Creep - Jennifer Hillier [12]
It didn’t occur to Sheila then that she had a problem. Sure, she met a lot of guys. Sure, she ended up in bed with most of them (or in the backseats of their cars, or in the bathrooms of the bars, or in the bushes behind the nightclubs). So the hell what? How was it any different from the women on Sex and the City, who drank Cosmopolitans every night and screwed every cute guy they saw? She was a liberated woman, completely in charge of her sexuality. Wasn’t she?
Wasn’t she?
Never mind that she sometimes mixed Ecstasy with her wine and that sometimes it led to blackouts. Never mind that sometimes she’d wake up in a strange room, unable to remember where she was or why she was there.
She couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t seem to stop it. She couldn’t temper her need for the warmth of another man’s body on top of her, beside her, inside her. The excitement of meeting someone new, the rush she felt when she saw the desire in his eyes, the adrenaline pumping through her veins as they had sex—it all seemed to be a perfectly satisfactory replacement for love. Even if he didn’t remember her name.
Even if it didn’t last.
She finally hit rock bottom when she woke up in her car early one Sunday morning, scared and alone, wearing nothing but her skirt, shoes, and someone else’s leather jacket. Her forehead was cut and she ached all over. She reeked of sweat and men’s cologne and was so bruised she could barely drive herself home.
It was one hell of a wake-up call.
That night, after a hot bath and a long sleep, Sheila went online and found a Sex Addicts Anonymous group in Renton, a city south of Seattle where she hoped she wouldn’t run into anyone from the university. Luckily, she never did. She started meeting with an old colleague, Marianne Chang, for therapy shortly after. Though she didn’t join AA, Sheila gave up drinking along with sex.
A year later she was twelve months sober, nobody the wiser, and thriving. And that’s when she met a tall, strapping investment banker named Morris Gardener.
They’d ordered the same drink at Starbucks, Grande caramel lattes. Though he’d paid for his first, he let her take his coffee, and a witty banter ensued. He gave her his card. She discussed phoning him with Marianne, and the therapist gave her approval. Dating was fine, so long as they built a solid foundation of friendship first. And definitely no sex, not until the relationship was serious.
It wasn’t long before she recognized that he was an alcoholic, but it didn’t turn her off. If anything, she made it her mission to help him get clean. She got him into AA, helped him through the same twelve steps she’d been through in SAA, and was there for him the many times he was tempted to slip. It was rewarding to be part of the reason he pulled his life back together, and they became genuinely good friends. Close to a year after they met, they started dating.
The early days of their courtship were a fairy tale. Morris was kind, sweet, generous, funny. Sheila’s life was finally on an upswing, and it stayed that way for the better part of a year.
Until she found out her father was dying of cancer.
The news was devastating. Though they hadn’t talked in years, Sheila had gone to her father’s bedside, only to have her heart broken when he demanded she leave.
When he died, Ethan Wolfe provided the perfect distraction. One indiscretion with him led to another, then another. It was almost chilling how quickly she fell back into her old ways. But this time there was guilt, lots and lots of guilt, because Morris was a good man who deserved better.
That Ethan had pursued Sheila relentlessly for months didn’t matter—she’d known it was wrong from the beginning. But the problem with addicts is not that they don’t know the difference between right and wrong. The problem with addicts is that they do it anyway.
A familiar voice interrupted her reverie and she looked up into the handsome face of the man she was going to