Page 103 of Her Coach

I shrugged softly. “It’s not my diagnosis.”

“But it does affect your life, and you deserve to be able to talk about it.”

“It’s not my struggle.”

“Whole family thing, right?”

I sighed heavily. “Well, fuck.”

He chuckled before he kissed my forehead. “Do you want to know why I chose not to drink tonight?”

I winced at his question, but shook my head. “No. Why did you?”

“Because you’re right.”

I snapped my stare back up to his. “What?”

He smoothed his thumb along my lower lip, catching a tear I didn’t realize had dribbled down my face. “You were right. I do drink too much. I never drank like that before the scandal that broke. It started with the divorce, and coping with the empty house, and the empty bed, and the empty… everything.” He shrugged softly. “Then the news broke and I lost my job, and I figured… why not? People drink over less. It’ll be fine.”

I scooted a bit closer to him, pressing my leg in between his. “And now?”

He studied my face for a while before he spoke. “And now, there’s no reason for it. The drinking was supposed to help get me through the rough times, not become the foundation of the good times, too. But I let that happen. I let it spiral out of control.”

I blinked. “Do you think that’s what I’ve done? Let my relationship with Mom spiral out of control?”

He shook his head. “No. Do you want me to tell you what I think?”

“Please,” I said.

He scooted just a little closer, his arm slipping around my waist. He caged me against him, and I wondered if I was going to even like what he had to say.

I relished his warmth as his lips moved. “I think you’re allowing your mother to spiral out of control because you keep her surroundings so stable and so put together that she doesn’t realize how much this has eaten away at her.”

I searched his eyes. “You think I enable her.”

“I think you give her the prime environment for her to enable herself. Just like the media could dig into me at any moment and find me still drinking, still fucking, still on this trend, I guarantee you that if I dug into your mother’s life—your mother’s routine—I wouldn’t find much of a deviation.”

I snickered. “That’s because there’s… not…”

And then, his meaning finally slammed against me. It wasn’t that my help wasn’t hurting Mom, it was that my help was a Band-Aid over a gaping wound that needed stitches.

I swallowed hard as the realization blanketed me. “So, what now?”

He scooted so close that we were sharing a pillow. “What do you mean?”

I shrugged softly as I gazed deeply into his eyes. “Where do we go from here? What do we do? How… do we fix these things?”

He brought my hand to his lips to kiss, his eyes never wavering from mine. “My drinking stops. I’d love to have the occasional one over dinner with you whenever we go out, but I’m no longer bringing it into the house. If I drink, it’s out, so that people can see and it’s not this dirty secret that I keep close to my chest.”

“You’re going to do that?”

“I am. It’s what’s best. If I want to move forward with my life and carve out a path I can be proud of, I have to leave behind everything I’m not proud of. My drinking is one of them. The scandal is another.”

I felt panic fill my face. “What if the media finds out we’re together?”

“Is that why you made your comment? You’re worried they’ll start hounding us?”

“Isn’t that what the media does? Hounding people for news?”