Owen's Best Intentions
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Anna Adams
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18.1K
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20
Prologue
“HERE, BUDDY. THIS is the place.” Owen Gage had to concentrate to make the words sound normal as he raised his hand awkwardly to tap on the taxi’s back passenger window.
“You sure?” The driver pulled to the curb in front of Lilah Bantry’s apartment building on one of Manhattan’s long, narrow, building-bound streets. “This your place? Do you want me to wait?”
“No, why?”
“It’s none of my business, but I’m not sure you belong here, and I feel bad just dropping a drunk guy on the street.”
“A cabbie with a conscience. Thanks.” The interior light almost blinded Owen. He might not have been in the best shape to see straight. “But I’m not drunk.” He shoved money at the driver and then fumbled with the door handle. He was in control. He just needed to concentrate.
The handle gave way, and he all but fell out of the car, onto the rain-splattered curb.
After the month he’d spent in a rehab center in the mountains, just being in this city cut through the friendly warmth of his buzz. Only a buzz. He could handle his liquor.
He headed toward the uniformed doorman who stood sentry beneath a wide awning that was green by day, but looked dark and damp tonight.
“Kevin,” Owen said, “how you doing, buddy?” There. He’d strung those words together like a champ.
“I’m better than you. What are you doing here like this, Mr. Gage?” Kevin had stood his post for as long as Owen had known Lilah and her family. Since the first time Lilah had taken one of Owen’s carved wooden sculptures for her fancy gallery. He’d thought his work was too rustic for the Bantry Galleries, but she’d refused to give up on his sculptures, or him, for the past two years.
“I want to see Lilah. Is she home? I have news for her.” Not good news, but information he was sick to death of hiding. He was tired of trying to be a different man because he loved her. Time she found out who he was.
Kevin reached for Owen as he tried to open the doors. “Wait.”
He shook the guy off, looking at him with an unspoken promise to make his point more plainly if he needed to.
“Mr. Gage, she doesn’t want to see you like this. Come into my office. Have a cup of coffee.”
“Yeah.” Coffee. “Why do people act like caffeine defuses vodka?” Owen pushed through the door.
The foyer’s tiles, white marble threaded with gold, looked wet and slick. He was careful about where he placed his feet. At the elevator, he grabbed the edges of the silver doors and stepped inside. It took a couple of jabs to get Lilah’s floor number, and then he backed into the wall behind him.
Kevin was on the phone at his desk, no doubt alerting Lilah.
Maybe coming here had been a mistake.
He’d climbed a fence at the world-renowned rehab center in upstate New York, hiked through the woods and found a liquor store before he located the bus line back to civilization. After all that effort, Lilah deserved to see the man she claimed to love.
The doors opened at her floor. He pushed himself off the wall and left the car, veering to the right.
She didn’t answer at first. He banged on the heavy wood with his fist, noting pain, but from a distance. It didn’t really hurt.
She finally opened the door, clinging to it, her face pale. “You have another month.”
“Kevin did call.” He had an urge to touch her sallow skin. She didn’t look right. “Are you sick?”
“You have another month in rehab.”
“They tell you it won’t work unless you’re honest, and I’m tired of lying.” He reached for the door. She held on to it and, oddly, didn’t invite him inside.
“Why did you come here when you’re like this?” She looked him up and down. “You couldn’t think I’d be glad to see you.” Her eyes were almost bruised with exhaustion.
“I asked are you sick?”
“You quit, didn’t you? You walked away from rehab.”
Even in his head, the big, honest announcement he’d come here to make sounded like the load of bull it was, except Lilah had to know the truth. “I don’t want rehab.” That wasn’t it. “I’ve tried. You don’t know how many times I’ve tried.”
Over and over. Sometimes for a week. Sometimes for a few hours. Sometimes for a month or more, like after that first morning—at thirteen—when he’d passed out in the tree fort he and his brother had built. He’d woken with a cotton mouth and a head like a gong, and guilt that had become his oldest, most loyal friend.
Telling her about that would only make him weak. She looked away, pain pinching her face. Shame squeezed his warm buzz into a hazy memory.
“I like to drink, Lilah. So do you. We’ve had a good time.”
“I’m not having a good time anymore.” She sounded as if she might cry.
