Page 9 of Over You
“I know. And I’m sorry but just. . . Jesus. Come home. This is ridiculous.” Silence. “Georgia Anne. I love you more than anything else. You know that, right?” Why did she keep going with these long pauses? “Right?”
“I need you to love me more than the drugs.”
That was a knife through the chest. I shook my head even though she couldn’t see me. “I do.” And that wasn’t a lie. I didn’t love the drugs; I hated them.
“Then prove it.”
“Just come home, and I’ll—”
“No. No more tomorrows. There are no more tomorrows until you show me you’re clean, Spencer.”
Holy shit. She wasn’t going to come back. Desperation crawled through me like an army of ants, and I collapsed on the lounge, my elbow on my knee and my head in my hand. Like a castle in the sand when the tide came in, everything around me was crumbling. “Don’t do this, babe,” I whispered. “Come on.” If I could just bargain with her one more time.
“Prove to me I’m the most important thing, Spence.”
Panic worked its way through my veins like a bad hit of heroin. She was giving me the ultimatum I never thought she would because she’d always said love was unconditional. The question ofwhat ifswirled through my head. It wasn’t as simple as tossing the drugs into the trash. It wasn’t as simple as rehab and therapy. The way that demon had wormed its way into my psyche, hunkering down for the long haul—I felt like an exorcism may be my only hope. And maybe that was a better analogy: Addiction wasn’t a disease; it was a possession of the mind, body, and soul.
“Three months,” she said like it was the simplest thing in the world. “Get clean for three months, and I’ll come back.”
“Are you fucking serious?” The phone shook in my hands. The coke had long ago left my system, and I was jonesing. “I have a tour in a week, Georgia.”
“Three months.”
In a pathetic attempt at self-preservation, that fear morphed into anger. “You don’t leave someone just because they screw up, Georgia Anne!”
“This isn’tjustscrewing up, Spencer.”
My throat burned. My vision blurred. Out of habit, I shoved a hand in my pocket for a bag that wasn’t there. “I thought you loved me!”
“Don’t you understand.I do. That’s why I left. To save you.”
I kicked one of the patio tables, sending it halfway across the deck. “How selfless of you to travel halfway across the world tosave me.”
And then, she hung up. I’d been rejected by my birth-mother. By every foster family who had never adopted me. Kids at school. But I never expected to be rejected by her, and that took what little soul I had and tore it into bite-size morsels for those demons to ingest.
5
Georgia Anne
Six months later
At seventeen, I had moved in with Spencer. By eighteen we were married, and by twenty-two, I was lost. Without purpose. And heartbroken. God, so heartbroken. . .
Two months into Midnite Kills’ tour, Spencer overdosed, and while I had accepted that I would forever be in love with an addict, I had also learned that loving someone didn’t mean destroying yourself in the process.
Somedays, I felt okay with that decision, others the guilt rode my shoulders like the harbinger of the Apocalypse. As much as he meant to me, I had to put myself first. And that was hard to do.
At first, I’d told Spencer he had three months. After the overdose, I gave him three more because I was desperate for him to get clean, and I was dying to be with him which was why I’d spent the past six months backpacking across Europe. Being thousands of miles apart was the only way I could ensure that I wouldn’t go back to him until he’d cleaned up.
I’d spent six months with blistered feet. Six months of shedding myself of material things—with the exception of the tacky, plastic photo keychain that housed a black and white picture of Spencer and me. And over my journey, I had learned that I didn’t need much to survive. Not a house in the hills or a fancy car. When it came down to it, I didn’t evenneedhot water. But the hardest lesson I had learned was how to sleep in a bed without him. How to manage the nightmares when I woke up and Spencer was still gone, still high. The hardest thing I had to do was learn to live without him and tell myself love wasn’t the answer to everything. Actually, it wasn’t the answer toanything.
Love was fleeting, and no matter what Hollywood told us, we didn’t need it to live.
And sometimes, loving someone who couldn’t love themselves could kill.
The train rumbled over the track, and I stared through the window. Tiny chalets dotted the French countryside. Yellow and purple flowers sprinkled the fields that whizzed past until the landscape eventually turned into graffiti-covered buildings.
I had just settled against the cloth seat and closed my eyes when the brakes screeched to a halt. The announcer spit something out. Although the French words rolled from his tongue like whiskey, the only words I recognized were: “Paris Gar du Nord.”
