“Piper, wait….”

“Get away from me,” I cry, pushing past him to get to the door. I have to get out of here, away from him and his horribly bloodshot eyes and swollen vein. I’m spun around when he grabs my arm, and I can’t avoid his eyes, those beautiful blue eyes I love so much, now wild, spacey and unfocused. Nausea bubbles up in my gut like acid. Sobbing, I wrench my arm free from his grip. “Don’t touch me.”

“Please.” He sways toward the wall, drops the syringe onto the floor, and almost falls on his face trying to pick it up.

Devastated at the sight of him this way, I shake my head in horrified disbelief. “I thought you were clean. You told me you were better. What the hell are you doing to yourself?”

Like a zombie he stumbles forward, arms outstretched, and tries to pull me into his arms. “Baby, I’m better. I’m much better. I just need a little sometimes. To get through all the shit.” He holds his arm toward me. “Look, there’s not even a lot of marks. See? It’s only when I’m tired and I can’t sleep and I can’t think…” He rakes his fingers through his tangled hair. “I just need to get it all to stop sometimes. That’s all. I’m fine.” A demented smile slashes across his face.

I back away from him. “You’re not fine, Blue. And you’re scaring me. I-I can’t see you like this.”

And I can never, ever, let my daughter be around someone like this.

Gasping for breath through the sobs wracking through me, I run from him, down the ugly hall to the elevator, where I stab the down arrow on the panel repeatedly. The chrome doors slide open just as Blue appears at the end of the hall, yelling my name. Tearing my eyes away from him, I step into the elevator before he catches up to me and back myself into the corner just as the doors close me in like a vault. An older woman already occupying the elevator eyes me with an expression of great concern while I hunt through my bag for a tissue.

“Excuse me, miss, are you all right?” she asks when the elevator starts to descend.

I nod and wipe at my eyes with a ragged tissue I found at the bottom of my purse. “Yes. I-I just had a fight with my boyfriend.”

She tsks and shakes her head. “Men are bastards,” she mutters. “And not worth your tears.”

Words of defense sit at the tip of my tongue, but I can’t let them out. She could very well be right. Maybe all men really are bastards, completely lacking the ability to get their shit together and forever destroying all the good things in their lives and breaking every heart they claim to love into a million pieces.

I’m done. I gave him my heart and my body and my trust and he threw it all away in a matter of hours. Hours.

I’m shuddering with emotional overload. All I want to do is get far away from here, home to my little girl and the safety of my gay fake boyfriend. I can’t get the vision of that needle in Blue’s vein out of my head. Or the way he was leaning back against the tile wall, eyes closed, lost to me, lured into an affair with heroin.

As soon as the doors open, I bolt out of the elevator and head straight for the concierge’s desk in the hopes of getting a cab, but out of the corner of my eye Blue appears from the stairwell doors looking like a savage with his jeans unbuttoned, barefoot and shirtless, all abs and ink and lipstick kiss smudges on full display.

It’s a miracle he managed to run down four flights of stairs while high as a kite without falling on his ass. Spotting me, he quickly closes the space between us and grabs my hand. “Don’t go,” he begs, trying to catch his breath. “Please.”

“Look, you need to go back upstairs.” I glance around the lobby to make sure no one has recognized him. “You’re a mess.”

“I don’t give a fuck. I’m not losing you again. Come back up with me.” His bloodshot eyes plead with me, and I hate myself because I’m close, so close, to giving in.

I squeeze his hand tighter in mine, because I truly don’t want to let go of any part of him. “Blue, I can’t do that. I’m sorry.”

He blinks hard. “I’ll go to rehab. Okay? I’ll get off the shit again.”

“You should do that. Definitely,” I agree.

“I don’t want to lose you.”

I shake my head and choke back more tears. “I don’t want to lose you again either, but I can’t do this. This is too much for me. All of this is just way more than I can deal with right now.”