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  Addicted

  Amelia Betts

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  To all those who have ever obsessed to the point of ridiculousness.

  Loneliness—real “drag your soul through the mud, with your heart trailing behind like a tin can tied to a pickup truck, capital L” loneliness—is waking up the morning after the best sex of your life and realizing that the man responsible for that incredible, mind-blowing sex is no longer in your line of sight. Or anywhere in the near vicinity, for that matter.

  And you suddenly remember why you’ve avoided any kind of relationship for the past three years—because of the hurt, the physical pain that comes from the void left behind when the guy leaves. You remember why you would have been better off with plan A, which was to stay far, far away from the male species for the rest of eternity; to keep your distance and enjoy the thrill of the secret crush; to stock your fridge with all your favorite foods and find creative ways of devouring them, one by one, until it’s time to restock again.

  But the sad fact of it is, you went with plan B. And now your heart is the tin can on the back of the truck, and that truck is speeding along a desolate dirt road with mile markers bearing snarky reminders of all the wrong turns you’ve made.

  Mile One: Aah, one-night stands. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em, eh?

  Mile Two: Well, I guess you did live without them until now…

  Mile Three: I mean, did you really think a guy who looked like him was coming back for seconds?

  Mile Four: But then again, you’ve never had much willpower, have you, Mischa?

  Mile Five: I guess when someone is so far out of your league, it’s in your best interest to jump on it…

  Mile Six: On the other hand, rejection is a bitch.

  And so on and so forth. For miles and miles.

  And still somehow you’re expected to get out of bed and move on with your day, even though your soul and your heart are being dragged, at breakneck speed, by this unstoppable force that feels like it will go on forever.

  Some of us just weren’t cut out for random flings. In fact, I knew by now that I wasn’t cut out for any of it. I was fragile, like a baby who hasn’t stayed long enough in the womb. My heart was prone to breaking at the drop of a hat, and I’d already learned about the crushing regret that came along with putting myself out there, the advanced level mess-with-the-bull-and-you-get-the-horns kind of loneliness that spoiled my days for an entire year after my freshman-year boyfriend dumped me and never looked back.

  But it was that exact feeling, the loneliness with a capital L, that I invited in, practically begging for it to walk through my door, the moment I met him.

  Chapter One

  Last Tuesday in May: Oceanside Rec Center Meeting

  Topic of discussion: “Living in the Past”

  Calories imbibed: 2,500 (ish)

  “Hi, my name is Jennifer.”

  “Hi, Jennifer,” a chorus of grave-sounding voices, including mine, responded.

  “Today’s topic feels pretty relevant to me. I’ve been thinking about the past quite a bit lately. Specifically, I’ve been going over and over in my head all the things my mom and I went through when my dad moved out of our house. I was in kindergarten…” Jennifer’s swampy, Gulf Coast accent helped give her story a little Southern flair, but beyond that, it was just like mine, and the girl’s next to me, and roughly 90 percent of the women I had ever heard speak in these meetings. We all had absentee father syndrome, it seemed, or absentee mother, in the rarer cases. And most of us had the overcompensating single parent who showed their love by stuffing us full of junk. We were the Overeaters of the world—ours the personal tragedies spelled with a little t, not a big one. We weren’t the twelve-steppers who had ruined other people’s lives, or stolen money from family members, or driven expensive cars off of docks. We were the silent, sweet sufferers with well-meaning dimples in our chubby cheeks, allowing each other little glimpses into our otherwise clandestine, often nocturnal, habits of food stuffing, stashing, and hoarding. Except I had never even allowed anyone else that glimpse.

  Despite coming to Overeaters Anonymous religiously since I was fifteen, I had never once raised my hand to share. Mostly it was shyness that held me back. I had always been a wallflower at heart, and even in this most comfortable of environments, I was only interested in hearing other people’s tales of woe, not exposing my own, which centered around a diplomat father whose job had taken me and my mother to various exotic locales like Belgium and Kenya and Singapore before he had dropped us like a bad habit, jetting off to the Philippines to start a new family while she and I had retreated to her hometown of Eagle Grove, Iowa, when I was only eight years old. But today felt different. I was about to graduate from college and I had no place to live, no job prospects, and no safety net. I had eaten two trays of frozen mac and cheese and a bag of barbecue-flavored Lay’s (in addition to an unknown quantity of cheese puffs) and was in dire need of intervention. But what would I say? My housing and employment problems didn’t seem like the most relevant subject matter here, and if I was going to talk aloud about my food addiction for the first time in my life, wouldn’t I need to go back to the absolute beginning? Start with the very first binge? Or the time I got caught shoplifting Doritos because I’d run out of allowance money and eaten everything in the house? Should I describe my one very unsuccessful (read: traumatizing) attempt at purging? Or maybe just the bizarre fact that this was my first share in spite of coming to these things for seven years?

  “Okay, who else?” I heard Sherrill the moderator’s singsong cadence interrupt a brief silence and froze in my seat.

  “Hi, my name is Lynette,” a voice that was not mine said, after a hand that was not mine was picked.

