The shower’s running.

Not a good sign when you live alone. It can mean only one thing. I brought a hook-up back to the bungalow.

Fuck.

Fighting my eyes open against the morning light streaming into my bedroom, snapshot memories of last night begin to dance around my pounding head.

Max turned up at my office. Talked me into going out and drinking with him.

Shots. Way too many shots.

Then, two women came over to join us.

One was blonde, a natural, with long wavy hair. Petite body. She even had hazel eyes. Her face was pretty, not beautiful like Evie’s but pretty enough. Because of that, I couldn’t help myself. I had to have her. Not because she was hot—which, of course, she was—and not because I just wanted to get laid. No, it was none of those things.

I fucked the blonde because she looked exactly like Evie, my ex-wife.

I can’t believe I did it again. Jesus, I really am a sick fuck.

Trust me, what I’ve done is like an alcoholic falling off the wagon.

I don’t have a sex addiction—even though I do like sex a lot. No, I have an addiction to fucking women who look like my ex-wife.

Sick, right?

Well, I had an addiction, which apparently has kicked back into play.

Fuck!

I haven’t pulled this crap in a really long time. Up until last night, for five years—barring a slip-up three years ago—I’d successfully avoided having sex with any women who reminded me of Evie.

Three fucking years down the drain.

I’d actually thought I was cured. Guess not.

For a long time, after Evie had left me, all I did was screw random Evies. All they had to be was petite with long blonde hair, and I would let my imagination do the rest.

According to my therapist, screwing Evie’s look-alikes was my way of dealing with her abandoning me. Supposedly, I was trying to re-create the one time in my fucked-up life when I had felt truly happy—before it all went to shit.

Funny because, even though my life had sucked before Evie, ultimately, she was the sole reason it went down the path straight to hell.

I should’ve known from the moment I met her that, eventually, she’d be my downfall. I mean, I am Adam, and she’s my fucking Eve. It had been written in the cards.

My therapist said I was mourning the loss of her, like she’d died or something. Maybe if she had, it would have been easier. At least I’d have known why she’d left me.

But no, all I got—after a year together and one week of marriage—was Evie disappearing without a word.

I mean, we had been fine, happy even. Or so I’d thought. I had gone out on my one-week-late bachelor party, kissing her good-bye before leaving, and when I got home, waiting on the coffee table for me were annulment papers with her signature on the dotted line, a note beside it saying, Sorry, and her wedding ring sitting on top of it.

And that was it.

I haven’t seen or spoken to her since. That wasn’t for my lack of trying. Of course, I repeatedly rang her cell. I left her panicked, then angry, and then just plain old desperate voice mails. And I kept calling until her mailbox was full.

A few days later, her number was disconnected.

Even then, I still refused to believe she’d just left me.

So, like the sad fuck I was, I tried to find her. I hired the best PI in California to look for her.

But after a few weeks of trying, he came up dry. It was like she’d fallen off the face of the planet.

I didn’t want him to give up though. I offered him a shitload more money to keep trying, but he told me there was no point. He said the reason he couldn’t find Evie was because she didn’t want to be found.

And there it was. I had my answer.

She’d really left me.

She was gone, and I was never going to see her again.

Up until that point, I’d held things together with the hope that he’d find her, and I could bring her back home.

But that was never going to happen.

That was when I fell apart. I couldn’t breathe, like I was suffocating from the pain. It was the worst kind of agony.

I just needed to forget—forget everything, forget her.

So, the first thing I did after leaving the PI’s office was go and score some coke, which was easy enough to do in my world. I had used coke in the past, pre-Evie, for recreational use. That was the norm in my so-called privileged world.

I snorted that fucker on the spot, and a small sense of relief washed over me, but it wasn’t anywhere near enough. I was looking for total oblivion. So, I took another hit, and then I left the dealer with an eight ball in my hand to get me through the rest of the night. Next up, I went to a bar, and I started drinking with the intention of never stopping until, at the very least, I was comatose.

Unfortunately, I woke up the next morning with that same agonizing, suffocating desolate feeling.

I just wanted death to come and fucking take me.

As I came around, my skull pounding from the drugs and alcohol, I discovered that I was in bed with an unfamiliar girl beside me. But as I looked at this girl’s face, I realized she didn’t look so unfamiliar. Actually, she looked a hell of a lot like Evie. They could have been sisters, given the right lighting. Then, the girl woke up while I was staring at her. She smiled as she put her hand on my cock, and I felt a strange sense of relief.

Without another thought, I fucked her again. And it was in those first few seconds of pushing my cock inside the nameless Evie look-alike that I didn’t feel like I was going to die.

There was nothing. I was numb, free of the pain.

And that was when I realized that screwing someone who looked like Evie would free me from the pain more than coke ever would, not that it’d stop me from snorting it in tandem with sex. They just kind of went hand in hand.

But from that moment on, I’d search out that nothingness like a sniffer dog tracking drugs.

I never slept with the same girl twice. No, because in my fucked-up brain, it felt like a betrayal against the only woman I’d ever loved—you know, the one who had left me in this fucking mess.

So, screwing these women once was fine. Twice would be a betrayal that I apparently couldn’t do.

I know. It’s fucked up.

But this was my life for the next five years.

When the pain was unbearable, which was pretty regularly, I would take some coke and go out to a bar alone. I’d stay out until I found someone who looked enough like Evie to get me through the night. I’d chat her up with sweet words and empty promises—not that it was ever hard for me to get laid. Then, I’d take her back to her place or a hotel, a pub restroom, or an alleyway—I wasn’t fussy, so long as I could fuck myself into oblivion—and I’d feel that comforting numbness that would get me through a few more days.

It was an addiction I couldn’t seem to break, not until my father died. Trust me, it wasn’t the grief that made me want to sort out my life. No, it was the glaring fact that I didn’t want to die in some shitty hotel room with coke up my nose and a faceless lay next to me in bed—like he had.

Although my lay would have been female, unlike his.

My father was men all the way, much to my mother’s dismay. That was only because she was worried about his preference for men getting out and ruining her public image.

So, when my father died, after five years of living with my coke and sex addiction, I put myself into rehab. I found out from my counselor that I didn’t actually have a sex addiction. I was addicted to having sex with women who looked like my ex-wife.