Lovely Trigger by RK Lilley
CHAPTER ONE
A FEW MONTHS AFTER THE
ACCIDENT
DANIKA
Physical therapy was hell on earth. It was pain, futility, and frustration, all with a feeling of hopelessness because I knew that it could only do so much. But I gave it my all. I had too much pure stubborn grit inside of me to do anything else.
I was only twenty-one, quickly approaching twenty-two, but I’d never in my life felt young before Tristan. With him, for a while, I’d felt young and carefree, with my life ahead of me. A promising life.
As though it had all been a dream, some kind of a spell, that careless joy disappeared from my heart again as quickly as it had come. I was back to being the oh so responsible woman that I was meant to be.
I never cried a tear of self-pity. That had never been my poison. Bitter was my poison, and it took every ounce of character I possessed not to let it consume me.
I missed him. I couldn’t even lie to myself about that.
I missed him dreadfully.
I convinced myself that it had all been passion, not true love. True love was a myth, a misdirection from the solid things in life. What I’d felt for Tristan had been big and all consuming, but I told myself, like a mantra in my head, that it had never been solid.
Even so, every little thing brought him to mind. We’d had too much together, been through too much, felt too much, and every feeling had a memory. So many songs, shows, and movies were locked away for me, never to be viewed again.
It was that kind of a breakup. The ruinous kind.
When the longing got truly unbearable, I fell back on pure survival mode, my mind going into that blank place I’d had to perfect as a sexually abused teenager.
It served me well at those times. And luckily, those times always passed.
I kept so busy that I had very little time for dwelling, and no time for pining for a thing that was never meant to be.
School, work, and plotting out my dream career was a very involved process.
I could throw my whole life into my ambitious future, in fact that was my only option, now that the possibility of ever having a family of my own had been ripped so violently from the table.
I did not feel whole for a long time, but I told myself, over and over, that I was strong. Strong enough to go on, with some bits of myself, or, if I was honest, some huge important hunks of myself, missing.
And I did.
TRISTAN
“Welcome to the floor,” my counselor told me, the first time I walked into his office.
I thought it was a good way to start things. I wouldn’t have been able to pour my heart out to him, if he didn’t at least have a good sense of humor.
He was a small man in his fifties. His hair was long, gray, and unruly. His glasses always perched right on the tip of his nose as he studied me.
And he didn’t even have a brown leather chaise lounge, as I’d feared. I got to sit up and talk to him like a normal person, not lie down like in the movies.
I sat in a comfortable chair on the opposite side of his desk, and, over time, told him everything.
“Do you ever blackout?” he asked on our first meeting, his tone idle as he looked down at his chart. I was a little fixated on that chart of his.
“Excuse me?”
“Blackouts. Periods where you were still functioning, but you have no memory of it.”
I liked the way he handled things, the way he made me talk without it being a big deal, and never made the tragedies in my life seem too big for a person to handle, with his calm reactions.
“Oh yeah. I call that the weekend.” He smiled ruefully, but didn’t look up.
“I assume this has wreaked some havoc on your personal life.”
That was the understatement of a lifetime.
It was the most bitter pill to swallow; how my own rock bottom had impacted her. I had always been the one to throw myself in front of a punch for my brother, my mother.
And my wife. My wife. I’d have done anything to take her pain, to bear her injuries myself. Instead though, I had caused them.
But I could not go back. I could not live on what ifs, if I had any hope of living at all.
“Well, yeah. I suppose that’s why I’m here.” I tried to make my tone idle, but I nearly choked on those words. “I have lost every one of the people closest to me. My brother, my mother, my wife, my unborn child. All of it was because of addiction.”
“You must be a stubborn one, that it took so much to get you here.” He grinned ruefully.
“Stubborn is my
specialty. We’ll get along just fine.” And we did. Sometimes, though, I hated him, because he gave me the hard truths.
“You can’t ever expect to get her back,” he told me one day, when I’d been talking endlessly about Danika, once again. “This is something you need prepare yourself to accept. I can see it will be your biggest challenge, as you venture back into your life outside of rehab.”
I wanted to argue, wanted to fight him.
Instead, I closed my eyes and attempted to accept.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he asked, his tone kind.
“I was thinking about the first step.”
“That’s good. Tell me what it means to you.”
“I am powerless over my addiction.
My life has become unmanageable.”
“That is the textbook answer, to be sure, but that’s good. That one takes a while to process. Now, let’s look at the twelve steps as a whole. An overview, if you will. In essence, they teach us that we cannot play God. There are some things we do not have the power to change, not just as it pertains to using or not using. This also applies to past mistakes. You must accept that you cannot change her mind, and find a way to go on with your life and stay clean.
Are you ready yet to accept that?”
“I would just like to talk to her. If I could just get her to meet with me, get her to see that I’m getting better, I think it would show her that I’ve changed, that I’m willing to do whatever it takes to be in her life.“
“Okay, I see that we still have plenty to work on here.”
