be like at the height of summer. I’m watching the patchy green acreage with its clumps of scrubby trees when I see a figure about one hundred yards from the road.

He’s working without a shirt on, digging out in the hot sun, and my eyes are instantly glued to him. His back and shoulders ripple with the efforts of lifting huge shovels full of soil and tossing them into a quickly increasing pile to his left. I look at the dark patch on the back of his right shoulder, and though I can’t see the details from here, I know exactly what it is—a large heart bisected by a pair of drumsticks.

Above the heart is the word
Love
. Below it is the word
Lush
. Each of the guys in the band has one of his own—Mike’s has a guitar in place of the drumsticks, Joss’s a microphone, Collin’s a bass. They got them when they signed their first recording contract. Walsh wouldn’t let me come when he got his, and I couldn’t understand why since I’d already known what it was going to look like—I’d helped the guys design them—and I’ve never been squeamish around needles. But he was insistent.

When he came home afterwards, Mike and Joss unloaded him on the front porch of the little duplex Walsh and I were renting in a really seedy area of Portland. He was drunk, which wasn’t the norm yet then, and the guys said that his tattoo had taken longer than anyone else’s. He’d kept drinking through the whole thing—not because it hurt, but because he’d been scared of what I was going to say when he got home. I couldn’t understand what they were talking about until I got him inside and he collapsed face-first on our bed, his shirt hitching up above his waist. There on his left hip was a picture—of me—and below it were the words
My Heart. My World.

Now, I can see that second tattoo peeking out above the top of the dusty jeans that mold to him like a well-worn second skin. I finally realize I’ve stopped driving, so I turn off the engine. If Walsh can hear the car from where he is, he doesn’t give any indication of it as he continues digging. Thrust, pause, lift, dump, repeat. I quietly get out of the car and walk around to the passenger’s side, where I lean against the door and watch him, mesmerized by his movements, his damp skin, the way the sun hits his hair and gleams off the red highlights.

I feel my breathing increase, and my heart rate picks up pace to match it. It’s as if, from this distance the pain between us can’t reach me—only the desire can. Pure, blazing desire that consumes me like the Texas heat consumes the air and the earth. My mind goes back in time as I remember the way Walsh used to touch me, caressing my skin with his long, calloused fingers and his hot, rough tongue.

I lay my head back on the car, clutching my waist with my crossed arms as if I can contain the power of my desires. I continue to think of him—his hard, hot body, his warm, soft words. I breathe in and out, visions of Walsh’s naked back straining as he digs and digs through the hot soil like I wish he were digging into me. I feel something shift in the air, and I jerk my head up, my eyes flying open.

Walsh stands, glistening with sweat, watching me. I can’t see his expression clearly, but I can feel the hunger in the way he holds his body, as if he’s struggling with everything he’s got not to come to me. For what seems like hours, neither of us moves. Then, my breathing finally slowing, I push off the car and walk around to the driver’s side, where I get in and start the engine. When I look in the rearview mirror, he’s returned to digging and it’s as if the whole episode never happened. As if he and I never happened.

Walsh

I
CAN
hear the car pull away, and I’m literally in physical pain at the idea that Tammy might be heading back to Portland. As much as I don’t want to be around her, I don’t want to be away from her either. Seeing her there, leaning back against the car, her breasts straining against the thin fabric of her t-shirt, her long, smooth legs bare to mid-thigh, glowing in the spring sun… It nearly puts me into the hole I’m digging. My chest hurts. My eyes burn. My head throbs. I wipe my arm across my forehead and push the shovel back into the soil, struggling to regain my rhythm.

Four hours, two graves, and a really large thermos of water later, I’m resting on the handle of the shovel, watching the sun set below the horizon when I hear another car approach. I turn to see Mike pulling up in the brand-new tricked-out black pickup he bought when he came to stay here. He wouldn’t use that damn thing for work if it were the last truck in Texas, but he loves to drive it around and feel "cowboy." Jackass.

"You’re not going to be able to get out of bed tomorrow, dude," he shouts as he gets out of the cab.