* * *

I woke up ten hours later, my body aching and sore and already in the throes of some heavy withdrawal, and Aubrey wasn’t beside me. She was gone again, though this time she had left a note. I picked up a piece of paper from the pillow beside me and squinted in the late-afternoon light that filtered through my window. I scanned the contents, trying to make sense of it.

Aubrey had gone back to her place. She wasn’t coming back tonight. She’d see me during the week.

Shit. I had really messed up.

I knew she was upset with me. And in the harsh light of sobriety, my body trembling, my stomach ready to heave, I just couldn’t handle it. I needed her. I needed my girl, who made it all better.

Without a thought about what I was doing, I picked up the phone and called her. She answered right before it went to voice mail, as though she had been debating whether or not to pick up.

“Please come back,” I cried, my voice breaking on a sob. I didn’t allow her to say anything. I just cried into the phone, pleading with her to come back to me. I needed her so fucking badly. I ached. I hurt. I wanted more pills. But for the first time I was pretty sure that I wanted her more.

“I can’t, Maxx,” she said regretfully.

I wouldn’t accept that. “Aubrey, please! I want to hold you. I just need to be with you right now. I’ll come there if I have to,” I said desperately. I would do whatever she wanted so long as I could touch her. Just touch her. I craved it.

Aubrey sighed, and I knew I had her. “I’ll be there in a few minutes,” she finally said, giving me exactly what I needed.

She arrived at my apartment fifteen minutes later, looking like the answer to all of my prayers, if I was a praying sort of guy. I pulled her to the couch and buried myself in her. And she gave herself to me just as she always did.

I was in too much emotional chaos to feel that there was a distance that hadn’t been there before, that she was pulling away from me.

I was too thankful to have her naked body beneath me, her mouth on mine. I ignored everything else.

It wasn’t until after we were finished, and she was making her excuses to leave, that I realized what was missing.

Her.

I had had her body for a time, but I didn’t have her heart. And that made me wild.

Later that evening, after I had taken a few pills to even myself out and was feeling more in control, I decided to confront her. Aubrey had just walked into my apartment, and I watched as she dropped her purse on the table and came over to the couch where I was sitting.

She gave me a smile that seemed disingenuous. She didn’t reach out to touch me like she normally did. She didn’t lean in to kiss me. She sat beside me, a careful distance between us. Her altered behavior distressed me.

“What’s going on with you, Aubrey? I feel like you’re purposefully holding back from me,” I said, trying not to sound as pathetic as I was feeling. I watched as a myriad of emotions flickered across her face. I grabbed her hand and lifted it to my lips, unable to hold myself back from touching her a moment longer.

She yanked her hand back, and I watched as anger settled over her features. She gave me her coldest stare. “Why should I give you everything when you give me nothing? When you’re willing to stop the crap you do, then maybe I can trust you with all of me.”

My mouth hung open in shock. Aubrey never talked to me like this. She never got angry and pissed. “What?” I asked as she got to her feet. It was then that I saw the tears in her eyes, and I was at a loss.

She leaned down and kissed my lips. “I care about you so much, Maxx,” she said, making my heart clench violently in my chest.

She never said I love you. I had given her my heart, so why couldn’t she give me hers? Why couldn’t she tell me what I needed to hear? That she loved me? I felt alone in this torment of feeling. Her silence, her refusal to say those three little words, made me insecure. It made me doubt her.

It made me doubt us.

“Don’t leave me,” I begged. “I love you!” I was fighting dirty. I knew I was using those words as my weapon. But I didn’t care. I’d use anything I could to make her stay. I needed her, now more than ever.

I started to cry. Ugly tears slid down my cheeks, and I watched as Aubrey’s face softened. Maybe the tears would do it. Maybe they would make her stay. She wiped the wetness from my face, then turned her back on me. I sobbed more loudly as she picked up her purse from the table and opened the door.

She didn’t turn to look at me. She refused to look at the tears, which were entirely her fault. “Get yourself together. Please.” And then she left.

She abandoned me to my misery.

* * *

I couldn’t sleep. I had taken a few pills earlier and knew it was only a matter of time until they wore off.

I had tried calling Aubrey a dozen times since she had left me earlier in the evening, and she never picked up.

I was becoming desperate.

I was losing it.

I was losing her.

I was in a bad place. I couldn’t see my way through.

Not able to toss and turn any longer, I threw on some clothes, laced up my boots, and grabbed my art supplies, throwing them in a large canvas sack.

I got in my car and started driving.

Given where my head was at, was it any surprise that I found myself outside Aubrey’s apartment building at three o’clock in the morning?

Her street was empty. The air was cold and quiet. My breath puffed out from my mouth like fog.

The drugs should have made me mellow and relaxed. But things with Aubrey were making me anxious and restless.

I needed to get it out somehow.

I positioned the pots of paint on the sidewalk and grabbed my biggest brush. I popped open the top of the blue paint with a flat-head screwdriver and dipped my brush. Paint coated my freezing fingers as I swept the bristles in long, even strokes along the pavement.

I was frenzied while I worked. Focused. Manic.

I don’t know how long I was out there. I didn’t care that I could be discovered.

I just needed to paint.

I needed her to know what I was feeling.

How much I loved her.

