Worthy of Redemption (2 page)

“I’m sorry,” I said to Lily again as we raced down the highway. “I’ll replace your sneakers.”

“It’s okay,” she said tightly. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I just wanted to feel numb for a while,” I found myself admitting.

“It didn’t work, did it?” she asked softly.

“No. Everything feels a little fuzzy around the edges, but it still hurts like hell.” I looked over at her. “When I was nine years old, my older brother died right in front of me. It was my fault, and that hurt a lot.”

Her mouth fell open. Even in the dark car with only the dashboard lights aglow I could see her eyes wide with horror and pity.

“This hurts more than I can remember that hurting, Lily. And then I feel guilty for hurting more for Emmy than I did for my own brother. I feel so fucked up in the head right now. I want to get high so fucking bad,” I said, running my hands through my hair.

“Well…” she said and cleared her throat. “I’m fresh out of…whatever it is that you…snort, smoke, or inject – or swallow.”

“I just got out of rehab yesterday,” I said with a dark, mirthless chuckle. “I’m such a fucking winner.”

“We will just have to occupy you and keep you from going that route,”
Lily said.

“What are you going to do? Hold my hand all night?” I snapped.

“If I have to,” she said with determination.

I looked doubtfully at her. “What difference does it make to you what I do?”

She gave me a nervous glance before smoothing it over with a pretty decent poker face.

“What difference does it make?” she asked nonchalantly.

“What will you get out of it?” In my experience, hardly anyone below
my
means did something for me for nothing.

“Who said I had to get anything out of it?” she snapped.

“Everyone has a price,” I said sourly. “What’s yours?”

“Just make sure I can get back to my car after I’m done holding your hand and we’ll call it even.”

“No money?” I snorted. “I can hardly believe that. How much do you want for babysitting me, Lily?”

“What makes you think I want or need your money, Kyle?”

“You’re just a barmaid in a small bar in the suburbs, Lily. Why wouldn’t you want or need my money? Maybe you need a new tattoo, or a new piercing.” That was mean, even for me, but I was drunk and bitter and hurt. I took it out on the only person in the vicinity.

Lily
was silent for a long time after that. She didn’t look at me. She only looked at the road and the GPS, and the lady’s voice on the GPS was the only sound. I realized that I just insulted the one person who was willing and able to save me from killing myself or someone else by getting behind the wheel and she was the only one who may save me from overdosing on meth. The craving was stronger than ever. I had no one to turn to that really gave a damn. My mother had her own problems, my father didn’t give a shit, and whatever friends I had weren’t really friends at all. Jess was the last person on the face of the Earth that I wanted to talk to. I could call the sponsor I was given by the rehab center I was in, but how much would he really care? And he wasn’t physically there to stop me. Lily could have thrown me out of the bar the moment I confessed what I did to Emmy, but she didn’t, and she didn’t after I puked either, and she was the one that had to clean it up.

“Emmy tried to teach me to be nicer to people,” I said quietly as we neared my apartment building.

“It didn’t work,” Lily said. “Clearly.”

I couldn’t argue with her, so I remained silent until I had to direct her to my assigned par
king space. I didn’t feel as drunk as I did before I vomited, but when I tried to get out of the car, I was hit with a wave of dizziness and damn near fell on my face. Lily reached out and caught my arm and then steadied me against the car while she closed the door and activated the alarm.

“Now take your time,” she said, taking my hand. She slowly
led me to the sidewalk.

I grinned down at our hands. “You really are holding my hand.”

“Yeah.”

“I think I’m still drunk.”

“You’re really good at stating the obvious,” she said.

“I have to pee,” I said, stopping on the sidewalk.

“Okay,” she said slowly, eying me skeptically.

I released her hand and pulled down the zipper on my jeans.

“What the hell are you doing?” she cried.

“I can’t wait until we get upstairs,” I said and pulled my semi-hard dick out without caring that
Lily was standing right next to me.

“Oh my god,” she said and then averted her eyes while I pissed onto my neig
hbor’s car. I hated that guy and his stupid yappy dog.

I felt myself swaying and a second later
Lily’s hands were on my back to steady me.

“The last thing we need is for you to fall into your own piss,” she said with a loud sigh.

I gave myself a little shake and turned back around to say something to Lily. I turned too quickly and almost fell backward onto the car and into my own pee, but Lily reached out and grabbed my shirt. She started to look relieved until she looked down and saw that my dick was still hanging out of my pants. Rarely has any woman ever looked at my manhood with disgust, but Lily did.

“Put that thing away!”

“What’s wrong? Never saw a penis without a piercing before?” I teased.

“If you don’t put it away now, you’ll never be able to use it again,” she growled.

I put my boy back in my pants and went to take her hand again.

“Don’t touch me with that hand,” she said and shook her head in disgust.

“Why?”

“You have Penis Pee Hand!” she said incredulously. “I’ll hold your other hand, but not your Penis Pee Hand.”

We managed to get up to my apartment without me falling down or touching Lily with my PP Hand. I had not been nice to her even once all night. I fully expected her to deposit me into my apartment and take off, but instead she pushed me towards the hallway leading to the bedrooms.

“Please go take a shower and brush your vommity teeth.”

“You’re not going to hold my hand in the shower?” I asked her. “I may fall and crack my head.”

“Maybe you need your head cracked,” she said and walked off towards the kitchen.

I staggered to my master bathroom and started to strip out of my clothes. I unbuttoned my jeans and started on my shirt. Like a little kid, I got my head and arms stuck trying to pull off my shirt.

“Damn it!” I yelled as I staggered around the bathroom trying to free myself. To make ma
tters worse, my jeans began to slip. “Fuck it!” I yelled.