“Because you’ve changed?” But why? He couldn’t understand what had made her different all of a sudden.
“I have changed.” She pressed her hand to her mouth.
He stared at her, waiting. “Explain.”
“My work suffers every time you’re in town. I spend so much time watching you, waiting for you to get ready to leave this bar, or that pub.” She covered her mouth again.
“Do you have the flu or something? You look like you’re going to be sick.”
“I wanted us to have a chance.”
“A chance for what? You act as if you don’t remember how many times we’ve headed back here at daylight. Together, and we weren’t always trashed.”
She laughed, but the sound cut like a piece of glass. “I wasn’t,” she said. “Because I can stop.”
“I can stop, too.” Even to him, that sounded idiotic after he’d staggered, drunk, into her home on the fumes of a fifth of vodka.
She lifted her face. Her whole body stiffened as if she were bracing for a blow. “I have stopped. I liked having fun. I liked the way alcohol made me feel different, but I was playing around. I guess I’m tired of playing, and I can’t be with someone who needs to be drunk all the time.”
“I can quit anytime I want.”
“Like your dad.”
Those three words were a shot to the gut. She was one of the few people outside of his brothers and sister and mother who knew what growing up in his house had been like. She’d compared him to the slob who’d made his family a bunch of victims. “You throw him in my face the first time you get mad at me?”
“Your father hurt you because he drank, Owen. He drank like you do. You told me yourself, he couldn’t stop.”
“Maybe he had his reasons.” He closed his eyes for the briefest second. “I’m not my father.”
“You don’t want to be. I believe that.” She came to him, taking his face between her hands with patience and sadness that was more painful than accusations.
She was saying goodbye. He knew it even as her touch eased the pain in his head.
“I just wanted to see you tonight.” He tried to put his arms around her, but she slipped beyond his reach. Over her shoulder, he spied the silver tray that held vodka and scotch and whiskey so expensive a guy from Bliss, Tennessee, had never tasted its like before she’d first offered it.
His mouth watered. He wanted it. He couldn’t help it. The thirst was a furnace inside him, a fire that had to burn. Fires burned.
Drinkers drank.
“You’ve seen me.” She walked away from him, her mouth tight, her eyes wounded. Pale blond hair fell over her face. “Now you can go back to the center,” she said. “I’ll drive you. Let me change.”
“I’m not going back. I tried because I care about you, and you wanted it, but I don’t want it.”
“What if I can’t be with you if you drink?”
He moved in front of her, jostling a small parquet table he’d given her as a thank-you for his first show at her family’s gallery. “What are you talking about?” He tried again to decipher her expression. “Why are you looking at me as if I’ve cheated on you?”
“Because that’s how I feel. Every time you show me you prefer vodka to me, you cheat on me.”
“You showed me the best clubs in Manhattan. You’ve matched me drink for drink and laugh for laugh. We’ve had a good time. Maybe it was just fun at first, but you matter more than...”
“You are vital to me, Owen, so I’m begging you...” He’d never heard this tone before, so earnest, so broken. Where was the woman who’d survived a childhood kidnapping to step bravely out in the world as a successful gallery owner? “I am literally begging you to promise you can stop drinking. That you will stop drinking.”
“I can’t.” Every last moment in that place had been like marching through a desert, his mind always fixed on a glass of the only relief for the thirst that owned him. It was painful to acknowledge, but he’d needed that drink more than he’d wanted Lilah.
“I came back because I missed you.” He could barely look at her as he said the words. “Why can’t that be enough? Maybe it’s time we stopped doing this long-distance relationship. I could move here.”
At least then he could lose the title of town drunk, transferred from his father’s head to his.
“No.” She turned her face away, and strands of her hair stuck to the tears on her cheeks, making this whole mess worse. “I need you to commit to being sober.”
He was sober now. The vodka he’d sipped all the way from rehab on a bus that had smelled like unwashed humans had long since vanished from his system.
He licked his lips. What he’d give for another fifth.
“I will not lie to you,” he said.
“I don’t want you to lie. I want you to be the decent man I believe in, not a man who terrorizes his family and wastes his life.”
He laughed as if that were funny, but he headed for her door. “You don’t believe I’m decent.” He didn’t believe it. “I’ve made my choice. When you get bored with being reformed, give me a call.”
