Free Cover to Covers by Alexandrea Weis

quit drinking. I think she knew then that she had been wrong about you.”
    Her skeptical demeanor evaporated. “You’ve been sober since I left?”
    He nodded. “Twenty years.”
    “Wow , I’m impressed. I never thought…I’m glad to hear it. Your drinking was…a real problem. When you were sober, you were wonderful to be around, but when you drank you were—”
    “An even bigger asshole than I am now?” he injected. Monique opened her mouth to speak, but he held up his hand. “I know I wasn’t the best boyfriend at the time, but I want to thank you for sticking by me for as long as you did. Without you, I might have chosen a different path. You made me see that I needed to walk away from the booze in order to get my life together.”
    “I can’t take credit for that. You made the decision to stop, not me.”
    “You gave me the strength to make that decision, Moe.”
    She stroked the edge of the white plate in front of her. “You know the drinking had a lot to do with why I went back to New Orleans.”
    Dropp ing back in his chair, Tyler digested what she had just told him. He had suspected that his excessive drinking had pushed her away, but until that moment he had never truly accepted that as a reason for why their relationship had ended.
    “Why didn’t you say anything?”
    “It doesn’t matter.” She put on a happy smile. “Everything turned out for the best. You have your company, and I have my writing career.”
    He placed his elbows on the table. “But if you had stayed, things might have been different for us.”
    “If I hadn ’t left, you might never have stopped drinking. You would never have taken over your stepfather’s company and become the successful man you are.”
    “I would have stopped for you, Moe.”
    “We both know that’s not true,” she responded with a dismissive shake of her head.
    Their waitress re appeared, and after placing their beverages on the table, she darted away.
    Monique reached for her wine glass. “Besides, if I had not gone back to New Orleans, I might never have met Mat and become a writer.”
    Ty ler ran his fingers along the rim of his glass of soda water. “Was he…the first?”
    Monique’s gray eyes searched his, and then she took a quick sip of her pale yellow wine. “No. My brother, Jake, set me up with one of his friends. I think he got sick of listening to me talk about you. I can’t even remember his name. Randy, Raymond…something like that.”
    “Obviously, you didn’t care for him.”
    “No, I didn’t.” She tossed back another gulp of the liquor. “He was just someone who was there. It happened about three months after I came home. I was lonely and I figured what the hell.”
    Lifting his beverage, that nagging burn for a shot of alcohol rose from his gut. “You should have called me.”
    “Called you for what? Sex? ” Monique fidgeted in her chair. “Sleeping with you wouldn’t have changed anything between us.”
    “No, it would have changed everything between us.” He took a needed swig of soda water.
    “I would have just turned into a number then, Ty. And I didn’t want to end up being just another notch on your bedpost.”
    He plopped his glass on the table. “Jesus, you would never have been that.”
    Raising her wine to her lips, she conceded, “I guess we’ll never know.”
    She sat across from him, heartily chugging her drink, when he realized her need for alcohol was just as great as his.
    “ Moe, haven’t you ever wondered what we would have been like together?”
    Monique almost choked on her drink. She patted her hand against her chest and banged her glass down on the table. “No!”
    “Liar.” He signaled their waitress, who was standing at the oak bar across the room.
    “ Ty, what are you doing?”
    “ I’m getting you some more wine.”
    “I don’t need it, really.” She held up her half-empty glass.
    T he waitress looked over at him and he pointed down to Monique’s drink. When the