Page 12 of Puck My Pain Away

“There,” he says. “Can you stand?”

“I don’t know.” It’s the most honest thing I’ve said to anyone in a month.

“We’ll find out together. Hand.”

I give him my hand. He takes my weight, more of it than I mean to give him. He gets me up off the ice and onto the bad leg slow, and it holds enough to limp on. He doesn’t let go of my arm the whole way to the gate. Doesn’t fuss. Doesn’t ask if I’m all right when I’m obviously not. Just keeps a hand on me and steers. I let myself be steered, and the letting is its own kind of relief, handing the wheel to somebody whose hands don’t shake.

—

The treatment room is the small one off the back, the private one. He sits me on the table and crouches again to get my skates off, and I let him do that too. The laces, the boot, the cold sweat-damp sock. He’s unhurried about all of it. He sets the skates by the wall, lined up. He stands. He goes to the door. He turns the lock.

The click of it is very loud.

I hear it and I know what it is. I’m not stupid and I’m not so far gone I don’t understand a locked door in an empty building between a man and his patient at nine at night. Some clean, cold part of me—the part that’s still a professional athlete who’s been in a thousand rooms with a thousand people who wanted something—flags it. That door wasn’t locked a second ago. You could get off this table. The lock turns from this side too. You could put your skate guards on, walk out into the parking lot, drive home, and never book the late slot again.

I look at the door. I look at him. I think about the apartment, the dishes, the framed dead man on the wall, the four a.m. ceiling. I think about the hum his voice put over the screaming, how it’s the only thing in three weeks that’s reached the actual fire, and I think: I’m not walking out that door. I’m not even going to pretend to myself that I might. Whatever this is, it’s the first thing that’s touched the pain, and I am an animal in a trap who has just been shown that the trap is warm.

I stay on the table.

“You’re going to do something for me,” Elias says.

He comes back across the small room and he stands close, closer than the work has ever put him, and his hands go to his belt. Unhurried. The buckle, the leather sliding, and my breath goes shallow and high. My whole body lights up with something that is not fear—or is fear with all its wires crossed into want, the two of them so tangled I couldn’t pull one out of the other if you paid me. I should say something. There’s a sentence I could say. I don’t say it. My mouth is dry, my pulse is in my ears, and I am hard in my track pants already, before he’s done a single thing, just from the lock, the belt, the certainty coming off him in waves.

“Look at me,” he says, when my eyes drop. “Not the door. Not the floor. Me. You only have to do what I tell you. That’s all. You don’t have to think. You’ve been doing nothing but think for three weeks and look where it’s got you.” His voice is low and even. It slides right under all my defenses because it isn’t asking. “I’m going to take all of that off you for a while. The thinking. The deciding. You don’t have to carry any of it. Do you understand me?”

“Yeah.” It comes out wrecked.

“Then get off the table.” He’s got himself out now, his cock in his hand, and he doesn’t make a thing of it, doesn’t perform it, just stands there holding it like the next instruction is the most natural one in the world. “Get on your knees.”

And here’s the joke of it, the joke God built into this exact night. For three weeks every person in my life has been trying to get this knee strong enough to hold my weight, to keep me off the ground, to get me standing. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of medicine pointed at one goal, keep Roman Vane on his feet. And the only thing that’s going to make any of it stop hurting is going down. I lower myself off the table onto the floor, onto both knees, the bad one and the good one. The bad one flares white as it takes the hard tile, and I welcome it, I go down into the pain instead of away from it for once. And I kneel in front of him in the locked room and look up.

“Good,” he says. Just that. The same flat good he gives me when I hit a rep, except down here it drops through me and I feel it everywhere, in my chest, in my dick, in the back of my neck. Good. I have spent my whole life chasing a building full of people screaming my name and it turns out the thing I’d crawl for is one cold man saying one quiet word like he means it.

He puts his hand in my hair, not gentle, gets a grip, and guides my head. I open my mouth and let him push in.

