She was gone, and I was never going to see her again.
Up until that point, I’d held things together with the hope that he’d find her, and I could bring her back home.
But that was never going to happen.
That was when I fell apart. I couldn’t breathe, like I was suffocating from the pain. It was the worst kind of agony.
I just needed to forget—forget everything, forget her.
So, the first thing I did after leaving the PI’s office was go and score some coke, which was easy enough to do in my world. I had used coke in the past, pre-Evie, for recreational use. That was the norm in my so-called privileged world.
I snorted that fucker on the spot, and a small sense of relief washed over me, but it wasn’t anywhere near enough. I was looking for total oblivion. So, I took another hit, and then I left the dealer with an eight ball in my hand to get me through the rest of the night. Next up, I went to a bar, and I started drinking with the intention of never stopping until, at the very least, I was comatose.
Unfortunately, I woke up the next morning with that same agonizing, suffocating desolate feeling.
I just wanted death to come and fucking take me.
As I came around, my skull pounding from the drugs and alcohol, I discovered that I was in bed with an unfamiliar girl beside me. But as I looked at this girl’s face, I realized she didn’t look so unfamiliar. Actually, she looked a hell of a lot like Evie. They could have been sisters, given the right lighting. Then, the girl woke up while I was staring at her. She smiled as she put her hand on my cock, and I felt a strange sense of relief.
Without another thought, I fucked her again. And it was in those first few seconds of pushing my cock inside the nameless Evie look-alike that I didn’t feel like I was going to die.
There was nothing. I was numb, free of the pain.
And that was when I realized that screwing someone who looked like Evie would free me from the pain more than coke ever would, not that it’d stop me from snorting it in tandem with sex. They just kind of went hand in hand.
But from that moment on, I’d search out that nothingness like a sniffer dog tracking drugs.
I never slept with the same girl twice. No, because in my fucked-up brain, it felt like a betrayal against the only woman I’d ever loved—you know, the one who had left me in this fucking mess.
So, screwing these women once was fine. Twice would be a betrayal that I apparently couldn’t do.
I know. It’s fucked up.
But this was my life for the next five years.
When the pain was unbearable, which was pretty regularly, I would take some coke and go out to a bar alone. I’d stay out until I found someone who looked enough like Evie to get me through the night. I’d chat her up with sweet words and empty promises—not that it was ever hard for me to get laid. Then, I’d take her back to her place or a hotel, a pub restroom, or an alleyway—I wasn’t fussy, so long as I could fuck myself into oblivion—and I’d feel that comforting numbness that would get me through a few more days.
It was an addiction I couldn’t seem to break, not until my father died. Trust me, it wasn’t the grief that made me want to sort out my life. No, it was the glaring fact that I didn’t want to die in some shitty hotel room with coke up my nose and a faceless lay next to me in bed—like he had.
Although my lay would have been female, unlike his.
My father was men all the way, much to my mother’s dismay. That was only because she was worried about his preference for men getting out and ruining her public image.
So, when my father died, after five years of living with my coke and sex addiction, I put myself into rehab. I found out from my counselor that I didn’t actually have a sex addiction. I was addicted to having sex with women who looked like my ex-wife.
Tragic, right? Yeah, well, tragic is my middle fucking name.