I heard the bathroom door open and knew
Lily was probably watching me with disbelief. I could hardly believe it myself. She grabbed a hold of my shirt and yanked. I stumbled forward, but her hands were on my bare chest, keeping me upright.

“Wow,” she whispered, looking at her hands on my chest.

I looked at her with my eyebrow raised and flexed. As if my skin burned her, she quickly pulled back her hands. Her face reddened as she took a step back into the bedroom.

“You can handle the rest,” she said quickly and practically ran out of the room.

My shower had a sobering effect. My head began to clear some as I stood under the steaming hot water. As the effects of the alcohol began to dissipate, my emotional pain intensified. Emmy was gone, completely. I called her every day after I woke up in rehab. I emailed her every night before I went to sleep, and I sent her letters via snail mail. She never answered any of it. Eventually, she changed her number, deleted her email address, and all of the letters came back to me unopened. I left rehab several weeks early, against professional advice, and went to find her.

What I found was a house in the process of being emptied by movers, but no Emmy. I found her best friend Donya hostile, but no Emmy. I found her cousin Mayson a little less hostile, but still no Emmy. No one in the office had seen her since the company’s New Year’s Eve party. I even called her mother, who was much less hostile than Donya and Mayson, and even more helpful.

“She was here, but she’s gone now,” Samantha Grayne had said.

“Gone where?” I asked. My heart raced when I considered the fact that she may have gone to Luke to tell him about her son – the son that I wanted to raise as my own. “Did she go to Luke?”

“That would be the smart thing, you know,” she sniffed. “But no, she didn’t. She’s not here, Kyle, and she won’t be back for a long time. I can’t tell you where she is. I feel for you, I guess, but she’s…broken. I think you broke her, even though she won’t say so, but I think you did. I won’t tell you where she is.”

She hung up on me then. I was sitting in my car when I called her, and all I could do for a half hour afterward was stare at a picture of Emmy taken at the very beginning. It was a week before the gala and the night that I would first tell her I loved her. It was a picture she obviously took with her cell phone, lying in her bed and smiling broadly up at the camera. She looked so carefree, so unburdened with life – with me. I never again saw that level of happiness in her eyes.

When I was sure that I could leave the parking lot I was sitting in without driving directly to my dealer, I headed to the Main Line to get rid of Jessyca. I felt a little bad for what I had done to her, but what she had done to me was beyond cruel. She knew about Emmy, how could she not? She knew I was in love with her, and every time she felt me drawing close to dumping her, she would make little comments regarding my dad and Sterling Corp. We both knew what she was talking about, but neither of us ever said it. I didn’t want to push her and jeopardize everything I was working so hard to save, and she didn’t want to push me to push her. But I didn’t want Jess. I wanted Emmy, and Emmy was fucking gone. I would never be able to pretend with Jessyca again.

“If you really mean this, Kyle, I will destroy you and Sterling Corp!” she screamed as I stormed out of her parents’ home.

“I’m already destroyed, Jess,” I had said darkly.

I drove to
SHOTZ
out of desperation. I hoped that everyone had lied to me and that Emmy was really hiding out there. It was an irrational hope, but it was the only one I had to hold on to, and the only one keeping me from completely falling apart.

Standing under the shower, I wondered how I had made it thus far without the self-destruction that I strongly felt was necessary. Then I thought of
Lily. I didn’t know whether I should curse her or thank her.

~~~

When I came out of the bedroom, showered, vommity teeth brushed, and dressed in some warm clothes, I found Lily sitting at my dining room table busy with her cell phone. Across from her on a plate were two baked potatoes, a large sports drink, and two aspirin. I stared at the items with a heavy heart.

“Emmy used to give me this hang over treatment,” I said in a low tone.

“Where do you think she got it from?” Lily asked and then gestured to the seat across from her. “Sit down. The sooner you start the better.”

I sat down and started to un
-wrap a potato. “Was I in the shower that long?” I asked.

“You were in there for a good while,” she said, peering at me over her phone. “Long enough for me to sneak out and go to Wawa and that diner down the road.”

“Thank you,” I murmured. “You’re being very kind to someone who hasn’t ever been nice to you.”

She looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, but then turned her attention back to her phone. I watched her as I ate. Her slate gray eyes narrowed in concentration. She occasionally bit down on her bottom lip, and when she would release it, she would run her pink tongue over it. I was really looking at her for the first time, I guess. She wasn’t the kind of girl that guys like me looked twice at. It wasn’t that she wasn’t pretty, because she was. In fact, she was far prett
ier than I ever believed before. Admittedly, I was shallow and didn’t see past the ten thousand bracelets on her wrists, her sometimes colorful hair, the intricate floral tattoos on her arms and clavicle, and her pierced eyebrow and tongue. Being a typical guy, I let my eyes drift down to her chest and almost nodded in appreciation. How did I not notice her ample breasts before?

“Texting your boyfriend?” I asked after eating a whole potato and drinking half of the drink.

Her eyes widened as she looked at me. “Oh, no. I don’t have a boyfriend,” she said, shaking her head and waving that thought off. “I’m playing a word game.”

“Are you…a lesbian?” I asked carefully.

She looked at me as if to say “What the hell is wrong with you” and said “No. Why would you even ask me that?”

“You looked a little disgusted at the idea of having a boyfriend.”

“Well, I’m not a lesbian,” she said. “But that part of my life is just as complicated as yours, but we don’t need to go there.”

“I told you some very personal things tonight,” I said, staring at her. “Do you understand how difficult it is for me to open up to anyone, let alone someone I barely know?”