Page 23 of Puck My Pain Away

“Make it stop,” I say.

He goes still.

“All of it. The knee, the word, Gus, Theo’s face, the kid’s empty chair, all of it. You’re the only one who can make it stop. So make it stop. I don’t care how. I’m asking you to.” I’m gripping the front of his shirt now and I don’t remember grabbing it. “Please. Make everything stop.”

And something moves in his eyes that I’ve never seen there before. Not triumph. Something more careful than that, more interested, a man recalculating. Because I’ve never asked. In every locked room before this I’ve been taken, I’ve surrendered, I’ve been the thing it happens to. Tonight I walked in and grabbed his shirt and asked. He’s clocking the difference, filing it, deciding what to do with it.

What he does with it is hand me the reins, and I understand even as it’s happening that it’s a gift he’s choosing to give and could take back, that letting me have this is its own kind of having me, but I’m too far gone to care.

“Then take it,” he says, low, close to my mouth. “You want to stop being the one it happens to? Fine. Stop. Put me where you want me.” His hand closes over mine where it’s fisted in his shirt. “Go on, Captain. Take something for once.”

I’ve never been on this side of it with him. My whole life I’ve been the one with the size and the reach, the one who throws the hit. With him, I gave all that up the first night and never asked for it back. Now he’s handing it to me, and I take it, because taking it is louder than the word done and right now loud is all I want.

I get him to the bed. He lets me move him, lets me put my hands on him hard. I know he’s letting me, that none of this happens unless he allows it, but his shirt comes off under my hands, his belt, the rest of it. For the first time it’s his body laid out and waiting on what I’ll do instead of mine. He hands me the lube without being asked, watching my face the entire time, and I slick two fingers and work him open, because even now, even drunk on the turnaround, I won’t just take him without this. I go slow. One finger, then two, curling into him until his breath catches and his hips push back against my hand. I watch the cold calm of the most controlled man I know crack open an inch at a time, feel him start to give around my fingers and not bother to hide it.

“You’re stalling,” he says, and there’s something close to a smile in it. “I said take it.”

So I do. I line up and push into him, slow at first, feeling him stretch and give around my cock. The tight heat of him closes over me inch by inch until I’m seated all the way, and we both go still with it. Then not slow. His hands flat on the headboard, my grip bruising on his hips. I fuck him like I’ve never let myself, hard and deep and selfish, the slap of my body against his loud in the bare room. It’s not gentle, it’s not tender, it’s not the careful held thing I’d want it to be in some better version of my life. It’s me trying to fuck a single word out of my own skull, done, done, done, driving into him like I can leave it behind in the next thrust, and he takes all of it, every brutal stroke, his cock hard and untouched against the sheets, watching me over his shoulder with those flat eyes that miss nothing, even now reading me, even now in charge of the thing he’s letting me think I’m running.

And it works. For however long it lasts it actually works. There’s no knee, no Gus, no chair with a party hat. There’s just the heat, the grip, the sound he makes, the white noise filling up every room in my head where the bad things live. I come with my forehead between his shoulder blades and his name in my mouth, and for about four seconds I am nowhere, nothing, free.

—

The four seconds end like they always end. I’m not even all the way out of his bed before the dread comes back up my throat like water filling a hull.

It comes faster every time. Used to be I’d get an hour after, a whole clean hour where the quiet held. Then twenty minutes. Now it’s the time it takes my heartbeat to come down, and it’s already coming down. The word is already back, done, and Gus’s flat face, and the analytics kid filming my body as it forgets how to work. I’m lying there sweating in the sheets of the man I just fucked, and the silence is already turning on me, already filling up with everything I drove here to outrun.

“Hey.” My voice cracks. I roll over and find him, find the cold, solid fact of him beside me. “It’s coming back. It’s already coming back. I need—” I don’t even know how to finish it. “More. I need more. Don’t let it come back yet. Please.”

I hear myself beg and I don’t care. That’s the thing that should scare me and doesn’t anymore, that I’ll beg, that I have no floor left under me, that I’d get on my knees on this man’s hardwood and ask for anything if it bought me ten more minutes of the quiet. He props up on an elbow and looks down at me. I look back up at him wrecked and pleading. I watch him decide to give me what I’m asking for, and I’m so grateful I could weep.

