“You’re not just a lush; you’re an irresponsible lush. You deserve this.”
“I hate you.”
Sterling winked. “Nah. You love me. I can tell you the ugly truth, and we still remain friends. That’s why I love you.” He put a tall glass of gin in front of me. “Drink up. We’ve got a long day ahead of us.”
“I can’t apply for a job drunk.”
He held up a small white pill, and then placed it on the table, pushing it toward me. “We’re not applying for jobs today. Today, we’re saying goodbye to Ellison Edson the rich bitch, and hello to Ellie the blue-collar worker.”
“Eat shit and die, Sterling.”
He popped his own pill, washing it down with wine. I looked down at the table, turning the chalky white oval with my fingers. He was right. I wasn’t going to find a job today.
I threw the pill to the back of my throat, not caring what it was, just hoping it would take effect quickly. I gulped the gin until my throat burned, and then looked at Sterling, wiping my mouth. “This is going to get ugly.”
“It always does with us,” he said, taking another drink.
I woke up on the floor, naked and barely covered with a tablecloth. Sterling was my pillow, his bare thigh against my cheek. I sat up, wiping my mouth, tasting salt and gagging.
“Oh my God,” I whispered, looking at his naked body sprawled on the floor.
He didn’t look like Sterling, with the clean-shaven jaw I was used to. His face had begun to darken with whiskers, and his typically slicked coif had pulled free from the gel meant to keep each strand in place. He was no different from anyone else I’d left in my path, messy and ruined, but the sight of him was the physical manifestation of rock bottom—the man my sister loved lying naked on the floor, a mixture of our sweat still glistening on his skin.
Bile rose in my throat, and nausea overwhelmed me. I hadn’t thrown up after a day of drinking since junior high. The feeling caught me off guard.
I crawled on the floor to reach my clothes, pulling each piece of fabric to my chest. I breathed out a quiet cry and felt tears burn my eyes. Finley.
She would never forgive me—she’d never forgive us. I tried to remember what had happened. The sun was already behind the mountaintops, the sky getting darker by the second. Sterling and I had been fucking for hours, but I didn’t remember any of it.
Groggy and humiliated, I collected my clothes, pulling on my bra, shirt, damp panties—more nausea—and then my pants, feeling the coldness of the cotton against my skin. I gagged again, and then ran down the hall to the bathroom. My stomach heaved, and mostly wine and liquor splattered against the door. I pressed my lips together and let my cheeks bulge out, holding in the rest just long enough to lift the lid on the toilet. What seemed like gallons of alcohol burned my nose and throat as it came up and gushed into the toilet. The toilet water sprayed my face, and I closed my eyes, sobbing.
Once it was over, I stood up, washed my hands and face, rinsed my mouth, and tried to rinse mystery chunks from my hair. I looked in the mirror. The girl looking back was unrecognizable. She was gaunt, with dark circles under her bloodshot eyes. She was a junkie. Finley was right. Living this way was going to kill me.
I padded down the hall, picking up the wadded cash and my snow boots on the way.
Sterling stirred, and I rushed to the door, hopping on one foot to pull on one boot, and then the other.
“Ellie?” he called, his voice broken.
“Nothing happened,” I said.
He covered his face and turned his back to me. “Fuck. Fuck! No, no, no … we couldn’t have. We didn’t. Tell me we didn’t.”
“We didn’t. Nothing happened. Because if it did, Fin will never speak to either of us again,” I said, closing the door behind me.
CHAPTER SIX
The alarm bleated next to my ear, and I reached up, slapping at it until it turned off. The morning sun was pouring through the open blinds—I’d left them that way on purpose to force me out of bed. My interview with The MountainEar was in ninety minutes. Unfortunately, J.W. Chadwick owned the very bar I’d been kicked out of more than once, making my interview a littler trickier.
I opened my closet, wondering what people wore on interviews. When I Googled What to wear to magazine interview, it resulted in a thousand outfits I would never wear, including a ball gown with a plummeting neckline and see-through skirt I was sure no one wore outside a runway show.
I pressed my back against the wall and slid to the floor, perching my elbows on my knees and resting my forehead on my fists. I was known for a lot worse things in this town than being the daughter of the local billionaire. No one was going to hire me, and once Finley found out what I’d done, she would never forgive me. I had lost everything, and my future seemed very bleak.
Tears streamed down the bridge of my nose, pooling at the tip and dripping to the carpet. Soon, I couldn’t control the sobs rattling my body, and all I could think about was how unfair it was that my parents dropped this bomb on me and took all the liquor in the house. Mother couldn’t even pack without consuming two bottles of wine to calm her nerves.
“Miss Ellison!” Maricela said, crouching in front of me. “What is it? Are you hurt?”
When I looked up at her, she used her apron to wipe my eyes. “No one’s going to hire me, Maricela. I’m the town drunk.”
“Not for the last two days, you’re not.”
“I can’t do this,” I cried. “I have no idea how to do this. They’re just throwing me to the wolves.”