I wanted a drink.

I wanted a big, strong, bottomless drink.

It was the middle of the night and this was Vegas. So getting my hands on that bottomless drink would not be a problem.

I should’ve called Rudy.

Instead, I headed downstairs.

My AA sponsor and friend, Rudy Baker, was a blues musician, a fucking genius musician who’d just about drank his whole life away before he got sober about twenty years ago. He’d been my sponsor ever since we’d connected after my first stint in rehab. He’d been there for me through everything, knew all my dirty shit—or most of it—and was still there for me.

He even knew about Maggie. Knew I was in love with her, but even Rudy didn’t know I’d married her in Vegas.

Couldn’t quite get myself to confess that one to him.

Rudy lived in L.A., and while it was late, I could’ve called him anytime of the night.

I didn’t.

I didn’t even see him while we were in L.A. this time.

I made it as far as the hotel lobby before I stopped myself and sat the fuck down. Right where I was, on a stair. I could see the lights of The Strip beyond, hear the noise… and I just knew if I walked out there, I wasn’t coming back.

Fucking terrifying feeling.

I waved Shady away when he got close. “Just give me a minute. Please.”

“Sure, brother.”

He faded away, and I sat, looking out across the massive lobby, watching people heading out on the town. I hadn’t even thought to throw on a hat or anything. I just sat, unmoving, hoping no one would look my way and try to come talk to me.

There was a loud group of girls in sparkly dresses, obviously half-cut, laughing and arguing over which bar to go to. I could’ve walked right over to them and joined their little party.

Me plus chicks plus booze…

Instant party.

I remembered how easy that used to be, walking over to a group like that. Wild horses couldn’t have kept me away. Wherever I was headed, whatever other shit I was supposed to be doing… a group of chicks like that would’ve derailed me.

But I also remembered the kind of shit that happened the morning after I’d gone off those rails.

Like waking up to one of my best friends tearing me a new one because I’d ended up in bed with a girl he loved.

Like waking up in the hospital with a broken collarbone and a concussion and stitches in my head because I’d fallen off a fucking balcony.

Like waking up in a jail cell because I’d wrapped my rental car around a pole and by some miracle hadn’t killed anyone, including the girl who’d been in the passenger seat, whose name I didn’t remember. Was she blonde? Brunette? Tall? Short? I didn’t even fucking know.

That kind of shit.

The kind of shit that had finally scared me enough to realize I had a serious problem, and get my ass into rehab.

The kind of shit I never wanted to pull again.

Someone came down the stairs next to me and stopped. I didn’t look up, but I saw his snakeskin boots.

Seth.

He sat down next me and looked at me for a long-ass minute. “You hanging in?”

“Nope.”

“You gonna drink?”

“Don’t know.”

The words just fell out, and it was a fucking relief.

It was the first time anyone had outright asked me, in a long fucking time, if I was gonna drink.

It was also the first time in a long time I’d actually admitted aloud to another human being, besides Rudy or a roomful of random alcoholic strangers at an AA meeting, that I had the urge to drink and I didn’t even know if I’d be able to overcome it.

I’d had this urge, many, many times over the past seven years. The entire time I’d been sober.

But not many people really knew that.

Not many people in my life really understood. Most everyone around me thought I was “cured” or something. I was a rehabilitated alcoholic, a nondrinker.

My friends who drank socially, who enjoyed the pleasure of drinking without having it rule and ruin their lives, just assumed I was done with it. That I could sit in a bar full of people drinking around me, or in the middle of some party backstage, or alone in a hotel room, and I didn’t need it. I didn’t crave it. Because I was over it, it was out of my system, I was strong.

Or some such shit.

But those people were wrong.

The only reason I was able to resist picking up a bottle at all was because I’d gone through the torture of detox, of physically getting the alcohol out of my body—so I could think straight enough to stop myself from taking the next sip, by whatever means necessary. So that I was no longer driven and controlled by the physical need.

I’d been physically off of alcohol for years now. But the whole mental, emotional part was the part that still needed work.

