First Love, Second Chance: Friends to Forever / Second Chance with the Rebel / It Started with a Crush...

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. The dual centre, shared with his father. His frown doubled. ‘It’s just a thing, Beth. It’s not him.’

‘You could have just put it back in your bag!’

‘Would it have been safe there?’

Her back straightened up hard, even though it must have hurt her to do it. Raw hurt saturated her voice. ‘It’s been safe in there all day.’

What could he say to that? He should have known an addict would sniff out the nearest fix.

Beth’s breathing returned in big heaves, punctuated by bursts of compulsive shaking that rattled her bones. ‘Now you’ll freeze,’ she accused.

‘I’ll get by. I have more insulation than you.’ He folded his arms, spread his legs. Classic Marc. ‘But we aren’t talking about me. We’re talking about you.’

‘Oh, I must have missed the point where your inquisition turned into a conversation.’

His mouth tightened. But her words had an effect. He forced himself to take a step back, to ease his body language. This was clearly hard enough for her. ‘I’d like to hear about it, Beth. To understand it.’ Though he had to force himself to say so calmly.

‘So you can decide how disgusted you should be? Or how much like your mother I am?’

He stiffened. ‘We’re going to be out here a long time yet, Beth. Did you really expect to drop a bombshell like that and then just go back to talking about the weather?’

No, she didn’t. Then again, she hadn’t planned to mention it at all—not to him—and, as it turned out, her instincts were spot on. She stared at him warily where once she would have blazed unconditional trust up at him. ‘It took me six months from the day I closed the door of Damien’s house behind me until the day I could stand up in AA and announce I’d been sober for a month.’ She sloshed his side of the whale because he’d frozen in position. ‘Then two. Then five. Then ten.’ She shuddered in a breath. ‘Two years of my life trying to undo what I’ve done. I’ve judged myself enough for everyone in that time.’

I really don’t need it from you.

He flushed, which was a miracle enough, given the temperature. Then he cleared his throat. ‘Please, Beth. No judgement.’

Uh-huh, sure. She drowned in his steady, silent regard but finally sighed, ‘What would you like to know?’

His pause was eternity. ‘All of it.’

Fair enough. She’d opened this door with her dramatic declaration. She might as well fling it wide and see what rumbled out. It couldn’t be any worse than the raw disgust he’d failed to hide. She took a moment gathering her thoughts. Her aching exterior merged with her interior perfectly. She couldn’t tell him all of it but there was still plenty left.

‘I hurt my family when I married Damien so young,’ she began, mostly a whisper but close enough that he could hear. ‘I hurt you. Turns out I hurt myself too. But at the time he was everything I thought I wanted—a holy grail, like some kind of hall pass of credibility. People treated me differently when I was with him and I … liked it. I’d been a pariah for so long …’

‘Because of me?’

The monotonous sound of the ocean began to mesmerize her. ‘No. Because of me. I chose you over all of them and their money.’ She pushed the words out through a critically tight chest. Between the cold and the anxiety, it was amazing she could breathe at all. ‘He found out pretty quickly that he didn’t like much about married life. The responsibility. The expectation. And I was so young and trying so hard to be what I thought a good wife would be. When he insisted on a drink, what else could I do?’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’d ask him what he wanted and bring a second.’

‘Misery loves company.’

So true in Damien’s case. ‘But then that point passed and it got so much worse.’

Marc stopped sloshing, his whole body wired. ‘Worse how? Did he hurt you?’

She straightened up, took a moment working out how to answer. ‘Sometimes.’ Shame washed through her. ‘I just blamed the drink. The more he drank the angrier he got, but the more I drank the less I cared.’