Free On Thin Ice 1 by Victoria Villeneuve Page A

here.
    Amanda sat next to Sam.
She was what most people think of when they think of drug addicts.
She got in with a bad crowd in high school and became addicted to
meth. She pimped herself out for a while, but her rich family found
her and forced her into rehab. The brown roots of her platinum
blonde hair were showing, but at least it had stopped falling out
as much as it had before. She was starting to put on weight, but I
could still see her ribs through the tight tank top she wore with
skinny jeans that somehow managed to look loose on her. I had never
seen skinny jeans look loose on anyone before. Amanda was
nice enough, but quiet. She mostly kept to herself, and I was fine
with that.
    Two chairs to Doctor
Emma’s left was Fiona. She was an alcoholic like myself, although
she was about fifteen years older, and probably the closest thing I
had to a friend in here. She had brown hair down to her shoulders
in one of those trendy cuts you might expect Victoria Beckham to
wear, and eyes of the exact same shade. Her face was always
perfectly made up. Even when she was at her worst, she always wore
so much makeup sometimes I wondered if I’d ever seen her real face.
I didn’t know why she was in here apart from the alcoholism. I
didn’t know if she had a deep seated secret that led her to
drinking, if something in her life, a memory had made it worse. She
was like me, she didn’t like to share, and I think that was why we
found ourselves making a connection. We never spoke about what we
were in here for. I only knew her addiction was alcohol, like mine.
She nodded at me as I caught her eye. We would speak about
banalities, about things that didn’t matter, and it made us both
happier.
    I sat down in my chair
and stared at the floor. There was a piece of dirt almost exactly
in the center of one of the tiles, and I willed it to move an inch
to the left to be in perfect symmetry with the rest of the floor. I
had always been a little bit crazy like that. Time to zone out for
an hour. I never participated in these group therapy sessions. Why
bother? I was broken, I didn’t want to heal. What was the point? I
was vaguely aware of a slow procession of more people, another half
dozen or so coming in. Chairs screeched against the linoleum floor
as the residents of the Charles Madison Center for Sobriety all
took their seats, ready for the biweekly session of sharing their
lives with strangers.
    Doctor Emma said
nothing, flipping through the notes on her lap as people entered,
absentmindedly playing with a strand of her straight, long black
hair, until all of the chairs had been filled. Then she looked
around the room, cleared her throat and began to speak.
    “Welcome, everyone.
Thank you for coming.” Right. She said this every week, as though
we had any choice in the matter.
    “Before we begin, I’d
like to introduce you all to the newest member of our group.
Daniel, we would all appreciate it if you told us a few words about
yourself.”
    I dragged my eyes away
from the speck of dirt on the floor to see who the new guy was. I
looked up and noticed everyone looking to my left. He was three
seats away from me, and as soon as I saw him, my breath caught in
my throat.
    Daniel was hands down
the sexiest man I’d ever seen in my life. I was pretty sure I just
stared at him for a while, my jaw hanging wide open. His eyes were
dark, deep pools of mystery. His hair was of the same color,
scruffy, but not overly so. It gave him that perfect
just-got-out-of-bed look. His jaw had a hint of stubble, but his
cheekbones, as perfect as if they’d been carved from marble, were
still noticeable underneath.
    A shiver shot down my
spine, a shiver unlike any I’d felt in a long, long time. My eyes
moved away from his perfect face down to his body. The tight, long
sleeved sports shirt he wore showed off the fact that he was
incredibly muscular. I could see the ripples and bulges in all the
right places, and although I couldn’t tell for sure,