And so it went. Little by little, I began to accept that it really could be over between us. Not as a break, but as a permanent affliction.
It was a very rough pill to swallow.
It was months before I could open up in group therapy. Months of hearing other people’s stories. Some of them didn’t seem too bad, but others were worse than mine were.
One lady, a heroin addict, opened up about neglecting her baby for so long that it died in its crib while she got high.
I processed that story for a while, haunted by the way she told it, as though it had happened to someone else.
Something in her disconnect really got to me.
Had I disconnected that much from my own life? And if so, how? How could I have been so selfish, so cruel, as to neglect the things around me for so long?
It was numbness I’d been looking for, what we’d all been looking for, and that numbness had turned us into monsters when we used.
I had to come to terms with the things the monster inside of me had done. And with the fact that I was that monster.
It was as I began to cope with that realization, to accept it, that I began to open up in group.
“I’m Tristan. I am an alcoholic and a drug addict. I’m here because using cost me the love of my life.”
I smiled sadly as I looked down at my hands. “I think I started falling for her the first time she called me a man-whore.”
It hadn’t been easy to set up the meeting.
She wouldn’t talk to me directly, so everything went through a very slow filter via Jerry. We constantly met up with complications.
It took months just to get the ball rolling.
She wouldn’t even meet with me alone, as though I was some kind of dangerous criminal.
I tried not to dwell on that.
It messed with me, my sanity, my will to stay sober, but I had to focus on the positive.
I rounded up a few friends I’d met in rehab.
Trinity was a twenty-year-old heroin addict whose parents had already put her through rehab four times. Her current clean run was the longest she’d been sober since she was fifteen years old.
She was a sweet, funny girl, and I had hopes that this time she’d pull through.
She was a compact girl, and wore a uniform black T-shirt and jeans. Her short red hair was only long in the front, long enough to cover one eye, but she still managed make good eye contact.
Todd was a twenty-five-year-old tattoo artist and a pain killer addict. We wound up in the same sober house after rehab. He was a small guy, skinny, with bleach blond hair and enough tats to make me look like a blank canvas.
I’d made the fastest friends in rehab, but unfortunately, many of them weren’t lasting friends. Nearly everyone I’d met had relapsed within the last eight months. The ones that stayed sober with me, though, were like a lifeline, very necessary for my own recovery process.
Trinity and Todd were both still staying clean after rehab, still fighting the good fight, like me. They were ideal company for me, going through the same things I was, and so they could understand how hard the coming meeting was for me.
They’d been in group therapy with me, so they knew all about my obsession with Danika, and all of the reasons she had to hate me.
We got there early, because I just couldn’t wait around any longer. I was jittery with nerves. Wound up so tight that I couldn’t sit still.
I’d been waiting, obsessed, tormented, consumed for this meeting since the last time I’d seen her. It simply couldn’t end like this. There had to be something more, something I could do to make amends.
Even if I couldn’t be her husband, I longed to have her in my life. In any capacity.
I’d take literally anything.
I wouldn’t be happy with less than everything, but I’d take what I could get.
Crumbs, scraps, a taste of what she once felt for me, as a salve for what I still felt in abundance for her.
Even that I would take.
My hands were shaking so hard that I spilled coffee on my hands as I tried to take a sip of the decaf coffee I’d ordered just to have something to do with my hands.
As we sat there and waited for her, the future so uncertain, no, so likely to turn out in a way I couldn’t bear, I’d never wanted a drink more in my life.
I shared this piece of information. It was part of the process, to reach out when you felt yourself slipping. It still went against the grain for me, but I was trying my best to learn a new way.
Obviously, the old way hadn’t been working for me. Not by any wild stretch of the imagination.
“Well, hell, man, let’s hit the bar then.
It’s five o’clock somewhere.” Todd said it as a joke, and that levity was what I needed.
I burst out laughing and so did Trinity.
I was facing the door of the place, on lookout, and so I saw her first.
I froze. Every part of my body just seized up as I set eyes on her. At first it, was just at the shock, the sheer joy of seeing her beautiful face, even from several feet away, through a glass door.
Some man opened it for her, and I took her in for one heart stopping moment.
She wore a long black skirt that went down to her ankles, her pale pink blouse skin tight, showed off her perfect figure.
Her hair was loose and shiny, her makeup heavier than I remembered, and absolutely striking.
She was still the most beautiful woman I’d ever set eyes on. I knew she always would be.
“Holy shit,” Todd muttered.
“That chick is gorgeous,” Trinity said.
Danika began to walk through the door, and my fists clenched.
“Oh my God,” Trinity continued, in dawning horror. “Is that her?” I didn’t respond, couldn’t, caught up in my own personal hell as I saw her struggle to make it just a few feet to sit down at a table.
Have you ever felt like someone just reached into your chest and twisted a corkscrew into your heart? No? Well, that’s what I felt then.
It wasn’t f*cking pretty.