It’s a lot. He doesn’t ease me into it, doesn’t ask, just feeds it back. My eyes water immediately. My throat works against it, and he holds my head where he wants it and says, “Breathe through your nose. Same as on the ice. In through your nose, let me in, you can do this.” And I do. I breathe through my nose, let my jaw go slack, let him use my mouth. The tears come, run hot down my face and off my jaw, not from grief, from the body, from the deep of it. And I don’t try to stop them, and he doesn’t either. He looks down at me crying on his cock with my ruined knee on the tile and something in his face I’d kill to see again moves behind his eyes, and he says, low, “There you are.”

And the strangest thing in the world happens.

The knee stops hurting.

Not less. Stops. For the first time since the night it went, since the stretcher, since the recovery room and the first dose and every dose after, the fire in my leg is just gone, switched off at the wall. Every circuit I’ve got is full of this, of him, of the stretch of my own jaw, the salt of my own tears, the grip in my hair, the one job I have, which is to kneel here and take it and not think. There’s no room left in me for the knee. There’s no room left in me for the comeback clock or my father or Dara’s shoot date or the dishes or the ceiling at four a.m. There’s just this, this narrow burning now, and it doesn’t hurt, none of it hurts, and I understand in a flood why people end up here, why a man would trade everything he is for a feeling that turns the pain off this completely. I’ve been chasing it in an orange bottle and it was never going to be in the bottle. It was always going to be in something exactly this dangerous.

I make a sound around him, helpless, and he says, “I know,” like he can hear all of it, the whole avalanche, and maybe he can. He sets a pace and I stay with it. My hands find his thighs and grip the fabric and hold on, not pushing him away, the opposite, pulling myself into it, anchoring to the one solid thing in a building full of empty seats. He’s not loud. He doesn’t talk dirty at me, doesn’t degrade me, just keeps his hand in my hair, his eyes down on me, and feeds me low steady words, that’s it, take it, you’re doing so well. Every one of them lands in the hole in my chest the cheering used to fill. When he finishes, he holds me there and makes me take it, and I do, I swallow because he wants me to. I’m still crying, and I have never in my adult life been this far from the thing that’s killing me.

—

After, the floor is hard and my knee has come back to life. The room is too bright, too quiet. I’m a twenty-five-year-old man on his knees on a treatment-room floor with a wet face, and I should feel like garbage. I keep waiting for the shame to land, the real kind, the kind that would make a healthy man scramble up and grab his bag and never come back.

It doesn’t land. There’s a version of me that would be wrecked by this, the version that exists on the framed jersey on my wall, the kid my father drove four hours each way to watch, the captain eighteen thousand people stood up for. That guy would rather die than be found on this floor. But that guy got left on the ice three weeks ago when the leg went, and I’ve been finding out ever since that there was less under him than anybody thought, including me. Take away the ice, the scoreboard, the noise, and what’s left is a man who’ll kneel on a bad knee in a locked room because somebody finally made the pain stop. So the shame doesn’t come. What comes instead, as he tucks himself away and reaches down to help me up and the warm dome of nothing-hurts starts, already, to recede at the edges, is panic. Not at what I did. At him leaving.

He gets me up onto the table again, back where I started. He turns to go get the ice and the chart, to become my doctor again, to put the coat back on between us. I watch the distance start to open, and I cannot stand it. The second he steps back into that cold, the pain’s going to come back. The apartment’s going to come back. The four a.m. is going to come back. I will be alone in the glass box with all of it, and I have just found out, kneeling on a floor, that he is the off switch.

My hand shoots out. I catch his sleeve.

“Don’t go yet.”

It’s small. It’s the smallest I’ve ever made my voice. I hear how it sounds, a grown man, a captain, a guy who’s never asked anybody to stay for anything, and I don’t care, the pride’s gone, I gave it to the floor twenty minutes ago and I don’t want it back. “Just—” My throat closes. “Don’t go yet. Please.”