Winter Solstice in St. Nacho's (St. Nacho's #5) - Z.A. Maxfield Page 0,16
of Tug crying woke me.
“Tug?” I blinked my eyes to see the clock. Three in the afternoon. Tug didn’t reply. “Hey, what’s up?”
He pulled a pillow over his face. “Don’t look at me.”
I got up and went to stand beside the bed where he was hiding.
“Are you hungry?” I asked. “Want some water?”
He cried harder.
“Hey, what’s all this?” I smoothed the sweat-soaked t-shirt over his back. “Are you sad because of what I said earlier? Come on out and talk to me.”
“I c—” he gasped. “C-can’t stop crying.”
“Your body’s wringing you out from every orifice, huh?”
He shook with sobs. “Don’t want to be like this.”
“I know.” He let me remove the pillow so I could see the back of his head.
“Don’t want to live like this. Can’t do it.”
“I think you can, just for a little while. Mind if I ask you something? You don’t have to answer.”
He shook his head, still gripping the pillow beneath him tight to his face. “What?”
“Back when you used to come to the shop, I figured you didn’t get along with your folks.”
He laughed weakly. “Ancient history.”
“What are they like?”
He rolled to his side. “My mother left when I was born.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. As if I’d lie about that.”
What a stupid thing to say. Apparently, I was so privileged I couldn’t imagine a mother abandoning her child.
“Do you know why?”
He rolled his eyes. “College fling. I wasn’t planned. They weren’t married. She hid the pregnancy from her family, so when she had me, my dad’s parents took me in.”
I said nothing. What could I say?
“My grandparents pretty much raised me, until my grandpa died. By the time I was ten, Bà nội—Dad’s mom—was frail and we had to move in with my father’s new family.”
“Is that when you moved to Galt?”
“Yeah.” He shifted around so his back rested against the headboard.
“What’s your dad’s new family like?”
He snorted. “I had to pretend I was my father’s brother. My brother and sister still call me Uncle Thuong.”
That was so entirely fucked up I had no words.
Family secrets, man.
Wherever you found addicts, you didn’t have to look too far for skeletons in a deep dark closet.
“You started hanging around the shop a couple years later, right?”
“After Bà nội died, I got super fucked up. Magic the Gathering gave me a whole new world to focus on.” He tucked his hand behind his head. “There was so much to learn. That took me out of my head for a few hours every day.”
“Comix and Games is still there.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna haul my junkie ass to your mother’s store. I don’t think so. Your parents wouldn’t recognize me anyway.”
I had. “Last I saw, you were graduating high school.”
“With honors.” He closed his eyes. “And you want to know how I got from there to here, right?”
“Guess curiosity is a thing with me,” I admitted. “Librarian, remember?”
“Why not?” He shrugged as if it was no big deal. “Summer after graduation I got caught with drugs, thrown out, made some bad decisions. Downhill is all about momentum, you know. The farther the faster.”
“I’m sorry.”
He turned away, blinking his shimmering dark eyes. “You really think I can beat this?”
“When it comes to addiction, you don’t beat it, you manage it,” I reminded him. “And the odds are about the same as other chronic illnesses—diabetes, asthma, or high blood pressure—all of which require people to follow a treatment plan that might include medication and lifestyle changes.”
“You just know this off the top of your head?”
“Echo made me learn the spiel.” I shrugged. “But I looked the statistics up while you were thrashing around last night.”
He seemed impressed with that. “What did you find out?”
“Forty to sixty percent of addicts relapse.”
He blew out a breath. “Not the worst odds.”
“Better than roulette.”
He laughed weakly. “Anything’s better than roulette.”
“You could beat the odds and stay clean for the rest of your life, but Tug, even if you didn’t, it’s not a failure. It means you need to revisit your treatment plan, figure out where things went wrong, and fix them.”
“Right.” He rested his arm over his eyes. “It’s that easy.”
I ached for him. He was exhausted. Half-starved. His skin had taken on a grayish pallor that reminded me of finding him on the bathroom floor in respiratory arrest.
“Echo’s the expert, not me.”
“I know.” Tears leaked into his hair. I reached out and brushed the trail of moisture away with my thumb. “I can’t seem to stop crying.”
“You’re being torn apart at the cellular level, so obviously you’re