Last Call (Bad Habits Book 3) by Staci Hart Read Free Book Online Page B

amount to anything. It was just what I did, something to fill my soul and the silence of my life. We never lived anywhere for more than a year before we were re-stationed, which meant I never really had a chance to make friends. So I was the weird, quiet kid who wore mostly black, with charcoal-smudged fingers and hard eyes, smoking under the bleachers.
    When I turned sixteen, The Sergeant announced we were moving again and it just hit me. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to live with him. I wanted to go to New York, start a life for myself.  
    He didn’t even put up a fight when I told him, just gave me a couple grand and told me to call him if I got in any trouble.
    I never called. Neither did he.  
    It had been more than ten years since then. Sometimes I wondered about him. If he found a new wife. Had more kids. If he was happy. Sometimes I wondered if he wondered about me. But usually I didn’t think about him at all.
    I’d taken a bus from Fort Rucker, Alabama, to New York with nothing but what was in my dad’s old canvas army-green duffle bag, used the money to rent a room at the Vanderbilt YMCA for a month, and found a job at an Italian restaurant bussing tables.
    It was there that I met a gangly blond kid, a couple years older than me with a smile like Christmas morning and the ability to make me laugh like no one I’d ever met. Seth was my first friend, the first person to make me feel included. It was the first time I’d ever been happy. He lived with his buddies, Danny and Sarah, and said they had room for me, if I wanted to stay. And of course I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay forever.  
    But what I thought was good and real was just an illusion. I followed Seth down the rabbit hole all the same.
    I’d done drugs before — smoked a little weed, tripped on mushrooms — but nothing like what I walked into with Seth. Molly — ecstasy — was the first step for me, the easy push, something to make you feel like everything was going to be just fine, the overload of serotonin that made all of my problems, past or future, seem small and trivial. Then it was ketamine, heavy limbs and stretched out nights spent just existing. And through it all, I felt like I finally had a home. That I had a family. That I belonged. And I was so in love with the idea that I sacrificed myself to hang on to the feeling.
    One night, Jared, our dealer, came over and brought a needle kit. Free samples of China White. Like nothing we’d ever felt before, he said, and he was right. It was like nothing I ever felt again, even though I chased it every time I put a needle in my arm.
    The next two years were a blur, days and nights running together like dripping paint. The four of us split rent in a shitty two-bedroom in Hell’s Kitchen, working so we could get high. Then Seth started peddling for Jared, and the cycle went around and around, faster, deeper, darker — until we were all lost.
    I remember the day I woke up in both senses of the word. The metallic tang of unwashed bodies hung in the thick air, still and stagnant from long, slow breaths and closed doors and windows. I didn’t know what time it was, what day it was, as I opened my heavy lids, mouth sticky. I looked over at Seth, hanging half off his rumpled bed, the knuckles of one hand dangling just over the floor. His face was turned to mine, eyes closed, ringed with dark shadows, hair more yellow than golden, dark and thick with oil. His needle kit lay on the bed next to him, the cigar box open, contents strewn around it.
    I didn’t recognize him. I didn’t recognize myself. And it was then I knew I needed more out of life than I was giving myself.  
    I didn’t have a diploma, so my job options were slim. But I could draw. I saw an article about Tonic in a magazine and wondered if being a tattoo artist was a possibility. You didn’t need a diploma or degree, you just apprenticed and practiced and became what you wanted to be.
    And that’s exactly what I did.