We built a little fire and roasted some hot dogs and it was about this time I started getting the shakes. My body was demanding to be fed, but I’d given my word, so I rode out the pain. Unfortunately Sabrina had a different kind of pain up her sleeve.

“Can we talk?”

I felt my heart sink as sweat gathered at my brow. “About what?”

“About us.”

De-tox and a relationship chat. If there were a cliff around, I would have run and jumped off it.

“Can I have a drink?”

“We didn’t bring any.”

“Anything to smoke?”

She shook her head.

“How about a pill?”

Sabrina looked me hard in the eyes. “No.”

I wiped the beads of sweat from my face and looked at the fire. “You know, I hear there are some plants in the woods with hallucinogenic properties. We could go on a nature walk.”

She looked at me, at the sweat on my face and my shaking hands. “Is it that bad?”

“It’s been four hours. That’s the longest I’ve ever gone without something since I was sixteen.”

She shook her head.

“Don’t shake your head at me,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“Then can we talk?”

I sighed. “Sure.”

Sabrina leaned close to me and took my hand. I tried to smile, but I felt my stomach balling up tight.

“There’s no simple way to say this,” she said. “Cal . . . Honey, you’re a mess.”

I went from sick to mad in half a second. “What’re you talking about?”

“We’ve been seeing each other for almost six months and I don’t think you’ve been sober once the whole time.”

“Define sober.”

“Nothing in your system.”

She squeezed my hand. “I never said anything before because I didn’t think we had anything, but now, I think we do.”

“Yeah?” I smiled.

“Yeah,” she returned. “But I don’t know if I can be with someone who’s so self-destructive.”

I rolled my tongue inside my cheek. “In case you haven’t noticed, more than just my habits are trying to kill me. I have a lot of enemies and they’ll be your enemies too if you keep hanging around me.”

I got up and walked away. I didn’t want to hear another word of her bullshit. I got all of five feet away before I walked out of the firelight’s range and smacked into a tree. She didn’t laugh, but I could tell she wanted to. That made me really mad. I swung around.

“Look, you knew what I was when you met me!” I said. “Now you decide you like this and don’t like that?”

She was shocked and just stared at me like a wounded puppy.

I wasn’t done.