Page 18 of Puck My Pain Away

Something moves at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. The ghost of where one would go on a man who had them. And I want it, that almost-smile, more than I wanted anything he did to me tonight. That should tell me something. I file it under the grin and don’t look at it.

Except I do look at it, for one second, in the dark with my heart still going. Because it’s a new thing and new things scare me now. The first weeks, what I wanted was the off switch, the relief, the twenty minutes of nothing, and I could tell myself that was just the pills by another name, a thing I was using, the same as the bottle. A man can use a thing. But this, the wanting to make him almost-smile, the wanting to be the one who got a reaction out of the most controlled man I’ve ever met, that’s not using. That’s something else, something with his actual face in the middle of it. It’s been growing in me under the other wanting like a second root system, quieter and deeper, a hundred times more dangerous, because the pills can’t break your heart and he can. I knew the day I texted you up that I was going under. I’m only now finding out it’s the wrong kind. I didn’t fall for a drug. A drug would be simpler. I’m falling for the man holding the bottle, and he hands me my coat at the end of every night to remind me which one of us is allowed to feel things.

—

After, I don’t want to leave. That’s new. Usually the cold comes down on him and I get put out and I go. Tonight I linger, pulling my shirt on slow, hunting for a reason to stay another minute in the lit room with him, and the question comes out of me before I’ve cleared it with the part of me that knows better.

“Is this only ever going to happen here?” I keep my eyes on my shirt cuff, my voice light, like it’s nothing. “Behind a locked door. In the dark. Is that—is this all it’s allowed to be?”

The room goes quiet in a different register. I’ve stepped over a line and I feel it the second the words are out, the line that says this is an arrangement, not a thing with a future, don’t you dare make it a thing with a future. I risk a look at him.

His face hasn’t changed. He doesn’t answer the question, not in words. He crosses to the hook by the door and takes down my coat, my big, stupid, team-issued coat, and he holds it out to me, open, for me to put my arms into. And that’s the answer. Here is your coat. The night’s over. There is no other room than this one. He says it without a single word, with a courtesy that’s somehow worse than if he’d just said no. I put my arms into the coat he’s holding because what else do I do. His hands settle the collar at my shoulders for one second, almost gentle, then drop away.

“Drive safe,” he says. “Water with the night dose.”

I go. The grin’s gone by the parking lot. I sit in the truck in the cold and understand that I just asked a locked door to love me back.

—

At home, I don’t do my exercises.

There’s a sheet Blake printed for me, range-of-motion stuff, the boring grind that’s the actual road back, fifteen minutes twice a day. It sits on the counter under a glass with a ring in it. I look at it, and I pour a drink instead. The knee can wait. The knee’s not the point anymore and somewhere I know the comeback’s become the cover story for the other thing, the appointments that aren’t appointments. I drink standing up, let the sheet sit there accusing me, and I don’t pick it up.

There was a version of me that did the boring fifteen minutes religiously. Two-a-day at sixteen, first one in the gym, last one out, the kid who believed the body was a promise you kept to yourself one rep at a time. I built everything I ever had out of that, the discipline, the willingness to do the dull, painful work when nobody was watching. It bought me a career, a letter on my chest, eighteen thousand people on their feet. And here’s the sheet, the same boring work, the road that actually leads back to all of it, fifteen honest minutes, and I would genuinely rather drink myself stupid and drive to a man who hurts me than do them. That’s how I know it’s got me. Not the knee buckling. This. That you could lay the whole road back out in front of me on a printed sheet, simple, doable, and I’ll step over it to get to the dark wing every single time. The discipline’s still in me. I can feel it. It just works for him now. I gave the best thing I ever had to the worst thing I ever did. I leave the sheet under the sweating glass, and I don’t pick it up. The ring it leaves is going to be there in the morning like a little round verdict.

Then I call Dara, because it’s easier to do it tonight while I’m numb than tomorrow while I’m not.

“Roman! How’s the⁠—?”

“I need you to push the date again.” I keep it flat. “The shoot. The comeback timeline. All of it. Push it.”

A pause. “Okay. Okay, sure, how far are we⁠—?”

