I can’t show you what I really am …
His eyes narrowed but he was relentless. ‘It’s this or the car, Beth. Your choice.’
What was a bit more salt on her already crusty face? She ignored the two tears that raced each other down her cheeks. ‘Do you want to see me beg, Marc?’
His frown practically bisected his face. ‘I want you to be warm, Beth. I want you to drink.’
She forced her back straighter. ‘And I won’t.’
‘For crying out loud, woman! Why are you so difficult?’
Old Beth and new Beth struggled violently inside her. Old Beth just wanted to throw her alcoholism in his face to punish him for forcing her hand like this. For putting her in the position of having to defend herself. To expose herself. To him, of all people. The man she’d already let down in a hundred ways. The man whose good opinion seemed to matter to her more than anyone else did. New Beth understood that using it as a weapon would only hurt him horribly and, ultimately, disappoint him more.
She knew she couldn’t say nothing, either. But saying something didn’t have to mean she was beaten. She could trust him with the information. Like she’d trusted her AA sponsor with all her deepest secrets. Couldn’t she? Never mind the fact that he’d just told her his mother was an addict and made it painfully clear how much that disgusted him. This was Marc. He’d see she had her addiction under control. He’d see how hard she was working. He’d understand. He always had.
She laughed, low and pained. God, now she was lying to herself! Who was she kidding? This was Marc. She deserved his disgust for what she’d done and how she’d been.
She stared at the determination in his face. He meant it when he said drink or car. A numb kind of fatalism came over her. Whatever he did—however he reacted—it couldn’t be worse than the wondering. Than fearing what might happen if she was revealed to the world. To him.
But her heart still hammered and it pounded into the miserable ache that filled her chest. Why was it easier to trust a total stranger with the truth than the man who’d been her closest friend?
It was hard to tell where the cold-trembles stopped and the terror-trembles started, but she thrust out her violently shaking hand towards him and raised defiant eyes and said the words aloud she’d been saying twice a week for two years.
‘Hi. I’m Elizabeth and I’m an alcoholic.’
* * *
Marc’s stomach tightened right before it dropped into a forty-storey free fall. His breath seized up and his skin prickled cold all over. He dropped his towel on the whale and turned away from Beth without so much as looking at her trembling outstretched hand. He marched off into the darkness, ignoring the shocked mortification on her face. He couldn’t trust himself not to.
I’m Elizabeth and I’m an alcoholic.
His heart hammered. People made those jokes all the time, but the degraded, pained tone in her voice and the bleached courage in her eyes told him she wasn’t kidding.
Beth was an alcoholic.
His Beth.
He kept walking, ignoring the fact he couldn’t see what was two feet in front of him in the sand and his feet were dangerously bare. A deep, savage ache drove him forwards. That Beth—Beth—could be afflicted like his mother. That it could happen to two people he loved. What was he—some kind of jinx? All the people he cared about ended up dead or.
The living dead.
He clutched the flask—a piece of his father—close to him. Beth’s eyes had shifted back and forth on it as if it were made of excrement one moment and pure ambrosia the next. He knew that look only too well. It was the way his mother used to look when she hurried past a pharmacy all stiff and tall. Just before her body caved in on itself and she’d turn back for the entrance with a hard mouth and dark eyes, dragging him along into hell.
Beth wanted this whisky. Badly.
His fingers flexed more tightly around it. Growing up, she’d been his role model. Sensible. Smart. Courageous. Everything he valued most in a friend. Everything he’d searched for in himself. Yet sensible, smart, brave Beth had ended up addicted to alcohol. If she could succumb.
But she was fighting it. Some deep, honest part of him shouted that through the darkness. She wanted it but said no. His chest ached for the pain that had contorted her face. For the extra agony that this night must be for her. As if the cold and pain weren’t bad enough.
He recognised it, even if he didn’t understand it.
That thought brought him up short. Maybe she could explain. Help him understand. He owed her the chance, surely? He pivoted on his bare feet and followed the silver moonlight trail back to where he could vaguely see the shadow of a whale and a slender woman silhouetted against the rising moon.
Beth lifted bleak eyes to him. It hurt that he’d put that look there. He bent to re-drench his towel and took several deep breaths before trusting himself to speak.
‘How long?’
There were probably more intelligent, sensitive questions to ask right at that moment but, more than anything, he needed to know how long she’d been struggling. Half of him hated it. The other half hated that she’d gone through it without him. She glanced away at the moon and then didn’t quite find his eyes again. She was terrified. But hiding it. Something deep and painful welled up inside him, cut into the already sensitive flesh around his heart. He was hurting her.
Just like she’d hurt him. Except this didn’t feel like justice.
Wide, stricken eyes returned to his. ‘Eight years drunk. Two years sober. I’m recovering.’
Was there even such a state? Wasn’t someone alcoholic for ever—just a sober alcoholic? Her focus kept returning to the flask. Shifty, sideways glances. He wanted to empty the contents into the sea but, the way she was looking, she might just plunge into the water and try to guzzle the salt water. A deep hunger blazed in her eyes. It elbowed its way in amongst the self-disgust. It reminded him of the look in her eyes that day behind the library.
‘Did you start at school?’ he asked.
She shook her dank locks. ‘About a year after I got married.’
Marc winced. Did she start the moment she hit legal age? ‘Why?’
Her eyes widened and tears grew in them. ‘Things got. hard.’
‘Life gets hard for everyone.’ Not everyone turned to the bottle. Alcohol. Pills. It was all the same—a cop-out.
‘I know. I’m not special. But I made that choice and now I’m living with the consequences.’
At least Beth accepted that she was at fault. He’d heard every excuse under the sun from his mother. She had headaches, she wasn’t sleeping, one medication made her crave another. It was never truly her fault.
His mouth tightened. Beth’s eyes kept flicking back to the flask he held down at his side. She lifted a hand and pressed it to her sternum as though a ball of pain resided there and crushing it helped. Something old and long-buried made him turn and hurl the flask as far out to sea as he could. Its shape and weight gave it a heap of extra flight.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Beth cried out and lurched towards its airborne arc.
Christ. Did she want a drink that badly? ‘I’m removing temptation.’
‘That was your father’s!’
Surprise socked him between the ribs. That she cared at all. To think of that. His mother never would have thought of him through her haze. She’d have been braving the sharks to retrieve her pills. Not like the old days when he was the centre of her world.