I reeled for an endless moment, as I saw just what I’d done, and tried to cope with it, trying to breathe for even another moment, to live in a skin that I despised down to my soul.
I didn’t even realize I’d moved to her until I was at her table. My body had moved with no tangible communication to my brain.
She barely looked at my face, just one devastating, cursory glance before her eyes became glued to my chest.
Oh God. She can’t even stand to look at me now. I felt gutted by that. This was going worse than my most dreadful fears.
I stared at her for the longest time, drinking her in, willing her to just look at me.
Finally, I shook myself out of it. “Can I get you anything? Coffee or tea?” The finest tremor ran through her, but it stopped between one second and the next. I wasn’t sure I hadn’t imagined it or manufactured it, since I myself was shaking.
“Some hot tea, thank you,” she finally answered stiffly.
I went to the counter and ordered two teas, watching her all the while.
She didn’t look at me once.
I brought the tea back to the table, and she nodded her thanks, staring down into her cup. She added a sugar packet and stirred it.
“Milk?” I asked.
She shook her head, adding more sugar. She didn’t drink it, just focused on it.
I shoved my own neglected tea to the side.
I put my hands on the table, fingers threaded together. I stared down at them as intently as she stared at her tea. I took a very deep breath, gathering my courage.
“I have many regrets, many bad things I must take credit for, but believe me when I say that the negative impact that all of my actions have had on your life is my biggest one.” I had rehearsed this speech. I doubted I would have been able to say it without breaking down otherwise.
Finally, I felt her eyes on me, but now I didn’t have the strength to meet them. I knew I’d find nothing I could bear in them.
I wished she’d say something, anything, but when it was clear that she wouldn’t, I continued. “I do not deserve your forgiveness, after all that’s happened, but I am asking for it.”
Begging, I thought.
Groveling.
“Know that I would take it all back if I could, and know that I hold myself responsible for all of the bad things that happened. I am so sorry that my hitting rock bottom the way I did impacted you.
Any recompense you can imagine, anything you would ask of me, I would be happy to provide.” Please, I thought.
Ask me for something, anything. Let me give and you take. Let me have some role in your life again. “I’m at your service. Always, Danika. And it is my most sincere wish that someday, perhaps over time, you might consider being my friend again.”
Her hand went to her throat, and she shuddered, as though in revulsion.
I shuddered in pain.
She was that disgusted with me now that even the idea of a friendship with me made her recoil?
“Tristan,” she said slowly, her voice hoarse. “Consider yourself forgiven.
But please don’t think that I hold you responsible
for
everything
that
happened.”
I was filled, for the briefest moment, with the strongest feeling of elation.
“Things didn’t turn out how I could have hoped,” she continued. “But no one person is to blame for any of it. So yes, I forgive you for any and all of it.” Joy, wonder, the biggest spark of hope filled my chest.
Her next words made pain, horror, denial, follow closely in their wake.
“That being said, I must decline your offer of friendship. Some things…what I mean to say is, some people, need to stay away from each other, and we are such a pair.”
No, no, no, I thought. Anything but that. Don’t cut me off completely. I can take anything but that.
But I saw the resolve in the set of her shoulders.
I saw the end in her downcast eyes.
The very least I could do is give her what she so clearly wanted. I did not have the right to fight her on this. Not after all I’d done.
“If that is how you feel, I must respect your decision.” Those words didn’t want to come out of me, but I forced them out.
“It is,” she said quickly. “But thank you for the apology, and I wish you all the best.” She spoke to my collarbone.
“I’m glad you got yourself help.” She was done. That was all she was going to say. I couldn’t quite believe it, but I made myself accept it.
Finally, I wrenched myself away.
It was an effort.
My body did not want to leave her any more than my heart did.
I did not know how I was going to move on, but it was clear that she already had.
“I need to stay busy. I need to stay on point today,” I told my friends when I’d sat back down at the table. I stared at Danika’s downcast face. How had it come to this? I had the clearest picture in my head, of the way she used to look at me, like I was her whole world.
I would have given anything to have that back.
To deserve it.
Though of course, I’d never deserved it.
“I am feeling a very strong desire to use.” My voice was succinct.
“We’ll keep you busy,” Trinity said gently.
“We’ll go watch a movie, then hit up the gym,” Todd suggested. “I know how you love your workouts.”
I nodded, then followed them out. We passed Danika, who seemed in no hurry to go anywhere, still looking down at her drink, her face blank.
I paused as we passed her, but Trinity grabbed my arm, tugging me away.
“She hates me,” I finally said, as I put my car in gear. “She said she forgives me, but she doesn’t want me in her life.
Not in any way. She said we can’t even be friends. She could barely even look at me.”
“Oh Tristan,” Trinity said gently, and I could tell by her tone that she, too, had been hoping that this meeting would turn out better for me.
“I’m so sorry, man,” Todd added. “It’s a rough hand you’ve been dealt. But some things are just out of our hands.” That was a hard lesson for me to learn, but I tried my best to learn it well.