Obviously.

Seth said nothing. He got to his feet, and I didn’t blame him. He probably didn’t want to watch me destroy myself any more than I wanted him to. He definitely didn’t want me dragging him down with me.

“I come back in five minutes,” he said slowly, “and you’re still here and still dry, we’re going for a drive.” Then he headed back up the stairs.

* * *

Seth was back in five minutes, maybe faster. I was still here, I was still dry, and he had the key for Jude’s rental car.

I told Shady to stay behind. He didn’t like it, because Jude wouldn’t like it, but he stayed.

I got in without asking Seth where we were going, and he didn’t tell me. He just drove.

He drove until the lights of Las Vegas were behind us, until every sign of civilization other than the road was behind us… way out into the desert. Until I zoned out to the song that was playing on the radio and completely lost track of where we were.

It was Paul McCartney & Wings, “Maybe I’m Amazed,” the live recording from Wings over America, 1976. And Jesus Christ, this song…

This was one of those songs that, when I first heard it as a kid—this exact version of this song in particular—playing on some radio station, just like this, I’d been bitten by this sense of hope. A kind of faith that there was something out there so much bigger than myself to believe in, something that could save me if I could just tap into it.

Was this what some people felt when they discovered God?

For me, the only god I’d ever known was music.

I got so lost in the song, I had no idea which direction Seth was driving.

He pulled off the narrow, winding road into an empty stretch of desert and drove some more. Then he parked, turned off the car and got out without a word.

I followed.

Seth walked about a dozen paces into the desert and stopped.

“Where the fuck are we?” I patted my vest, looking for my lighter.

“Wherever,” he said.

And that’s when it hit me. That Seth had just brought me out into the middle of no-fucking-where—and I didn’t have anything on me. I didn’t have any weed.

Seth turned slowly, looking around, but there wasn’t much to see. Just flat and dark and empty desert in every direction. I searched every pocket in my vest, twice, and fucking sighed.

Fuck me.

“What are we doing here? Peyote?”

He threw me a glance. “No, Morrison. We’re here to do whatever the fuck you need to do without getting drunk to do it. Sit. Walk. Sing and dance. Fucking commune with the aliens. Whatever.”

“It’s fucking cold.”

“So jog. Jump up-and-down.”

He sat down on the cold, hard Earth and stretched out on his back, like it was the fucking beach and he was gonna grab some rays. He was wearing one of those trucker hats he sometimes wore when he didn’t want to be recognized. The one that said Big J’s Drinkin’ Hole. He tugged it down over his eyes, and fucker pretty much looked like he was going to sleep.

He wasn’t even wearing a jacket. Just a zip-up sweater thing.

I was already starting to shiver in my vest and thin shirt. Long sleeves or not, it was January. “How are you not cold?”

“Mind over matter,” he said.

“The fuck does that mean? Your body temperature is gonna drop. You gonna imagine that away?”

“Eventually, I’ll get too cold and I’ll have to get up, get back in the car. But for now, you need to be here, I need to be here for you, so I can put off feeling cold.”

“Yeah? You gonna mind-over-matter the scorpions away, too?”

“Yup.”

I shook my head. This dude and all his Zen shit. Ever since he came back to us clean and sober, he’d been spouting this shit.

“That how you got off heroin, too? Fucking mind over matter?”

“Pretty much.”

“Fuck off.” I was starting to pace a bit, agitated and cold. “That’s a bunch of bullshit. You needed methadone and detox and a medical team, and don’t tell me you imagined all that shit in your head.”

“Clinic got me off the junk,” he said evenly, “but they definitely didn’t keep me from using again. That was all me.”

“Yeah? That sounds pretty fucking arrogant. What about all that ‘higher power’ stuff they preach in AA?”

“I never went to AA. NA meetings have worked for me, but I don’t really believe in a higher power. At least not one that’s gonna take all my fucked-up shit away. I just needed to get my head right. For me, that’s what it took.”

“That’s all, huh?”