  “Hi, Lynette,” I managed to say along with everyone else, kicking myself for wimping out.

  To her credit, Lynette had a lot to get off her chest that night. As did six other women who readily raised their hands after she had had her turn. To no one’s surprise—not the least my own—I never ended up sharing. But the thought stayed with me and nagged at me for the next few days as I packed up my apartment and ate the entire contents of my fridge and pantry in an attempt to forget about my impending homelessness. Somewhere between the binging, scouring the classified ads for minimum-wage jobs, and creating a resume that somehow screamed both under- and overqualified at the same time, I got the idea to seek out a new meeting, one that would be filled with unfamiliar faces, and try again. On the OA website, I found a listing for a Friday night group at a massive Baptist church fifteen minutes from campus and decided to force myself to go.

  Unfortunately, there were several fast-food options along the way and I was moved to stop at two of them—Burger King for dinner, Wendy’s for dessert. Eating junk on the way to OA was the height of blasphemy, but I figured it was all in the name of getting me there. Hot Friday night plans, indeed.

  By the time I drove into the church parking lot, I was ten minutes late and definitely stressed out. A thin layer of sweat had broken out underneath my white V-neck T-shirt, threatening to push my casual look into not-so-appropriate territory. I power walked to the church in search of the meeting spot, locate
d in one of its smaller chapels. Most of the time, I preferred to be late, since meetings usually began with boring administrative announcements that I tuned out anyway, but I didn’t want to draw attention to myself with a brand-new group. Luckily, this one seemed to be just getting started as I rolled in and settled into an empty pew in the back, trying not to double take as an incredibly attractive, out-of-place-as-all-hell, twentysomething man in tight black jeans and a light-blue denim button-down took the stage. I had never seen such a specimen at OA before, and because I was so shocked by his presence, I looked around at the other attendees to gauge if I was the only one having this reaction—which is when I realized I was surrounded by men and only men. Men who, in a strange twist, were all relatively attractive.

  Not your mother’s Overeaters Anonymous, I thought.

  “Hi, my name is Liam,” he said as he sat down on the lone chair onstage.

  Oh God, he has an Australian accent.

  “Hi, Liam,” the group responded.

  “Hi, Liam,” I followed suit a half second later, the singular female voice among the crowd.

  “So, tonight was supposed to be my big three-month chip. But I fucked it up. I had to tell Ben just now that I didn’t earn it this time around. Sadly.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. What was this man’s trigger food? Carrot sticks?

  “The truth is, I had sex with an employee earlier today. At the restaurant I own, in my office. She gave me a blow job.”

  And what does this have to do with your eating problems, sir? I glanced furtively around to see if anyone else looked as confused as I was, but all eyes were on the speaker.

  “I felt so ashamed after. I’d really been trying to stay a hundred percent sober—no touching myself, nothing,” he continued.

  And that’s when it hit me. I scanned the room yet again and noticed the knowing nods, the pain in these attractive or, bottom line, average-looking men’s eyes—I was definitely in the wrong place. I was surrounded by sex addicts.

  In a panic, I sank down in the pew, double-checking my phone for the meeting details I thought I had gotten right.

  “I spiraled immediately,” his gravelly hot voice went on. “I was contacting escorts on Craigslist. I drove to this woman’s house and sat outside in my car, beating off in hopes that I would skip it with her. Which I didn’t… I went in right after I came. And there she was, your basic call girl, hanging out in her lingerie, the smell of vodka coming off her skin from ten feet away.”

  Again, knowing nods all around. I found myself doing the same, afraid that the others would sniff me out as an intruder, here to listen to their salacious stories for my own amusement. But then I remembered my general invisibility to the male species, my inherent wallflowerness—in this instance, it was like a superpower.

  “And then the most fuck-all thing happened. I realized I’d left my wallet back at the restaurant. I couldn’t pay her up front, and she obviously wasn’t going to take my word for it. I told her I’d go and come back—now that I’d seen her, I knew I’d obsess over the sex until it was done. But the drive back had all this traffic, so I ended up stuck on the highway, just crying my eyes out like a little girl, thinking about tonight and how I had fucked it all up. Then I beat off again, in my car, probably in full view of a taxi driver in the lane next to me.” He paused to look around the room, making eye contact with someone in the front pew. “Whatever I was going to say tonight no longer has meaning. I can either start all over again or not. I’m glad I’m here. I’m always glad about that. But I wish I was celebrating something. That’s it.”

  He stood up abruptly, clearing his throat and glancing at the moderator, Ben, who took the stage as Liam hopped down and slid into the front pew. An older man in reading glasses patted Liam’s shoulder.

  For the remainder of the hour, I kept having to make sure that my jaw wasn’t visibly agape as sex addict after sex addict spoke of their overwhelming lust and carnal desires that knew no end. It was such a different manifestation of neuroses than mine. Instead of stuffing their faces full of calories, these guys were out there burning them! Mind you, they were placing themselves in dangerous situations with fellow nymphos, sex workers, strippers—you name it—but they were involved in something extremely, wildly different than anything I knew.