And here’s the sick joke I tell no one: I know exactly what this is. I’m not a stupid man. I’ve sat through the same league seminars every player sits through, the ones with the slides, the brain scans, the percentages, the earnest doctor explaining how it works, how the hole gets dug, how the dose that quieted you Tuesday won’t touch you by Friday and you’ll need more, always more. The math of it is cold, certain, pointed straight at a guy exactly like me. I could draw the diagram. I could give the seminar. I know the name for what I am the same way I know the name for an offside, and not one ounce of the knowing slows my hand or shuts my mouth or gets me up off this bed and out the door. That’s the part the slides never explain. They tell you what’s happening to you like that’ll be enough, like a man drowning has never once heard of water. I know I’m drowning. I’m asking him to push my head down anyway, because down is the only place the noise stops.

He gets up. I hear a drawer, water running, his bare feet on the floor. When he comes back, he sits on the edge of the bed. He takes my hand, turns it palm up, and puts two pills in it.

I don’t ask what they are.

That’s the thing I’ll come back to, after, when there’s an after. He doesn’t tell me and I don’t ask. There’s a half-second where the old Roman, the one who never missed a birthday, leans in from somewhere far away and says you don’t even know what those are. I hear him, and I close my hand over the pills anyway. Because I do know, near enough. I know they’re his, I know they come from the same hand that writes my scripts, runs my knee, takes away the word done. I know they’ll make everything stop, and that’s the only fact I’m shopping for tonight. What they are exactly doesn’t make the list. I asked him to make it stop. This is him making it stop. I lift my hand to my mouth and take them, dry, while he watches. I lie back down and wait for the quiet to come and take me.

It comes. God, it comes. It comes slow, heavy, warm, rolling up from my feet like a tide coming in over sand. The bad room in my head goes dark one light at a time, Gus first, then the chair, then Theo, then the word, until there’s nothing left lit at all. The ceiling goes soft. His hand is on my chest, I think, somewhere, anchoring me, and I’m aware of him moving over me again, of being touched, of wanting it and saying so, my own voice coming from a long way off telling him yes, telling him don’t stop, asking for it, getting it. Everything’s loose, slow, good, far away, mine, all of it mine. I chose it, I keep choosing it, every blurred minute of it I’m still in there saying yes.

I wake at dawn.

Gray light again, his ceiling, his sheets. I’m sore in a dozen places and there are marks on me, a bruise blooming on my hip in the shape of a grip, a soreness that tells its own plain story. I lie there in the early quiet and take inventory of my own body, and not one thing on it surprises me. I remember asking. I remember all of it, blurred at the edges but mine, the begging, the pills in my palm, saying yes and meaning it. Whatever happened to me last night, I asked for, and I’d ask again. That should be the thing that finally scares me upright and out the door, that the marks all square with the asking and the asking doesn’t horrify me at all. He’s already up. I can hear him in the kitchen, the ordinary sounds of a man making coffee, and I get my clothes on slow, every muscle complaining, and I find I can’t quite look at the bed.

—

I drive home with the windows down because the cold air is the only thing that feels honest.

The streets are empty, that blue scrubbed hour before the city wakes. I’ve got the heater off, the window open, the wind hitting my face hard enough to sting. I’m sore everywhere, hollowed out clean, and there’s a flat gray calm in me that I don’t trust but won’t question. My phone buzzes in the cupholder. I glance at it at a red light. A number I don’t know, local, no name attached.

I let it ring out. Three buzzes, four, then the screen goes dark with a little voicemail icon, and I don’t think about it twice. Could be anyone. A scheduler, a robocall, somebody with the wrong number. I’m not in the business of answering unknown numbers at five in the morning, I’m in the business of getting home and getting horizontal before the gray calm wears off, and a call I didn’t ask for from a name I don’t have is the easiest thing in the world to let slide off me this morning, when everything slides off me, when I am one long frictionless surface that nothing sticks to anymore.

The light goes green. I leave the phone face-down in the cupholder and I drive. Somewhere in the voicemail I’m not going to listen to, a reporter named Erin Vasquez is saying her name into a machine, pulling a thread I don’t even know exists yet. I roll home through the empty blue streets, sore and marked and calm, already counting the hours until I can go back.

16

ELIAS