"You ever think you might drink too much?"
"It's the only way I get through my goddamn days after what you did to me."
Truth is, she started drinking while she was still under his control, though if someone asked her to pinpoint the exact moment it started, she couldn't be sure.
She can't say if it was the night at the restaurant, drinking that expensive glass of wine; or on the whirlwind tour he took her own, filling her with champagne and bourbon and whiskey, always whiskey.
(Truth is she can't stand the sight of champagne anymore, not since he ordered her to drink it off him.)
But it's the whiskey that stuck. It's whiskey she turned to when he started getting lax and not telling her to stay put, it's whiskey she turned to when Trish took her in, after, and it's whiskey she's drinking now, glass clutched in her skinny fingers.
She can always find redemption at the bottom of a bottle. Sometimes she squints, looking through the glass like Alice, like she can see a better future for herself behind smudged fingerprints and amber-colored liquid.
But tonight she doesn't want to see her future. Tonight she wants the haze it puts her in. She likes that it makes her brain feel like she's watching street-lights through a rain shower, or in an Impressionist painting, something indistinct and blurry.
She likes best that it makes her forget. When she's drinking she can forget what she did, where they went, how his hands felt on her. When she's drinking the edges of her vision aren't purple, his voice isn't in her ear commanding her to come back, Jessica.
And drinking helps. Fuck everyone who says it wouldn't. (Okay, mainly Trish.) Drinking makes it that much easier to forget, that much easier to cope, and she feels less like a mess drinking whiskey than she does reciting street names under her breath.
And if she drinks a little more than she should? Well. Not like there's anyone around to tell her it's a terrible idea. That guy down the hall is off doing his own thing, and she hasn't seen Trish in weeks, not since she left and got her own place.
Guilt stabs at her insides, but dully. Drinking helps numb that, too, the guilt of leaving Trish's apartment in the middle of the night, at walking out on her only friend.
Well. She doesn't need friends anymore. She doesn't need anyone.
She just needs another drink.