Page 17 of Puck My Pain Away

—

I take the collar out of the drawer where I’ve kept it since the night I decided he was ready for it.

It’s a plain thing, leather, a ring at the throat, nothing a person would look at twice in another context, and I bought it the same way I do everything—quietly, weeks ahead, surveying not lunging. I hold it up. I watch him understand what it is, watch the flush climb his throat, the want and the shame braided so tight he couldn’t pull them apart now if he tried. I don’t ask. I’ve earned past asking tonight.

He could refuse this. I want that on the record of my own mind, the one ledger I keep honest. The door is locked but the lock turns from the inside; he put himself on this side of it, drove here, climbed the stairs, said the words. There is a version of the next ten seconds where he stands up, takes his script and his shame, walks out into the cold and never comes back. Some nights I’ve half-expected him to. He never does, because the thing I’m offering is the only thing that turns the screaming off, and a drowning man doesn’t argue with the rope just because of whose hand is holding it. So I hold the collar up and I wait. I watch him choose it, watch him tip his chin up the half-inch that gives me his throat. Only then do I move.

I buckle it on him, my fingers at his throat, the leather creaking as it draws snug, his pulse going hard and fast under my knuckles, his breath shortening, the heat coming off his skin in the cool room. I clip the lead to the ring, the small click of the catch loud in the quiet, and I feel the whole big frame of him go still and pliant under that little weight of leather like I’ve thrown a switch. Two hundred pounds of professional athlete, gone soft and waiting at a touch to the throat. There is no drug on earth that does for me what that does.

“On the floor,” I tell him, and he goes.

What I do to him then I do slowly, and I do cold. I make him beg through all of it, beg with the collar at his throat and my hand on the lead, beg how I want it and again when the first time isn’t enough. I take him hard, no kindness in it, my fist wrapped in the lead, my other hand at the back of his neck. I tell him what he is in a low flat voice while I do it, the filthy patient ledger of it, look at you, the captain, this is what you came across the city for, this is the only thing that quiets you now, and every word goes into him and lights him brighter. The humiliation isn’t the cost of the relief for him, it IS the relief, the permission to stop being the great Roman Vane and just be a thing that’s held. I keep him on the edge and I don’t let him have it. I make him ask. I make him beg for the one thing his body’s screaming for, and I hold it back until the asking is total, until there’s nothing of him left that isn’t the asking. Only then, when he’s all the way down, all the way given, do I let him come. The sound he makes when I finally allow it is the sound of a man set down after carrying something too heavy for too long.

And then, for one second, in the slack of his face, I see Sam.

It’s nothing he did. It’s the after, the bottomless emptiness that comes over a face when the wanting’s spent and there’s no armor up yet, the open ruined peace of it, and I have seen that exact expression before, on another young man, in another locked room, in the months before the night they found him. The resemblance isn’t physical. Sam was slight and dark and Roman is none of those things. It’s the look. The total surrender, the floor finally reached, and under it, if you’re the kind of man who can see it, the small bright thing that’s already dying.

The room tilts. For one second the antiseptic smell is the other room’s smell, the body on the floor is the other body. I am, for one second, standing exactly where I swore I’d never stand again, having done exactly the thing the file in my drawer is supposed to stop me doing. What might be horror moves up through me cold and fast.

Because I did love Sam. That’s the part no inquiry would ever understand, the part that makes me worse and not better. It wasn’t nothing to me, whatever the clean story would need it to have been, a predator and a victim, clean roles, clean villainy. I loved being his whole world. I loved it like you love the only warm thing in a cold life, and when he died, I didn’t feel the relief of a man whose crime has covered itself over. I felt bereaved. I went to a different city, built a different practice, waited the regulation length of time for a man whose references have gaps. The whole while, the thing I missed wasn’t a person exactly. It was the feeling of being necessary to the point of someone’s survival. I have spent four years in a controlled empty apartment starving for it, and now it’s here again, on the floor of a locked room, wearing a hockey player’s face. I am not horrified that it’s happening. I’m horrified at how glad I am. There’s the truth I’ll never write in any chart. A monster who didn’t love them would be easier. I’m the other kind.

Then I straighten my cuffs.

That’s all it takes. The motion of it, the familiar small adjustment, the wrists, the fabric squared. The room rights itself. The smell is just antiseptic, the man on the floor just Roman, the second gone like it was never there. I’ve had a lifetime of practice closing that door. The horror was real. The horror was brief. The closing of it took less effort than it should, which is the truest and worst thing I know about myself, that I can see Sam’s face rise out of Roman’s, feel the whole weight of what that means, and then make it go away.

“Clean yourself up,” I tell him. My voice does what I tell it. “Water tonight, not whiskey, with the new dose. I’ll see you at the next session.”

He slowly gathers himself off the floor, wrecked and grateful. I unbuckle the collar from his throat and set it back in the drawer. I do not let myself look at the drawer below it, the locked one, where the file is, where Sam is, two lines of my own old handwriting and an incident note with the hour on it. I make the thought go away. I am very good at making the thought go away. That’s the reason there’s going to be a second file someday, and I know it, standing in the bright room while Roman ties his shoes with shaking hands, and I do not stop, because knowing has never once been the thing that stops me.