“Yup. And that’s all it takes, every second of every day, over and over and over again. Definitely not as easy as it sounds.”

“Doesn’t sound easy at all.”

“Never would’ve worked if I didn’t stop mindfucking myself.”

Yeah. That I could relate to.

I’d been mindfucking myself all my life. At this point, I was a master of the self-inflicted mindfuck.

I’d mindfucked myself for years over my parents dying when I was so young I couldn’t even remember them.

Mindfucked myself before I went onstage, pretty much every time I went onstage.

Definitely mindfucked myself to hell and back over Maggie.

But unlike fucking Buddha here, mind over matter wasn’t gonna cut it for me.

I did believe in a higher power: the music we made together as a band.

I believed in the structure of the Big Book, too, the guidance of working through the Twelve Steps, even when I didn’t fully buy into them. Even when there were times I totally fucking resented needing them.

I needed AA. Most of all, I needed the meetings. They’d always worked for me, too. When I went to them.

Since this tour had started, I hadn’t dragged my ass to one.

“And just to be clear,” Seth said, “I’m not preaching anything. Everyone’s got their own path to sobriety. You got a road to walk that’s yours alone. For a lot of alcoholics, AA works. Belief in a higher power works. I’m not offering solutions and I’m not telling you what to do. I’m telling you what works for me, because you asked. I’m your friend, and I’m a friend who’s walking a similar road. So I’m here to listen, to talk, to share, to support, or whatever it is you want me to do short of lying to you, supporting your addiction and getting you booze. And I’m not gonna blow sunshine up your ass, placate you or sugarcoat this shit, either. I brought you to an alcohol-free environment so you could get your shit straight with a clear head, if that’s what you want to do.”

“What, right now?”

“You got a better time in mind? A better place?”

I looked around at the desert like we were on the surface of the fucking moon. “It’s not like I can do this shit in one night.”

“It doesn’t happen in one night. It happens in one moment.”

I looked at Seth, but it was too dark to see his eyes under the brim of his hat or the expression on his face.

“And in every single moment there is, it happens over and over again,” he said. “All you really need is one moment.”

I ran my hand through my hair. Christ, but I wanted a toke.

Did I really have to listen to this shit?

“Just one, huh?”

“What else have you got? The past is done. The future is uncertain. All you’ve got is this one moment, right now. You’re alive and sober, right now. What are you gonna do with this moment?”

He went silent for a long moment, and I was silent as that sank in. I really didn’t have an answer for that question. Which was maybe my problem.

“You gonna have a drink?” he pressed. “Because you take one sip of booze and your life is fucked, I guarantee you that. And by the way, case you haven’t figured it out yet, you think your life isn’t out of control because you smoke pot daily to mellow out and you’re itching for it right now and you’re in love with Maggie but you keep fucking it up, you are straight-up deluding yourself.”

I stared at him.

I walked over to where he lay and stood over him, staring down, but he didn’t move.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know you’re in love with Maggie, and I know you’re probably wondering where the fuck I stashed the car key right now, ’cause you want to get right back in that car and leave me in the dust so you can go get stoned. So. What’re you gonna do?”

Fuck.

I rubbed my hands over my face and sighed.

Nothing. I wasn’t gonna do anything.

I wasn’t even mad at Seth, really. Except that I kinda was. I was itching with the need to smoke up, and I hated myself for it.

I hated people calling me on it. Pointing out my weaknesses to me.

I wasn’t fucking stupid. I knew I shouldn’t be smoking weed. I knew it was a fucked-up replacement for liquor, in a way. Way less volatile in my life, but no less addictive. No less dangerous to an addict like me.

Fucking insidious shit; it was gonna do me in one way or another.

I’d never wanted to admit that to myself, but I fucking knew.

I knew I was a cranky bastard when I didn’t smoke up, when I was craving it, whenever withdrawal started to hit. That I was moody and uneven depending on how much I did or didn’t smoke.

It was fucking bullshit, and like the addict I was, I just kept telling myself the solution was more weed.

More weed, and I’d feel better.

