Addicted to You

**Addicted to You** is the first book in the Addicted Series by Krista and Becca Ritchie. It is the first book to follow Loren Hale and Lily Calloway's romance.

## Summary

​​***She’s addicted to sex. He’s addicted to booze…the only way out is rock bottom.***

No one would suspect shy Lily Calloway’s biggest secret. While everyone is dancing at college bars, Lily stays in the bathroom. To get laid. Her compulsion leads her to one-night stands, steamy hookups and events she shamefully regrets. The only person who knows her secret happens to have one of his own.

Loren Hale’s best friend is his bottle of bourbon. Lily comes at a close second. For three years, they’ve pretended to be in a real relationship, hiding their addictions from their families. They’ve mastered the art of concealing flasks and random guys that filter in and out of their apartment.

But as they sink beneath the weight of their addictions, they cling harder to their destructive relationship and wonder if a life together, for real, is better than a lie. Strangers and family begin to infiltrate their guarded lives, and with new challenges, they realize they may not just be addicted to alcohol and sex.

Their real vice may be each other.

## Plot

The book starts in September 2011 with a twenty-year-old Lily Calloway waking up next to her one-night stand at Kappa Phi Delta. Her best friend and roommate Loren Hale picks her up and they get driven home to the Drake by Lily's chauffeur Nola. Despite being the morning Loren is already drinking hard liquor.

Both Lily and Loren have been pretending to date since senior year so their families don't discover Lily's sex addiction and Loren's alcoholism. However, neither of them have acknowledged their addictions as serious problems and they both enable each other.

Lily uses sex for the natural high and to ignore unwanted emotions. Loren uses alcohol similarly. To keep up the lie, they go as far as inventing fictional friends Charlie and Stacey as a way to get out of seeing family.

Lily gets dragged into a family luncheon by her older sister Rose. At the luncheon all three of her sisters think she's pregnant because she's not drinking. In actuality, she's remaining sober because her pretend boyfriend is "perpetually drunk".

Loren is dragged to the luncheon too and has an argument with his verbally abusive father.

A few weeks later, Lily has contacted a tutor to help her pass her economics class at the University of Pennsylvania. She admits to her tutor that she picked him because he had the coolest name: Connor Cobalt. Connor helps Lily and Loren with economics because of their connections as children of huge moguls.

Both Lily and Lo get tricked into going to the Bahamas on the family yacht by Lily's fifteen-year-old sister Daisy. On the yacht, Lily nearly hooks up with a bartender on board and instead has sex with Loren for the first time since adolescence. They agree to become an actual couple.

One night when Lily goes home with Connor to continue studying she can't find Loren. She calls him repeatedly to no avail and goes to a highlighter party with Connor to try find him. They don't find him there but they do run into Kevin, her one-night-stand from the beginning of the book. He heavily implies that she and Connor are having sex instead of tutoring.

Halloween comes around and Lily and Loren dress as their favourite X-Men, X-23 and Hellion. They go to a Halloween party with Connor where Loren breaks into the liquor cabinet and drinks $40,000 worth of alcohol. He gets caught and nearly beaten up by a guy named Matt and three other guys all dressed as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Lily lies to Matt and tells them she'll reimburse the $40,000; she just needs to get her cheque book out of Connor's limousine. Then, a man dressed as Green Arrow comes over to tell Matt there's an incident occurring in the mansion and he'll make sure that the cheque gets written. Once they get back to the limo, the man dressed as Green Arrow introduces himself as Ryke. Matt and the other TMNTs start running towards them and Lily yells at Connor's driver Gilligan to drive away.

At this point, Loren has passed out on one of the limo's seats and is cradling his bourbon-filled flask like a baby. Ryke takes the flask out of his arms and pours it out of the window much to Lily's offence.

Ryke inserts himself into Lily and Lo's life by telling Lily he's writing an article for *The Philadelphia Chronicle* about Comic-Con and wants quotes from Loren. Lily quickly figures out that he's lying about the article.

Lily has more one-night-stands and Loren starts a sexual relationship with a woman named Cassie. That week, Lily goes through a blur of sex with strangers to the point that she didn't even know what the day was.

Connor is coming over more regularly just to hang out with Loren and Lily because, Lily guesses, he has no friends. Rose comes over to check on Lily and Connor asks on her on a date to see a theatre production of *The Tempest*. From then on, they're dating.

Rose is holding a fashion show for her fashion label Calloway Couture when Lily can't handle her cravings and goes to the bathroom to have sex with Lo. Afterwards, she still has cravings and she leaves before the show starts to have sex with Lo again. This hurts Rose to the point where she won't answer Lily's calls for some time.

Ryke keeps confronting Lily about Loren's dependence on alcohol and because of that Lily and Ryke don't get along.

In December, Lily, Loren, Ryke and Connor go to a dance club and Loren gets drunk at the bar. Lily dances with Connor and dances with a stranger. She fantasises that the stranger feels her up and gropes her and it turns out that the stranger's actually doing that when Connor pulls her away.

In the bathroom, Lily gets followed by the stranger who starts trying to undress her. She shouts 'no' and 'stop' but the stranger doesn't stop trying to rape her. Ryke comes into the bathroom and pulls the stranger off her. The four of them leave and go back to the Drake.

Connor texts Rose to come over and Lily finally tells Rose about her sex addiction and Loren's alcoholism. Over the next week, Loren goes through detoxification with a nurse hired by Connor. He decided he didn't want to go to rehab and instead stay with Lily. Lily makes no change to her addictive behaviours.

Lily, Loren, Connor, Rose and Ryke go to the Fizzle and Hale Co.-sponsored Christmas Charity Gala. Lily and Loren miss the reception because they book a hotel room to have sex in when Lily gets cravings. In the hotel room, Loren downs a mini-bottle of alcohol and pockets another. He goes downstairs to confront his father about wanting to become sober. It turns into a larger confrontation when it's revealed Loren's mother isn't Sara Hale and Ryke is his half-brother.

On the way back to the Drake, Loren tells Lily he's been kicked out by Penn because he's been failing most of his classes. This news can't get back to his father because Jonathan would take away his trust fund. Prior to this, Loren had been lying to everyone telling them he'd been getting As and Bs. They arrive at the Drake and learn that the chauffeur driving them had been Jonathan's personal driver Anderson who's notorious for his spilling secrets.

The book ends with Jonathan taking away Loren's trust fund and Loren going to rehab.

## Trivia

* The book is set in September 2011 to December 2011.
* Loren and Lily's ship name is Lilo.