“I had to get it out.”
“Did you?”
“It will always be a part of me. I’m just getting better at not letting it control my every waking fucking moment. You?”
“Same, but it’s been a goddamn journey.”
“Tell me about it. My parents disowned me about eight seconds before I took the stage.”
Silas’s eyes widened, and he shook his head. “Then I’m even more proud of you. Is it too soon to say that?”
“I’ll take it,” I said with a grateful smile. “Let’s go somewhere. I want to hear everything.”
Although I had an after-party and photo op, I canceled it all, and Silas and I went to a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant in Midtown. I ordered kung pao chicken and watched Silas fumble his chopsticks through a giant bowl of chow mein. We talked a little about my book, and he told me he’d taken his family’s vast pharmaceutical fortune and used it to work on cleaning up the opioid crisis it’d helped to create.
“I’m going to guess you didn’t pick that as your cause by accident,”I said slowly. “You’re the one who asked me about addiction at the Q and A.”
“It had me for a while. I needed to feel something, even if it was manufactured. But Alaska was even stronger than dope. It taught me it was better to feel nothing than something ‘wrong’ or ‘unnatural.’ I lived that way for a long time. Like a robot in human skin.”
“I went the other way,” I said. “Everything they told us was wrong, I did. Like a sad little rebellion that hurt me more. But I felt possessed sometimes, by forces beyond my control. They were always whispering that I was no good. Not worthy of anything. So when I met someone who was the physical embodiment ofgood, I sabotaged it.”
Silas’s eyes lit up. “You met someone?”
I nodded. “But I’m pretty sure I thoroughly fucked it up. I’ve seen him once in three years.”
“Why?”
“My therapist says I grew up in an ‘atmosphere of deprivation.’ River was an infusion of everything I’d gone without—a disruption of the status quo. Being with him was too good.” Tears threatened. “I fought us every step of the way.”
“This River was good to you?”
“The best.”
“I like him already.” Silas took a bite of spring roll. “But why not give it another try? You’re not in the same place you were the last you saw him.”
“True. I’m off the booze. And I’ve been celibate for two long years, which, if you know me, is as improbable as a lunar eclipse, Halley’s Comet, and a meteor shower all happening at the same time.”
My breath caught as a meteor shower and my perfect night with River—our first time—came rushing back to me…
“That’s not nothing,” Silas said, echoing my own thoughts from earlier.
“Once I got a little bit of clarity, it was easy,” I said. “I never wanted anyone after River. I still don’t.”
“So what are you waiting for?”
“I don’t know. I’m scared of fucking it up again. That I’m not well enough.”
Silas thought for a moment and folded his hands on the table. “I was where you were just a year ago. And then I met someone.”
I sat back in my chair. “Oh damn. The way you said that just now tells me everything I need to know. You’re madly in love with him.”
Silas chuckled. “Damn straight. His name’s Max and he’s…everything.Better than anything I believed was possible. But it hasn’t been easy. I have a therapist too, I go to meetings, and Alaska still tries to infiltrate our happiness. But when it does, Max helps me. Because he loves me as much as I love him. I don’t know this River, but he sounds a lot like my Max.”
“I’d give my right testicle to call himmy River.”
“It’s not too late.”
“It could be. He may have settled down already. He wants a house with a white picket fence and two-point-five kids while I have wanderlust in my blood.”