Fucking pathetic.

I never wanted to end up as fucking pathetic as I’d been at the height of my drinking; when I’d looked back with sober eyes and really seen the shit I’d done.

Or at least, the shit I could remember doing.

But here I was. Heading right down that same hole.

Same fucking shit, different pile.

“So this is the part where I go hit the nearest meeting and start working the Twelve fucking Steps all over again?”

“Told you. I’m not here to tell you what to do. But you want steps? Step one, flush your weed down the nearest toilet, all of it, and stop that shit. And once you stop jonesing and twitching for it and actually have a clear head for once, take a look at Maggie and see what you see. If what you see is the woman you want by your side for the rest of your life, then you find a way to make that shit happen.”

Yeah. Fucking brilliant advice.

If only I knew how.

“And here’s another guarantee I can give you, brother,” he added. “You’re never gonna make that happen while you’re smoking up and fucking other women.”

I turned away and looked out at the fucking desert, like it had any answers.

Empty.

The sky was pretty fucking empty, too. Just a big void of silence, echoing back the truth of Seth’s words.

“Maybe if I had her,” I said, “I wouldn’t be smoking up and fucking other women.”

“Uh-huh. Because it’s her fault, right?”

I looked at Seth, lying there with his hands folded over his ribs.

Jesus Christ, whose side was this fucker on?

“It’s her fault if you fuck other women now,” he said, sounding bored, “and she’s smart enough to know that down the road, if you’re with her and something goes sideways and you end up fucking other women again, you’ll make that out to be her fault, too. Just like it’s her fault she hasn’t thrown caution to the wind to take up with an addict. I haven’t known Maggie all that long, and I don’t know her all that well, but even I can see she’s not the kind of woman who’s gonna do that. And if she was, brother, you wouldn’t want her anyway.”

I’d started pacing again while he spoke, and I paced right back over to him. “So that’s it? Everyone else in this band gets the woman of their fucking dreams, huh? Everyone else gets to smoke up, but I can’t, right?”

“Yeah, and this is the part where you feel sorry for yourself.”

Seth sat up, spinning his hat around backwards so I could see his face. He threw his arms on his knees and looked up at me, meeting my eyes.

“Throw yourself your fucking pity party, Zane, pile on the excuses to go have a drink. But nothing’s gonna change the fact that yeah, most of your friends probably can smoke up, and no, you can’t. You see me smoking up? It’s different for us, and you know this. Other people can have a beer, smoke a joint and have a good time, get up and go on with their lives intact the next day. It’s not like that for you and me, and it never was. That shit is poison for us. How many times can you smoke weed before you slip and decide a beer is okay? Once? A thousand times? I don’t know the answer to that, and neither do you. But you and I both know, you will slip. And once you take that first sip, you’ve fucked away your choice about it. That shit gets in your body, and you don’t get to choose anymore if you take the next sip or the next. It’s over. You want to flush your life down the toilet like that? You want to die?”

“No. Obviously I don’t want to fucking die.”

“Good to know. You gonna drink?”

I knew what he was doing.

I’d been through this same conversation, more or less, with Rudy, about a thousand times.

“Don’t be an asshole. Do you see a fucking roadhouse out here?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m an asshole. Everyone is an asshole, and you’re the king of the assholes, right? You got it all figured out and then some. That’s why you’re standing in the middle of some desert right now, fucking lost, with no idea what you’re gonna do with your next breath.”

“Got some idea,” I muttered. “Kicking the shit out of you right now sounds like a good one.”

“Go ahead, you think it’ll make you feel any better,” he said, calm as shit. “But it’s not gonna change the fact that you’re a superstar and you’re actually standing here considering shitting your life away. You have everything, and you’re just gonna flush it away. Sounds pretty fucking pathetic to me.”

“I don’t have everything!” I leaned over him and shouted it in his face. Where the fuck did he get off calling me pathetic? Maybe I was, but shit. “I don’t have shit,” I growled, “because I don’t have the one thing I fucking need.”

