Page 33 of The Intimacy of Finding You

The question shouldn’t have caught me off guard, but it did. I wasn’t even sure how to answer that question. My stomach started to turn, an aching nausea stirring in my gut. I set my plate of food down on the cot, only half-eaten. “I ain’t spoken to her in well over five or six years. I…” My eyes started to burn. I blinked through the tears threatening to come and looked away. “I have no idea how she’s doing. I’m not even sure if she’s alive. I don’t think anyone would know how to tell me if she died, honestly. I’m too afraid to look up obituaries, just in case. You know?”

Callum had stopped eating, too. Silence hung in the air. It was thick, and it tasted like premature grief. Grief of lives we’d yet to really lose but were ready to. “Fuck, Tobes. I’m so sorry. Did she, like, cut you off?”

It hurt to shake my head. Both from the dizziness and from the truth. “Other way around. I stopped talkin’ to her before things got any worse than they already were.” I stared at the lamp beside us and the way the light never wavered. It never flickered or dimmed. It just stayed consistent and constant—things I feared I’d never be.

“So she was scared for you, and you didn’t want her to see all the bad stuff happen?”

“Yeah.” I took a deep breath, letting my eyes fall shut as all the memories rushed in at once. They were mostly a blur now. “After I left, it was just one thing after another. One person after another. I was desperately tryin’ to find where I fit in if it wasn’t with you, and I was thrown back into this never-ending cycle. When one started to hit me, it reminded me of Thompson and his sick obsession with seeing bruises and blood on little boys. Like me. Like Crew.”

The crinkle of a water bottle caught my attention. I turned to Callum, who was gripping one in his hand so tight, it was deformed beyond repair. “Who? Who were they?”

I could see the rage in him. I could feel it coming off him in waves. It was hot—burning, fucking hot. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing can change what’s already happened. I deserved it, Cal. I deserved it after leaving y’all like I did. After doing something so callous and not having the fuckin’ balls to own up to my mistake. I could’ve. I could’ve just come back.” I shook my head. “But when one of them started to touch me, I drank for the first time, and it made everything go away.”

I scooted backward a little, leaning against the wall. I looked up at the ceiling instead of at Callum because if I did, I’d break. I couldn’t break. Not yet. “I never stopped drinking, and I never stopped falling for love that wasn’t love. I’d think a guy was great, and he would be at first. But the moment I moved in with him, it’d all change. And then I’d be so fuckin’ gaslit, I wouldn’t leave. I’d just drink. I’m stuck in a never-ending, vicious fucking cycle, Callum. And so far, the only thing that’s made it all better is drinking. It makes my brain stop, it makes my body numb, and sometimes, if I’m lucky, it’ll make me forget entirely.”

“Tobi…”

“Mom was a wreck the entire time. She was trying to get me to come back home, but I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t. The moment she started giving up, I knew it was time. She stopped pesterin’ me to get sober. Stopped trying to move me back. I knew I needed to let her go so I could keep letting myself go. I’d rather she not have a son at all if it meant she didn’t watch me ruin my life more than it already was.”

Callum didn’t say anything. I started to get nervous. Had I said something wrong? Was he angry? I tilted my head down, looking right at him just as he sniffled. Tears were falling freely down his cheeks. His nose was red. His lips were a bit red, too. His lips always got red when he cried.

“I’m so sorry.” His voice cracked, coming out so broken and so unlike him that it started to break me, too. “I had convinced myself all that time that…that you had found someone better. You’d moved somewhere else, and you had a few dogs and a nice life. I had to think like that, or else it would’ve killed me. I had to think you were happy, or I would’ve lost everything because I’d lost you. I was worried, of course. I was distraught. I was searching for your name in obituaries.” He wiped a few of his tears away, but they were immediately replaced with more. “But I gave you a whole new life in my head, and all the while, you were suffering so much. And I had no idea. I wasn’t there. I hadn’t noticed the signs you gave me before you left.”

He shifted forward, placing his elbows on his knees and letting his head hang. “I want to fucking kill anyone who ever laid a hand on you, Tobes. You didn’t deserve that. You don’t deserve that. No fucking human deserves that, but you especially don’t. You’re so kind. So sweet. You alone lit up my entire world in a way no one else has ever and could ever do. You are a massive fucking supernova in a sky of nothing but black. You light up the entire earth just by existing on it. You didn’t deserve this, and I am so sorry that drinking yourself to death is the only thing that has helped the weight on you when I should’ve been there to help instead.”

I winced as he said it. I remembered telling him that bullshit when I was drunk off my ass and angry. I was so angry. Not at him, but at myself. I wasn’t good enough. I never had been, and I still wasn’t. I was just a drunken waste of space, and no matter how much I’d try to change, I’d never be good enough for him. He just couldn’t see that, so he’d been trying to get me to do something I wasn’t ready for. It hurt knowing I wasn’t good enough. “It wasn’t your fault. You never could’ve known. I just said that because I’m a drunken asshole. I don’t understand how you see me so bright, but I ain’t that guy anymore, Cal. I’m dark. I’m so fucking dark and gloomy, and I’ll do nothing but bring frustration into your life.”

He looked up at me, his eyes glossy with overflowing tears as his breath hitched and his body moved with it. I could see it. All the pain. All the despair. All the shit I’d put him through. “You don’t think I failed you?”

“No. You never failed me. I’m just a failure.”

“You’re not. You’re worth it. You’re worth it all. Whatever I have to do. Whatever I have to endure, you’re worth it to me. You’re more than enough—you always have been.”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever get sober, Callum. I don’t know how to exist without it.”

“You’re sober now, aren’t you? You’re staying in a bar, and you’re still sober. Doesn’t that mean something?”

I huffed a laugh. A humorless, soulless thing. “Jack trusted me. I don’t wanna burn that bridge before it’s even been built. That, and…um. I don’t know. I wanted to see if I could even do it. How it’d feel to be sober so I could see if I had the willpower if I did it for you.”

He sat up, wiping the rest of his tears away and sniffling. “Don’t do it for me, Tobi. Do it for yourself. Do it because you want to do it, not because I want you to. I don’t want to change you. I want you to care.”

“About myself? I don’t know if I ever will. About you?” I let my lips turn up into a grin. A pathetic, sad little grin as I thought about the short years we’d spent together. “I never stopped. Caring about you is easy.”

“Caring about you is easy for me, too. I just wish you could see yourself through my eyes.”

“Don’t get your hopes up, Cal. I’m already feeling sick and I already really fuckin’ want to drink. I’m still, at my core, an alcoholic.”

He shook his head and leaned forward, packing the food back up. “No. At your core, you’re still Tobi. And that’s enough hope for me that you’ll be okay.”

How could he believe in me that easily and with that much conviction? God, my stomach hurt so badly. The nausea had gone into overdrive. I gripped the small blanket beside me, trying to keep my hands from shaking. I’d kicked the blanket away forever ago because I’d gotten so hot.

“How long has it been since you drank, Tobi?”

My heart was pounding, too. I could feel it working harder, and I could hear it in my head. “Maybe around five? Why?”

He finished putting everything back into the bag and checked his phone. “Merry Christmas, Tobes. It’s midnight. You’ve gone seven hours without drinking.”

Was that supposed to make me feel better? More accomplished? I wanted it back. The numbing. The way my brain quieted and my body settled when I was too fucked up to notice anything different.