He says good night at the door, quiet, hopeful, already half-gone on the new script and the old need. I tell him good night back. I lock the building behind us both. And I drive home through the empty city with Sam’s face hovering at the edge of the windshield the whole way, surfacing and being squared away, surfacing and being squared away. Somewhere past the halfway mark I stop fighting it and just let him ride along, the boy I keep in a drawer, the proof of where this goes, sitting in the passenger seat of a car driven by a man who has decided, fully and in advance, to go there again.

At a red light, I catch my own eyes in the mirror and they’re calm, untroubled, the eyes everyone in the organization trusts, and I hold the look until the light changes. There’s nothing in them. There never has been. That’s the face I built on purpose; the one that gets a man like me handed the broken ones gift-wrapped, and it works on me too, most nights. Tonight, it doesn’t quite. Tonight, Sam rides shotgun the whole way home, and I let him, and I do not slow the car.

11

ROMAN

Blake set up a group thing for Thursday night. A recovery group, she called it, careful not to say the other word, some guys who’ve been through the injury wall, just talk, no pressure, I think it’d be good for you, Roman. She wrote the address on a card and pressed it into my hand in the corridor with that decent worried look she gives me. I said yeah, maybe, thanks. I meant none of it.

I drive past the address. I actually do that. I route past the little community building with the lit windows, the folding chairs I can see through the glass, a circle of men with paper cups, the exact thing that might save my life. And I keep driving, out to the facility, to him, because the group can’t turn the noise off and he can.

I slow down going past it, though. That’s the part I’ll think about later. I slow the truck almost to a stop at the curb and I look at those men in there, ordinary guys, a couple of them big enough to have played something once, all of them sitting in a circle telling the truth out loud to strangers, and some animal part of me wants it so bad my hands tighten on the wheel. To say it. To sit in a folding chair and say I’m twenty-five and my knee’s gone and I don’t know who I am without the game and I’ve started doing something that’s going to bury me. To have a room full of men nod because they’ve each been exactly there. For one second, I almost park. I almost do it. And then I think about what saying it out loud would cost, that the second I name it to that circle it becomes real and I have to actually stop. I am not ready to stop. I want the dark wing more than I want to be saved. That wanting is stronger than the fear, stronger than the shame, stronger, tonight, than whatever’s left of my survival instinct. So I take my foot off the brake. The lit windows slide back into the dark behind me. I leave the one open door in my whole life standing open and I drive to the locked one. There’s a card in my pocket from a woman trying to help me and I’m using the drive she gave me to get to the thing she’s trying to help me with. I text Theo from a red light so I don’t have to feel it. At a recovery group Blake set up. Proud of myself lol. Talk soon. Send. The lie’s so easy now it doesn’t even snag going out. Theo writes back a string of hearts and THAT’S MY GUY, and I turn the phone face-down on the seat so the hearts stop looking at me.

He buzzes me in. The wing’s dark. I know my way to his door now in the green emergency light without thinking about it, and that’s its own kind of horror if I let it be, how this has become the route my body knows best, more familiar than the path to my own gym.

—

We’re not careful tonight. That’s the thing. We’ve gotten away with it enough times that the fear’s worn down to something thinner. We’re in the treatment room with the lights low, I’ve got him and he’s got me, and neither of us hears the outer door.

Then there’s a sound in the corridor. Keys. A whole heavy ring of them, jangling. The squeak of a cart wheel. A flashlight beam swings across the frosted glass of the door, and my whole body goes to ice. The cleaning crew. Early. Right outside.

Elias doesn’t even change his breathing.

He puts one flat hand on my chest, presses me back into the dark corner by the supply shelves where the glass won’t show us. He steps to the door. He opens it a careful few inches into the light, and he becomes, instantly, completely, a different man. “Evening. I’m running late on a treatment write-up, I’ll lock up when I’m through, don’t let me hold you off the rest of the floor.” His voice is easy, warm, a touch tired, the voice of the most trusted clinician in the building putting in an honest late hour. I’m pressed into the dark four feet away with my heart trying to climb out my throat, watching him lie to a janitor with not one molecule of strain. The janitor says, “No problem, doc, have a good one.” The keys jangle off down the hall, the cart squeaks away, the beam swings off the glass and is gone.

He shuts the door. He turns the lock again. He looks at me in the dark corner.

And I start grinning. I can’t help it. It comes up out of me from somewhere under all the wreckage, the old feeling, the bench feeling, the locker-room-after-a-win feeling, getting away with something with somebody, and I’m grinning like an idiot in the dark with my heart still slamming and I feel, for the first time in I don’t know how long, alive, lit up, like the danger flushed something clean through me. “Holy shit,” I whisper, and I’m laughing, almost. “You didn’t even blink. You’re terrifying.”