“Yeah?” he said, still calm. “Tell me, Zane Traynor. You’ve got mad talent, fame, friends, pretty much any fucking thing money can buy. What else could you possibly need?”

“Maggie. I need fucking Maggie.”

“Ah, bullshit.”

“What?” I pulled back like he’d bitch-slapped me. “The fuck do you mean bullshit?”

“I mean bullshit. That. Is. Fucking. Bullshit. It’s not Maggie you need so fucking bad that you just keep sabotaging it so you can never have her. It’s all that stuff she’s got that you want. All that good shit in her that you feel when you’re with her. All that stuff you wish you could have. That fucking hole she fills in you with all her beautiful.”

I was pacing again, listening to him, wanting him to keep talking because everything he was saying was making some kind of sense—and wanting him to shut the fuck up.

“It’s all that shit you probably think you don’t have in you and don’t deserve,” he went on, “which is why you can’t get your shit together. But I’m telling you, man, you deal with your shit, you get yourself straight, fill those holes with whatever the fuck you’ve gotta fill them with… if it’s AA or it’s music or it’s God or it’s whatever-the-fuck, as long as it’s not booze or drugs or other women, or some other new addiction… if Maggie’s really the woman for you, she’s gonna come for you like a lightning strike. She won’t be able to stay away.”

“Yeah?” I pushed back. “That how it was for you and Elle?”

“Yeah. That’s how it was for me and Elle. That’s how it is for me and Elle, every moment of every day.”

Well, fuck.

He was serious about that.

I stared at him for a minute and he stared right back.

Then I turned away. My eyes were starting to burn, because listening to him talk that way about his relationship with Elle… it did something to me. Grabbed my heart in a steel fist and fucking twisted.

I was jealous of that shit. Fuck, was I jealous.

And he was right. I didn’t think I really deserved any of that beautiful shit with Maggie.

I never did.

Maybe partly because she’d been pushing me away since the day we met…

But what the fuck was I doing with the weed and the other women? I’d been pushing her away, too.

She wasn’t the only one who was hiding from our shit instead of dealing with it head-on.

“It’s a choice, brother,” Seth said, his tone softening. “Elle and I, we’ve got some magic shit between us. Can’t keep off of her, can’t keep her off of me. But it’s not an addiction. It’s not some unhealthy, fucked-up obsession that we have zero power over, that’ll drive us both into an early grave. It’s something we’re both strong enough to know we could walk away from and we’d both survive on our own, but we don’t. We don’t, because our lives are better when we’re together. It’s a choice, every moment, to be together.” He blew out a breath. “When you’re in a relationship, love isn’t a noun, man. It’s a fucking verb. Maybe you can’t always choose who you fall in love with, but it’s a choice to wake up every morning and love the one you’re with, to be there for them and do whatever it takes to put their needs right up there front and center with your own.”

He went silent, and I really didn’t know what to say anymore.

“For addicts like us,” he said after a moment, “it’s hard. We’re selfish fucks. Plus, we’re weak.”

I glanced at him. He spun his hat back around, tugging it down over his eyes, and lay back down.

“I’m telling you, brother, if Elle left me tomorrow, I’d still love her, but killing myself over it, that would be a choice. Every moment of every day, I choose to live. I choose to stay clean. I choose my relationship. And I choose to love Elle enough to put her ahead of my addiction. If it came down to it, I’d leave her if I had to.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’m fucking serious. You think I’d let some sketched-out addict around that beautiful woman, and that beautiful kid she’s gonna have? I’d leave her before I’d let her live with a junkie, and she knows it. And I don’t want to leave her. She doesn’t want me to leave. She accepts me for the imperfect person that I am. We’ve sat up talking until dawn on many, many nights about all the fucked-up shit I’ve done, and it doesn’t scare her away or turn her off. It just makes us closer. That’s love.”

I stared at him, but that was it. Seth was done. He just lay there in the dark.

I turned and started walking.

“Where you going?” he called after me.

“For a walk.”

“You gonna drink?”

“Fuck you.”