Shelby woke up the next morning feeling like she hadn’t just fallen off the wagon, she’d jumped gleefully into the abyss and ended up splattered on the concrete below—and she wanted to do it again, because a drink sounded like exactly the right way to take the edge off.

She’d heard about how amputees occasionally felt ghost limbs. For her, it was ghost hangovers. So even though she hadn’t had a drink in six years, some days she woke up feeling as if she had and craving a little hair of the dog.

Lucky me.

Without getting out of bed, she took her six-year chip off the bedside table and flipped it over her fingers one at a time, going from pointer to pinkie and matching her inhales and exhales to the movement. In and out, slow and easy. The oxygen filled her lungs until her chest couldn’t expand any more and then let it back out until that jagged urge for just one drink eased.

Unable to ignore the sun or the honks from the cars rushing in slow motion to merge onto the Harbor City Bridge just outside her apartment building anymore, Shelby got out of bed. She padded down the barely-big-enough-to-call-it-a-hallway to the galley kitchen, where an automatically brewed cup of heaven called coffee awaited her.

Her cell was in the charger next to the roll of paper towels and her apartment-size fridge covered in Ice Knights magnets. Needing to touch base with the most important man in her life before hitting the road, she pressed one of the four numbers in her phone contacts and poured her coffee while it rang.

“If it isn’t my favorite Mustang,” Roger said, his smile evident in his voice.

If there was one thing Roger Jones had always loved even more than Jim Beam, it was cars. However, he’d learned the hard way that the two didn’t mix. One stint behind bars a few decades ago for his fifth DUI and his third trip to rehab finally changed that. He gave up the bourbon and kept the hot rods. When she’d told him her name was Shelby, yes like the classic muscle car, Roger had grinned up at her from his wheelchair and said they were a sponsor/sponsoree match made in automobile heaven.

“How’s the V-8 running lately?” he asked.

“A little clunky.”

“Meeting?”

There was no reason to specify what kind; she’d been going to AA meetings regularly since rehab. “Yeah, I’m going this morning at the church down the street before I have to pack and go on a road trip.”

“Wait, aren’t you on a trip now? Cabin? Middle of nowhere? Peace and quiet?”

More like anticipation and orgasms, frustration and satisfaction, annoyance and oh-my-God-fuck-yes. “That didn’t work out quite like I’d expected.”