“I don’t know. Just push it. The knee’s not ready.” It’s a lie shaped like a truth, the knee’s part of it but the knee’s not the reason. The reason is I am not, anywhere in me, ready to leave the dark wing and the locked door, ready to go back to being a man with a season. I can’t say that to my agent, so I say the knee. “Tell the gear people spring. Tell everybody spring.”

She’s quiet a second, and when she talks again the brightness has gone careful. “Roman, that’s the third push. People are going to start—” She stops herself. “I’ll handle it. You just focus on getting well.” And the kindness in it, the getting well, lands wrong in my chest, because I’m not getting well, I’m doing the precise opposite with my whole heart, and the people who love me keep handing me their faith like I’m worth it and I keep spending it on the thing that’s killing me.

That’s the part the pills-and-bottle version of the story leaves out, the part nobody warns you about. It’s not just that you destroy yourself. It’s that you spend everyone else to do it. Dara’s going to go to bat for me with the gear company a third time, going to put her own name on the line saying he’s coming, he’s almost back, trust me, and she has no idea she’s vouching for a man who’s using her phone calls as cover for the thing he actually drives across the city to do. Theo’s sending me hearts. My father, somewhere, is telling people his boy’s working hard on the comeback, the one thing he knows how to be proud of. They’re all of them invested in a Roman Vane who’s grinding through rehab, coming back stronger, and that man doesn’t exist anymore. I let him die in a locked room weeks ago. Every day I don’t tell them is another day I take their belief under false pretenses and convert it into more time in the dark. I used to be a guy people could count on. The C on the jersey meant something. Now I’m a confidence scheme that loves the people it’s running, and the loving doesn’t make it better, the loving makes it so much worse. I hang up the phone. I pour another drink and cannot stand to be in the same skin as myself for a while.

—

Late, in bed, in the dark, I do the thing I’ve started doing.

I scroll up through his texts. All of them, weeks of them, from the first you should be asleep to tonight’s water with the night dose, and I read them looking for one. Just one. One text that isn’t an instruction. One that’s a question about me, or a joke, or a thinking about you, one line that came from the man and not the doctor, one crumb that says I’m a person to him and not a protocol he’s running.

There isn’t one. Page after page, all the way back, and every single message is a command or a correction or a dose. Take the scheduled dose. Ice twenty minutes. Sleep is part of recovery. Water, not whiskey. Drive safe. Care, all of it, you could read every line as care, and not one word of it is warm, not one word reaches for me like I reach for him. I lie there in the glass box with the phone lighting my face and feel the loneliest I have ever felt, which is a thing I didn’t think was possible anymore, to find a new floor under the floor.

He doesn’t love me. I know it like you know cold, in the body, before the mind agrees. He runs me. He turns the noise off and he runs me, and the running looks enough like care that I can pretend on the good nights. But there’s no message in this whole phone that a man sends to someone he loves. I am in something all the way up to my neck with a person who has never once, not by accident, been warm to me.

His last text sits at the bottom, unanswered. Water with the night dose. I should write something back. Good night, even. I don’t. For once I don’t. I set the phone face-down on the nightstand and I lie in the dark not answering him, the smallest rebellion there is, the only card I’ve got left to play, and I tell myself it means I still have a self in here somewhere that he doesn’t own.

I don’t believe it. But I hold onto it, and I don’t pick the phone back up, and that’s the closest thing to winning I’ve got tonight.

It nearly doesn’t last the night. I lie there in the dark being strong, not answering. The knee starts up its slow throb. The silence of the glass box gets bigger and bigger until it’s the only thing in the room, and the rebellion that felt like a self with a spine in it starts feeling like a kid holding his breath to punish a parent who isn’t watching. He’s asleep. He doesn’t know I’m not answering. The only person my big stand is happening to is me. And somewhere around one in the morning I cave. I reach over, turn the phone face-up, and type good night into the box, my thumb actually over send. Then I stop. I look at the two little words sitting there, one more good dog reporting in, and something in me I didn’t know was still alive refuses, just barely, just this once. I delete them letter by letter. I put the phone back face-down on the nightstand with the last text still unanswered. It’s nothing. It’s the smallest thing a man ever did. But I deleted them myself, and I hold onto that in the dark like the one chip I’ve still got in the game. That’s where I live now, hoarding a rebellion the size of a deleted text and calling it proof I’m still in here.

12

ELIAS