Will & Patrick Wake Up Married by Leta Blake Page B

ever knows. But no. If it’s ever going to work between us, I have to be honest. I have to tell him the truth.”
    Patrick doesn’t really care one way or another so he says nothing.
    “What was I thinking? I’d been working my steps, staying sober. I’m so tired of relapsing; so tired of starting over. I screwed everything up. Again.”
    Patrick remembers his father sitting at the cracked, old wooden table in the kitchen of the apartment he lived in for the first fifteen years of his life. He remembers the rough texture of his dad’s hand as it curled around the back of his neck, still damp from holding a bottle of beer. He shivers against the sick roll in the pit of his stomach.
    “Why?” Will whispers to himself.
    “You experienced an extreme stressor. Your brain secreted CRH, a hormone which releases corticotropin. Long story short: the chances of an addict relapsing or having a slip go up exponentially in the presence of corticotropin.”
    Will clears his throat and looks his way. “In English?”
    “You couldn’t help yourself.”
    “Do you know a lot about addiction?”
    “Some.” He can almost smell his father’s beery vomit spreading over the sofa cushion. “I studied it from the neurobiological point of view, mainly.”
    “Are you—I mean, do you have personal experience with alcoholism?”
    “I don’t drink often. I prefer to be sober for a lot of reasons, including being on call a lot.”
    “Oh.” Will’s eyelashes fan down against his cheeks.
    The note of shame in his voice keeps Patrick from saying more. It won’t do any good for him to hear about Patrick’s father. There’s no joy in that tale and there’s nothing good to come from telling it.
    “I guess it is my fault we got married,” Will says. “If I wasn’t an alcoholic—”
    “Beating yourself up for your disease won’t solve anything. It’s as much my fault as it is yours. The truth is I advocated strongly for our marriage last night.”
    “Yeah?” Will turns to him, the sun lighting up his blond stubble and golden lashes.
    “Yeah.”
    Will smiles. He’s damn gorgeous in that moment—tears, blotchy skin, and all. Patrick forces his attention back to his journal. He can’t process a single word.
 

Chapter Four
 
    “Swanky,” Patrick notes.
    Will glances around the Tallgrass Hotel lobby. There’s a tasteful Christmas tree in the corner next to a baby grand piano and lots of greenery lining the oak doorways. The Meadowlands restaurant is off to the right and features one of the best menus in town. The bar is to the left, and Will hopes he forgets it’s even there. Down the hallway are the elevators that go up to the four floors of rooms and down to the basement exercise facility and indoor swimming pool.
    Everything is top-notch. It’s new after all, recently built to lure doctors and travel nurses to staff the expansion of Healing Regional. The success of the hospital depends on it. The town has plenty of old motels, some of them nicer than others, but they needed a long-term facility with an air of class to make things easier on medical staff who might decide the balmy beaches of South Florida are a better fit than the freezing cold plains of Healing.
    “I suppose it is,” Will agrees.
    “Why are we here anyway? Don’t you have your own place?”
    “I can’t go back there. Can we talk about it later?” He’s exhausted and really doesn’t want to deal with anything more than getting them checked in right now. Especially not with an audience, even if it is just an audience of one.
    Patrick shrugs and wanders over to the piano, inspecting it closely and then running his fingers over the keys lightly. He shudders like he’s cold and returns to the front desk to stand beside Will.
    “What time is it, Beth?” The hotel clerk on duty is a young, blond woman Will’s known forever. He used to babysit her younger siblings sometimes when he was in high school.
    “Almost nine.” Beth gives him a