Voices – Page 42
The bottle called to Jen Wilkens, and she couldn’t seem to stop answering it.
She’d told herself it was an isolated incident, something that wasn’t going to keep happening, a temporary setback. Her first night back with John, it had just been nerves that had woken her up. It had only taken a little bourbon before she was ready to go back and lie down with him again. Not a problem.
“Not a problem,” she said, and drank from the bottle. She kept it hidden in the dresser drawer that housed her clothes, buried under a pile of t-shirts. At first she had only used it at night, after John had fallen asleep. Then the bottle had begun calling to her during the day, when John was at work.
She would stop drinking at around six, which would allow her two hours to sober up before John got home at eight. Just before he arrived, Jen would brush her teeth to get rid of the smell of alcohol. This had become routine in the past month and a half.
They would eat a late dinner, maybe watch some television, and then get ready for bed. Getting ready for bed usually meant an extended kissing session on the couch, or in his bed, or occasionally on the floor. Jen usually started these sessions; the drinking during the afternoon seemed to enhance her desire.
Then they would sleep, and sometime in the night Jen would wake up and lie there against his chest, until the calling of the bottle drowned out the sound of his heartbeat.
Eventually he would catch her, Jen knew. It was inevitable. And then what? Probably he would throw her out, she supposed. It was only fair. John had done so much to help her, had put up with so much from her already, that she couldn’t fault him if her drinking was too much for him.
She didn’t want to drink. She hated the taste of it, now, like bitter poison. Jen was reminded of some smokers she knew who said that they had reached a point where they didn’t even like the cigarettes anymore. They just needed them to function. Jen needed her bourbon like that. It allowed her to stay normal, to not frighten John by giving into the waves of crushing despair or overwhelming rage she sometimes felt.
That she needed more and more of it with each passing week to accomplish this was something she tried not to think about.
Jen watched television. Smoked cigarettes. Drank. At times she practiced moving things around the coffee table with her mind. This was her life when John wasn’t around. Jen wondered if it should scare her how much her world now revolved around him, but the best she could muster was a vague sense of impending doom. She had spent so long being scared that it had left her numb. Or maybe it was the booze that had done that. Jen wasn’t sure.
She wondered sometimes if stopping her romantic activities with John would cease the calls she heard from the bottle. It seemed plausible. There was only one problem, really: she liked being with John, and didn’t want to stop. At times, it was all she could do to keep from begging him to press her further, make her take the next step toward whatever destination was in store for them. She wanted so badly to believe that in some future world there was a Jen who was happy, and secure, and able to share all of the physical intimacy that she craved.
It was hard, during the moments in between. Every fiber of her being screamed at her, sometimes, that this was a huge mistake. It could only lead to more horror and hate. The bottle helped her through these times.
Jen sat, and smoked, and drank, and waited for John.