How much she was breaking me.

When I was through, I dropped the brush and stood back, looking down.

Why couldn’t I for once paint something that wasn’t fucked-up?

I sagged to my knees in front of the portrait of my despair.

I had painted the broken shards of my face. My mouth was open and screaming. It was obvious it was me in the shattered glass.

And then there was Aubrey, with her long blond hair, sweeping me into a heap of dust, gathering my pieces as she prepared to dump them in the trash.

This was Maxx.

And this was X.

This was both of us, bled out on the sidewalk for Aubrey to see.

Maybe she would finally know how much I wanted to give her all of me. Even as I fought it, the desire was still there. I didn’t want her to throw me away. I needed her to not give up on me.

And maybe one day I’d be able to give her everything she wanted.

* * *

I had fallen asleep quickly after I had gotten home from my late-night painting excursion. I woke up a few hours later sick and achy, but with a clearer head than I had had for some time.

Aubrey had been right. I was fucking up everything. The club, Gash, the drugs, they were taking over. There was little room left for anything else. Let alone Aubrey.

But I couldn’t let her go. The pills. The high. They felt too good. I had become too attached. How could I say good-bye to the one thing that kept me sane?

But I hated my need for it. I hated that when things got rough, that’s what I turned to. I looked into Aubrey’s eyes, and I saw myself as she did, a sad, pathetic excuse for a person.

But I couldn’t give her up. My habit was my truest love. The one I couldn’t live without.

Could I give up Aubrey?

No.

My obsessive painting last night should prove that.

I was in a bind. I couldn’t do without either of the things vying for my love, my attention, my soul.

Yet my relationship with Aubrey wasn’t the only thing falling apart.

I was spiraling. Worse than ever. I was losing the control I thought I was holding on to so tightly. My probation officer was breathing down my neck. It was costing me an arm and a leg to keep stocked with the herbal supplements I needed to fool the piss tests I was required to take every week.

That afternoon I was called into my academic adviser’s office. Dr. Ramsey was a stuffy dude who had the bulbous red nose of an alcoholic. I had a good idea of exactly what he kept stashed in that locked drawer in his desk.

He sat me down and looked at me over the rim of his glasses. “You’re failing everything, Maxx,” he said in his nasally drone.

I knew I hadn’t been doing that great, but I hadn’t thought I was actually failing.

“Well, shit,” I said, tapping my foot on the floor, already feeling antsy and agitated. I needed to get home. The pills I had taken before I had come to campus were already wearing off. I tried not to think about how it was starting to take more and more drugs to keep me on an even keel.

“That’s one way of putting it,” Dr. Ramsey said mildly, his brows furrowed in disapproval.

I knew he hated me. Just like I hated him. It was a match made in hell.

I took in the diplomas and certificates hanging on the wall. It was obvious Dr. Ramsey liked to show off, probably because he didn’t have anything else going for him but his modicum of success. Guys like him bugged the crap out of me.

Dr. Ramsey crossed his hands on top of his desk and pursed his lips. “Maxx, are you aware that you will need to get an A on every single exam in order to pass with a D?” he asked in that condescending way of his that deserved a punch to the throat.

“Well, I am now,” I told him dryly.

“And is that okay with you? To end up on academic probation with no chance of graduating? You’ll be lucky to still have a place at Longwood after this semester,” Dr. Ramsey remarked, curling his lip in disdain.

I was up to my eyeballs in disappointment. I sure as shit didn’t need it from snot for brains with too many diplomas and no dick in his pants. I got to my feet, shoving my hands into my pockets.

“I hear ya, loud and clear, Dr. Ramsey. Thanks for the pep talk,” I sneered, slamming out of his office without waiting for a comeback.

I left Dr. Ramsey’s office fuming. Sure, I hadn’t been as focused on school this past semester as I should have been. The club was taking up a lot of my time.

My failing grades had absolutely nothing to do with the tiny white pills that I was already obsessing about, the drugs that I couldn’t wait to get home to.

I was in complete denial that I was about to lose everything.

As if my day didn’t suck enough, my phone rang as I walked in the door of my apartment. I answered it, hearing my brother’s enthusiastic voice on the other end.

“I’m applying to an art school in Philadelphia,” Landon said excitedly. I barely heard him. I was searching through my drawer for the baggie I had put there the other night. Finally finding it, I shook out the pills I wanted.

Before I could take them, I registered what my brother had just said.

“You’re what?” I asked, knowing that I should be more supportive, that I should be excited for him. But all I heard was the sound of more money. More money I would need in order to take care of him.

The noose around my neck tightened.

“Uh, yeah. My guidance counselor says I have a good shot at getting in. She wrote me a letter of recommendation. My SAT and ACT scores are really good, Maxx,” Landon rambled on.

“How much does the school cost?” I asked, bursting Landon’s bubble.

Landon was quiet for a while before answering. “I can get scholarships, Maxx. I can get a job. I’ll make it work. You don’t have to help me,” he said, with more defensiveness than I had ever heard from him.

“You know I’ll always help you out, Landon. I just wanted to know,” I explained, and it was true. Even if it meant selling my fucking kidneys on eBay, Landon would go to school. Even if I had to drop out myself and become the biggest drug dealer on the East Coast, my baby brother would have his future.