Free Rock Bottom (Bullet) by Jade C. Jamison

lips on it if it was the last thing he’d do.
    “ Well, let’s skip the formalities, shall we?  The first thing I want to do is talk to you about addiction.”
    He cleared his head.  “Shouldn’t we discuss payment first?”
    The smile was slight, but it was there.  That gave him hope.  “I assume you’re good for it.”
    He nodded.  “I am.”
    “Then you can pay me after your time is up.  Since you appear to be eager, I want to dig in.”
    Fuck, yeah, he wanted to dig in, but not the way she imagined.  Subtly, Ethan.  He knew he’d never get anywhere with her by being aggressive.  She’d already made that clear.  So he simply nodded.
    “I have to know something.”
    Or not.  Ethan felt hopeful and leaned over.  “Anything.”  He resisted the urge to call her babe .
    “Do you really want to quit?”
    “Quit what?”
    “Using.”
    He started to give a knee-jerk answer until he realized he’d never actually been asked if he wanted to quit before.  Sure, he’d heard the stupid saying that someone had to decide to quit or it wouldn’t work, but he’d never been asked if that was what he really wanted to do.  So he closed his mouth and pondered his brain.  Her question had thrown him completely off guard.
    When he really thought about it, no, not completely.   There was a small part of him that would never want to quit.  Drugs—alcohol included—did something for him, or he never would have become addicted in the first place.  They numbed his brain, made it easier to forget or at least push things to where he couldn’t see and feel them.  They made it easier for him to ignore the new strange things his brain was trying to do…things that made him feel as though his firing synapses weren’t on his side.  His brain was warring against him, rebelling, trying to hurt him.  And—if that weren’t enough—the memories were killer.  The older he got, the more he remembered…about his father, his childhood, his mother, things he would have preferred to have kept tucked in that little closet in his brain.  Instead, the door opened, inch by inch, and memories made their way out.  They were just tiny pictures at first—fuzzy memories and shadows—but they grew as time went on.  Full scenes, episodes, movies began to consume him, and he tried to make sense of them, and when he couldn’t, a dark cloud enveloped him.  The dark cloud might not lift because of the substances he abused, but he was better able to hide from it.
    There was no fighting it.
    But, in spite of the reprieve the drugs brought from all that pain, he was tired of living that way.  The drugs, the alcohol made him a different person.  He was angry and mean when he used—it didn’t always seem that way to him, but Val and his bandmates had confirmed it to him several times.  He would often lose days—weeks, even—when he was on a spree.  The worst part, though, was he felt like he didn’t know himself anymore.  He didn’t know who Ethan Richards was.  He was famous, now, yes, but he’d become the caricature his fans expected.  He’d lost the real Ethan.
    Getting sober would be his way of getting himself back.
    So, no matter what benefits the drugs gave him, he knew he had to let them go for good.  He didn’t like what they did to him, and he already knew…they were killing him.  He didn’t think he could take it anymore—physically or mentally.  He had to kill the habit, murder its hold over him.  It was kill or be killed.
    He looked Jenna in the eyes and said, “Yeah.  Yeah, I do.  I want to be quit once and for all.”
    She smiled—not a huge toothy grin but a sweet smile, one that didn’t open her mouth but turned up the corners of her lips.  “Good.  So…let’s talk about addiction and what it does to your brain.”
    Ethan couldn’t help it.  He’d heard this spiel before.  Hell, he’d just heard it in rehab weeks ago.  He knew all about the receptors and how the brain would