Page 80 of Sweet Addiction
“We had a fight.” My heart sinks with the admission, and I look away from my sister and bring my focus back to my computer. Rome looks like he’s about to murder someone in the first thumbnail, and I desperately want to know what put that look in his eyes. “Lilah... Is he okay?”
My phone alerts me to another incoming text.
“I just sent you a link,” Lilah tells me. “Watch that one and tell me if you think he’s okay.”
“Lilah...” I let the rest hang between us. Everything I can’t say. Everything I feel. The fear. The doubt. The mess. Pressure builds between us like water pressing against a dam searching for the loose brick to bust through as I let fear win out and admit, “I’m scared.”
“Of what?” she asks with so much sympathy in her voice, the guilt threatens to eat me alive.
“Everything,” I confess, giving life to the one emotion that has been crushing me for half my life. Needing to let it out and tell the truth, even if just for this once. “Of never being enough. Not pretty enough, or talented enough, or kind enough, or smart enough. I’m petrified of being compared to you for the rest of my life and always being found lacking,” I finally tell my sister after years of living in her shadow. “I swear I don’t think you’re some dumb singer. I think you’re pretty amazing.”
“Dillan,” she gasps, tears welling in her eyes. “I don’t understand...”
“You don’t have to,” I tell her, not needing her to understand, just to hear me out. “It was never you making me feel that way. It was me. My shitty self-confidence. My self-doubt. Social media didn’t help. Keyboard warriors and basement-dwelling trolls made it worse.”
“Dillan . . . I’m so sorry.”
“No,” I stop her. “You can’t take any of this on. I’ve had years of therapy, some good, some bad, some helpful, some not. Butone of the things I learned early on was this isn’t your fault. I control how I feel. At least, some days I do. But how I feel is my choice.” I swallow down the fear building within me. “It’s why I stopped working with you. I had too. It wasn’t good for me, Tink. The constant scrutiny. The debilitating self-doubt... I don’t know how you handle it, but I couldn’t.”
Her blue eyes shine full of tears. “I didn’t know. How didn’t I know?”
“I didn’t want you to.” And those simple words are the most honest ones I could possibly give her. “It wasn’t your job to know or to fix it. It was mine. Nobody knew.”
“But you’re my baby sister,” she cries, and maybe I’m an asshole for finally laying this out there for my ridiculously pregnant, hormonal sister now, when she’s been known to cry at tissue commercials.
“I am, and I always will be. But I’m also a grown woman who had to learn to deal with her own demons. I wish I’d been strong enough to tell you then,” I whisper.
“And you are now?” she asks with hope in her pretty voice. “Strong enough?”
Am I?
I think about those words.
About what they mean.
About my life.
Where I am.
Where I’m going.
Where Rome fits into it... if he does. And I do think he does. I think he was the first fissure in the dam. He’s the reason the pressure dropped a tiny bit. Opening up to him first. Starting to let him in...
“I think so,” I whisper weakly. “At least I did.” My shaking finger hovers over the link Lilah sent as I wait to press play. “But I don’t know what’s on this video.”
“Just watch the clip, sissy.”
Watch the clip... Why does that feel like such a loaded statement?
Like this clip is going to matter on a visceral level.
Like it’s going to change things again.
My life.
My heart.
Five minutes later, once I’ve played the same clip three times, I have my answer.
