She exits the car, splash-slogging like a somnambulist through slanted blades of rain and across black water swirls in the gravel. Even in the deluge the sign dazzles red and electric: LIQUOR.

Her salivary glands seize like a Pavlovian hound’s and she squeezes fists, forcing nails into the meat of her palms. Hard, harder, as if doing so will somehow kill the urge. She'd managed to avoid this place for eight months. Now here she was, right outside the door.

Don’t do this, she hears him say. And he's beside her in an instant: sinewy-slight, black curls peeking from that stupid-ass Tech cap he always wore. Too-too earnest brown eyes. Cam.

She'd finally begun to win him back. The assaults on her privacy had been grueling: the checking in, checking up, taking tests, going to counseling, learning to articulate her fears, her feelings. But it hadn't been enough. One slip, a weekend binge, and he was gone.

“You made your choice. You don't get a say anymore.”

He disintegrates as though her words are a bomb. The evergreen of his shampoo hangs thick in the evening swelter, but he's gone. He’s gone. And what did she have left? Familial respect. A career with the museum, a job she finally enjoyed. Still. It wasn't enough. It never would be.

She leans on the door and walks in.

“Jules, no way! Damn, chica. Been a long time.”

She winces a smile at the crag-faced burnout behind the register. She wants to jump the counter and beat the shit out of him. Instead she winds a habitual path through aisles teetering with multicolored liquids. Nothing about this place has changed in eight months. Nothing.

She passes a thousand glass bottles, each one promising a unique flavor of bliss, and stops before the golden shrine in the corner. She breathes in, reaches up, traces the smooth curve of a neck flaring out at the shoulders. Her fingers leave smudges. She thumbs a perfect print and smiles. This one. She cradles the bottle off the shelf. Its weight is familiar, comforting.

“Hah, Bacardi. Couldn't leave it, eh?”

She stares at him one . . two beats longer than usual, flips a folded twenty onto the counter and leaves.

The rain's stopped now. Steam curls off the sidewalk, hovering in wisps like ghosts. Back inside the car it's stifling. The heat clogs her nostrils, brands her brain with the weight of what she is about to do.

She looks at the bottle in her hands. There is still time. She can stop. Set the bottle outside on the steaming blacktop and drive and drive and forget this ever happened.

She pulls down the sun visor and again Cam is there, smiling graduation photo rubber-banded to the corner. She looks past him, slantways into the mirror: gaunt, chalky, chapped. Her pupils black holes, divulging everything by revealing nothing.

She twists off the cap and the rum stings a bolt through her nose. She braces and sips, follows with a long swig. It burns her throat and chest and fingers and toes and finally her mind. She swigs another and another and the burn glows, intensifies, feels like home.