Wild Addiction (Wild #2)(55)
Author: Emma Hart

Our love is leading us blindly into an ending that might not be all that happy.

My heart twists with that thought. And the doubt—always the doubt. Nudging at the corners of my mind despite fighting it away. I know it’s irrational and it’s wrong, but I can’t hold it at bay.

Now, the doubts are infinitely more. Just…more. More painful. More intense. More potentially devastating. Because I have two hearts to consider.

Two hearts beat inside me. Two hearts love inside me.

Two hearts that can be easily broken.

“Liv? Are you really okay?”

“I’m tired,” I reply softly. “I want to go back to the hotel.”

Tyler steps to the side and settles his arm around my shoulder, steering me back up the beach. He pauses for a moment to grab our shoes before reaching for me again.

I lean into his embrace, and instantly, I know my lie has driven a wedge between us. A part of me wants to take it back, to be honest with him, but I know it’s not that simple.

My addiction is my issue, just like his is his. I won’t try to fix him, but I know he’ll try to fix me.

As each day goes by and I fall further and further into him, my doubt over being able to be fixed grows.

As I fall further and further into Tyler Stone, I am more certain than ever that I will have to say goodbye.

I wish, more than anything, that I were back in Seattle. I wish I were alone in my apartment with Angus. I wish I could drink coffee and eat pizza and hide the 30 Day Shred DVD behind the sofa.

I wish I could have time to lay out all the thoughts in my mind into something that even remotely makes sense. Right now my brain is a hive of sensations, and none of them are good.

They are fears and doubts and hesitation and anxiety. They are the things I’ve avoided successfully for so long. They are weakness.

And I’m beginning to feel it. That weakness. Like a bad drug, it’s clamping down and taking hold of me, winding its way through my body. It’s pulsating through my veins and itching across my skin.

It’s in every beat of my heart, in every shuddered breath I take as I fight the panic back down.

It’s on the tip of my tongue.

I am weak.

The love I have for Tyler has coupled with my addiction and intertwined with it in the most intricate way just like I feared, and the strings that bind me to my feelings are too strong. They hold me captive within my emotions and my addictions. They expose me to my fears.

I’m looking for things that aren’t there. I’m listening for things that haven’t happened. I’m thinking of things that aren’t in my control.

If you look enough, listen enough, think enough, you’ll create your own world. You’ll create a warped kind of universe where nothing is right. It’s a universe borne entirely of insecurity and anxiety.

Insecurity and anxiety make you weak.

I am weakness.

For the first time, I’m in too deep. This isn’t like before with Warren. This isn’t a teenage dream. This is a real love, the kind you feel deep in your bones. It’s the kind you feel so acutely that it could transcend time and space.

I love Tyler wholly, with every part of me. I love him with who I was and who I will be one day. I love him with who I am right in this second.

Except the person I am right now isn’t much of anything.

She is scared. Unsettled. Broken.

She’s addicted in the worst kind of way.

The thought of not being with him every day makes my lungs burn with the force of my breath. The thought of not being able to touch his face, kiss his lips, or hold his body physically hurts. It rips through me unrelentingly.

But being with him hurts, too. There isn’t a middle ground or a happy medium. It’s one extreme or the other. It hurts either way because both ends of my addiction, of my love, are devastating.

Without him, I could be nothing but an empty shell, living desperately for the one thing I’d have left of him.

With him, I’m bursting with life, but it comes with every insecurity a woman has to face.

Addiction hurts.

Nothing can feel good for so long without inevitably crashing and burning.

I scrub my skin with the puff until it’s raw. I scrub every part of pain away from my skin before I step out of the shower. If only it were easy to scrub it from beneath my skin.

If I could take every bit of pain out of my body, I would.

I would rather not love him than hurt us.

Because that’s all I’m doing. I’m hurting us both. Sure, he’ll hold me and wipe my tears, but I see the pain in his eyes.

Last night, I crawled into bed and sobbed into my pillow.

He didn’t know why. He didn’t ask again.

He just lay there, holding me against him, stroking my hair until I fell asleep.

Even this morning, he kissed my forehead before leaving the hotel for his shoot.

With Carmen Dallas. Model extraordinaire.

And I’m just Liv. The model who never was.

I stop in front of the ceiling-high mirror and drop my towel. I look down at my body—my slightly swollen breasts, my tender, enlarged nipples, and my barely bloated stomach.

I turn to the side and look in the mirror. My chest heaves as I brush my fingertips over my lower stomach. I know it’s bloat. I’m not seeing things that aren’t there, but my stomach isn’t flat.

Gas, water, whatever.

I curve my hand below it, holding it, and rest my other just over my belly button.

Beneath it all is a baby.

In this second, I’m not Liv, the model who never was.

I’m Liv, the mom who will be. And that’s more important.

I don’t care if this baby defines me. I don’t care if he or she becomes the reason I am who I am. I just care that they matter to me.

And they matter enough to know that the way I feel isn’t healthy. To know that the way I feel will eventually destroy them, too.

With one more look in the mirror, I turn to my suitcase and get dressed. I tie my wet hair on top of my head and take the elevator downstairs.

Tyler is shooting at the beach directly across from us, and when I look out of the lobby, I can see the people everywhere. They’re never quiet, the shoots. They’re always busy and bustling with life.

I don’t know why I’m coming down here. Perhaps it’s because the torture of watching him watch another woman will be less than the torture of imagining him watching another woman.

I cross the street and turn onto the beach path. The sand slips between my toes, spilling over my flip-flops, and I look around for Tyler.

My eyes find his dark head leaning next to an even darker one. My gaze drops—her hand on his bicep, his hand on her back…