I set my jaw. “I think it’s a start.”
She settled back against the couch and looked up at the ceiling, giving a long sigh. “But where do we even start?”
“Let’s start by saying what we want. I know what I want. Do you?”
She turned her head and gave me a long look from beneath heavy-lidded eyes, then took a deep breath. “I don’t know what I want.”
“You want to be a doctor,” I supplied, trying to be helpful.
She rolled her head away from me and looked up at the ceiling, blinking. “Yeah…maybe.”
“Emilia, what’s going on? We broke up because you wanted to go to Maryland—now you’re not going to Maryland and—”
She frowned, but her voice was still quiet when she spoke. “We broke up because you violated my trust and hired some jackass to stick a tracker on my car. Because you don’t trust me.”
I bit my tongue. It had absolutely nothing to do with not trusting her and everything to do with this constant fear inside.
I reached out and smoothed her cheek. “Can I ask you to move past that? To forgive me?”
Her eyes fluttered closed under my touch and she swallowed. “I’ve already forgiven you. But I still don’t trust you. We’ve got big trust issues, you and I.”
I smoothed her hair. “We’re not perfect. But I think we’re worth fighting for.”
Her eyes closed lazily and opened. “I think your hugs are worth fighting for…” she murmured in a sleepy voice.
“Only my hugs?” I asked, mildly amused.
“It’s a good start.” She leaned in to me, nestling against my chest. My arms wrapped around her almost automatically.
“Mmm,” she said. “Tighter.” And I complied.
So I held her until she dozed off in my arms. I kissed her hair, glancing at the clock. It was just after 9 p.m. and I began to wonder about her weird drowsiness. She’d had a glass of wine, so that might have done it. And—thanks to me—she hadn’t slept much the previous night. But it didn’t add up.
I adjusted her against me and that’s when I noticed two small bruises on her left arm. I held it up, at first thinking that our rough sex from the night before had caused them, but these looked like fresh bruises. I took a closer look and—sure enough I saw puncture marks at the site of the bruises.
I stiffened in shock, remembering that she’d taken her bag into the bathroom with her—and had been in there for a while. When she’d come out, she’d been acting more inebriated than she would have gotten from one glass of wine. My heart raced. Fuck.
I stared at her white-blond head that was tucked against my chest and thought about that weird request last night to keep her shirt on—the reluctance to put on the bathing suit. I adjusted her against me and with cold fear creeping down my throat I pulled up the hem of her shirt enough to look at her stomach.
It was covered with older bruises. Some were yellow, indicating they had been there for weeks. Injection sites. I thought about her fixation on Sabrina today—her desire to pry for more about my sister. Emilia was clearly injecting something. Was she an addict? What the hell? When had this happened?
With a dark, cold feeling inside my throat, I gently laid her aside so I could stand up. Then I bent and scooped her into my arms. I wouldn’t let her sleep on the couch all alone. I carried her up the stairs to my room. Laying her down gently, I pulled off her shoes, pulled her phone out of her pocket and put it on the nightstand next to mine. She turned over on her side and I put a throw blanket over her. We’d talk this through in the morning.
But before we had that talk, I needed information and I was desperate. I went to her bag and stared at it for a long moment, hesitating before I opened it. If she was using, then she needed help. If I could help her, then I had to. I took a deep breath and unzipped the bag, vaguely realizing that she had just mentioned in the previous hour that she had issues trusting me.
And yet here I was again, digging through her bag. My hands shook and I couldn’t get that vision of Bree out of my head…I was that boy again, watching my dying sister teeter on the curb. I knew I’d never see her again as I stared out the bus window. I was powerless, unable to help her no matter how much I begged to.
That wouldn’t happen again, goddamn it. It wouldn’t. Not to Emilia. I couldn’t breathe when my hand closed around a plastic container, a portable sharps container. I pulled it from the bag, my jaw dropping in disbelief. It had empty syringes inside.
Fucking fuck. My hand shook as I took the syringes to my office to run a check on Google based on the labeling. Oxycodone—a powerful opioid prescribed as a painkiller but also one of the most commonly abused prescription medications around. That’s how Bree had started—she’d swiped a bottle of painkillers from Christina’s mother’s medicine cabinet. She’d stored those in my stuffed animals, too.