  I amused myself with the idea of standing up—the female intruder making herself known—and telling them about the time that Terry McInerney, my freshman-year sailing instructor, had pressed his penis against my stomach for three minutes in a bar. It was after fall finals freshman year, during my “most-skinny-ever!!!” phase as I had coined it in my journal, when unbeknownst to me I had contracted a tapeworm in Costa Rica on a humanitarian trip I’d taken just before school had started. For the first and only time in my life, I had felt what it was to be one of those girls who were universally desired—not just a pretty face on a “fluffy” (as my mother liked to call it) frame, but a hot girl with actual power over the opposite sex. The phase had lasted long enough for me to start dating Bradley Griffin, the cutest guy in my dorm; stop going to OA; lose my virginity; fall in love; have said tapeworm diagnosed and treated; and get my heart broken by Bradley Griffin, still the cutest guy in the dorm, by the time I’d gained back thirty of the forty pounds that I’d lost. It was when I was still in the throes of that skinny phase, though, that Terry McInerney the sailing instructor had unnecessarily crushed his body up against mine at the local pub for the entirety of our brief conversation. Toward the end, I’d felt him against my torso, a hot, hard bulge pressing into my stomach. The sensation had sent tingles through every part of my body, and all I could focus on was the tantalizing part in his lips as he had waited for me to say something else, the heaving of our chests as they had collided and fell away from each other with each anticipatory breath. In a way, it was the most subversive sex act I’d ever taken part in. Sure felt steamy to me! I imagined myself saying to the group of sex addicts in my midst, then explaining about the box of Dunkin’ Donuts I had eaten later that night, washed down with a carton of chocolate milk. Did I mention I’m at the wrong meeting, guys?

  Obviously standing up and talking was not a viable option, so I slumped down in the pew and waited patiently for the hour to pass. At the end of it, I skipped the serenity prayer, eschewing the handholding and inevitable reveal of myself as an interloper in lieu of a quick getaway. I made a pit stop at the bathroom in the church’s main building, shaking my head at my clueless reflection and wondering where the hell the OA meeting had actually been. After a good two minutes of self-reflective hand washing in which I questioned for the millionth time that week my overall preparedness for adulthood, I moseyed out to the parking lot, trying to act as if nothing had happened.

  The biggest thing on my mind now was getting to the nearest 7-Eleven for a pint of rum raisin. Would my resolve have been the same had I attended the right meeting and finally spoken as I had planned? Would I be giving in to my usual cravings, or would I be stronger from the outpouring of communal support after I finally told my story? I would never know… but the thought of going back to my apartment alone, only to drag myself through the sea of half-packed boxes and contemplate my aimlessness sans ice cream, recalling all the stories I’d just heard about the kind of hot, dangerous sex I’d probably never know in my lifetime, was too desolate to bear.

  Alas, I didn’t make it to 7-Eleven that night. In fact, I didn’t make it out of the parking lot before the strangest, most unlikely, and luckiest thing that had ever happened to me unfolded before my disbelieving eyes.

  “Hey there.”

  I was headed toward my car in the church’s vast parking lot when my ears perked up at the sound of his Australian accent. I knew without a doubt it was the dangerously hot sex addict before I’d even raised my head and taken him in, seeing him up close for the first time. He had green eyes, lit up by the too-bright LED parking lot lights looming over us. His hair was sandy blond and messy in an on-purpose kind of way
, his features all perfectly proportioned and symmetrical on his heart-shaped face. He had the look of a golden boy gone bad, like a professional soccer player with a secret drug problem or the high school prom king who’d ended up in a minimum-security prison for embezzlement. He was thin but built, like a track star, and holding a grimy hubcap in his left hand.

  “I think this might be yours,” he said, nodding toward my derelict Honda Accord, lovingly nicknamed “the Sloppy Jalopy” by my best friend Gracie.

  “Oh my. How did that happen?” I reached out sheepishly for the car part that had been expelled without my knowledge.

  “Probably one of those damn speed bumps. I’ll just snap it back on, no worries.” He made his way around the car and crouched down by the rear right tire like a regular pit-crew member. Simple car maintenance had never looked so good.

  “Wow, thank you,” I said. “My car already suffers from low self-esteem. I don’t think she could handle a missing hubcap.” I heard him laugh from behind the car and silently congratulated myself for having the wherewithal to crack a joke.

  “Haven’t seen you at the meeting before,” he said, popping back up. “In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever laid eyes on such a convincing transvestite.” He wiped his hands on his jeans as he approached me. “That was a joke. Because you were at a men’s only meeting, not that I think you look like a man. Quite the opposite. Name’s Liam.”

  Utterly confused by the level of hotness colliding with me, I didn’t notice right away when he reached out his hand.

  “Oh, are you not okay with touching people?” he asked.

  “No.” I shook my head slowly, like someone just regaining consciousness. “I’m sorry. I’m Mischa.” I held out my hand and Liam shook it, a grin overtaking his face that was both incredibly charming and devilish.