Page 33 of Puck My Pain Away

Ninety days. A season ago I counted my life in shifts, shot totals, a date on a press release; now I count it in coins that say I didn’t die this month. The second one weighs more than the first, not because it’s bigger, it’s the same cheap aluminum, but because thirty days is hope and ninety days is evidence. After, in the lot, Theo hugs me too long and Russ tells me to call him tonight same as always. Then I get in my truck and drive across town in the middle of a bright weekday afternoon to Elias’s building, sober, clear, nobody’s secret. I park out front in plain view. I walk up to the door and do the thing I came to do, which is press the buzzer. The actual buzzer. Not the side code he gave me in the winter for coming and going in the dark, the one I used to use at two in the morning so no front desk would clock me. I’m done coming in the dark through side doors. I stand in the daylight at the front of his building. I ring the bell like a man with nothing to hide, and I wait for him to come let me in.

—

He lets me up, and we don’t fall into anything, because we agreed in the diner that there’d be no falling into things ever again, so we sit on the edge of his bed with all our clothes on like two people about to do something difficult, which we are.

“We say it out loud first,” I tell him, because it’s my term and I’m going to be the one who keeps it. “All of it. What this is. What I want, what you want, where the line is.” So we do. It’s not smooth and it’s not sexy, it’s two grown men sitting fully dressed on a bed talking plainly about what we’re about to do to each other. It should feel cold, businesslike. It doesn’t. It feels like the bravest thing I’ve done sober. I tell him I want the dynamic. I’m not going to pretend I don’t, that I’ve talked myself out of liking what I like, because that was never the problem; the problem was never that I wanted to kneel for him, the problem was a chemical and a secret and a man who used both to take what I’d have given him anyway if he’d just asked in the light. So I’m asking in the light. I tell him I want him to run it, in the room, with the door unlocked. I tell him the collar’s fine, more than fine, but the leash from before is gone, that was never about me. He tells me what he wants, plainly, and I make him say it, every want, out loud, because a thing said out loud can’t become a thing done to you in the dark.

And then I give him my word, the one I chose myself, sitting in a program meeting thinking about exactly this. “Whistle,” I say. “That’s the word. Anything’s happening I want stopped, I say whistle, and you stop like the ref blew it, full stop, no question, no finishing the play.” He asks if I understand that he’ll check too, that stopping isn’t only on me. “I know,” I say. “But the word’s mine. In a game, everybody skates till the whistle. I spent my whole life waiting for somebody else to blow it. I’m holding it now.” He looks at me a moment, and something moves in his face that isn’t his old hunger, it’s steadier than that. He says, “Okay. Whistle,” like he’s filing it somewhere it’ll never be lost. Then he stands up. Now we both know the talking’s done, the choosing is made, and what comes next is the thing we both want with every wall down.

—

He picks the collar up off the dresser, and he doesn’t make a show of it. He just comes to stand in front of me where I’m sitting on the edge of the bed and tips my chin up with two fingers. I let my head go back. He fastens it around my throat, his hands gentle in a way they never let themselves be in the winter when gentle would’ve given too much away. The leather settles against my pulse, snug, warm. I feel it close, feel something in my chest unlock at the same time, which makes no sense and perfect sense, because this is the thing I was chasing in the dark with pills in my fist, this exact feeling of being held in place by someone I chose. I get to have it now with my eyes open, my blood clean, a word in my mouth that stops the world if I use it. “There,” he says, low, his thumb running once over the leather at my throat. “Look at you.”

I go down for him on my own, slide off the bed onto my knees on the floor. He lets me, lets me set the pace of this part because I asked to. I get his belt open, his cock out, and I take him in my mouth like I’ve wanted to when I was sober enough to remember it, slow first, my tongue flat under the head, then deeper. He groans above me and gets a hand in my hair, not yanking, just holding, guiding. I take him to the back of my throat, swallow around him, feel his thighs go tight. “Good,” he says, rough, “just like that, take it,” and the praise lands somewhere the degradation never reached, because this time it’s true and this time I earned it on purpose. He fucks my mouth slow, shallow, watching me the whole time. I look up at him with my lips stretched around his cock, the collar snug on my throat, and I have never in my life felt more like I chose to be exactly where I am.

He pulls me off before he’s close, thumb on my jaw, and tells me to get on the bed, and I do, on my back this time because I told him I wanted to see him, another thing the dark never allowed. He preps me properly, which he never bothered with in the winter when it was all spit and hurry and the hurt was half the point. Now he warms the lube between his fingers first and works me open slow, one finger then two, curling, patient, watching my face for every flinch, every want. The care of it isn’t soft, it’s its own kind of dominance, the kind that says I’m going to take you apart right and you’re going to let me. By the time he lines up I’m shaking, leaking against my own stomach, begging him, actually begging, “Please, Elias, I’m ready, please.” He pushes into me slow and full. We both go still at the top of it, breathing, his forehead dropping to mine. “Okay?” he asks, one word, and I say “Yes, God, yes, move,” and he does.

He fucks me deep and steady, one hand braced by my head, the other wrapped around my cock, stroking me in time. It’s nothing like before. Before was about disappearing; this is about being completely here, every nerve, every breath, his weight, his stubble against my jaw, the collar tight on my throat, his eyes on mine the whole way. The heat climbs and climbs. He feels me start to go and says, “With me, come with me, look at me,” and I do. I hold his eyes and come hard over his fist with him buried deep. He follows me right there, groaning into my neck, pulsing inside me, the two of us shaking through it together at the same time, which we never once did in the winter, because back then he always made sure I came alone. Not this time. This time we go over together, and that, more than anything, is how I know the thing between us finally turned clean.

He stays in me after, breathing, his weight on his forearms so he doesn’t crush me. He doesn’t pull out and turn away and go cold like the winter always ended. He stays, presses his mouth to the side of my throat above the collar. I lie there full and sore, shaking under him, and let myself feel every part of it instead of chasing the next thing. That’s the part I keep turning over even now, with him still inside me and my heart slowing down. Every other time I let him have me it was to get out of my own body, to switch myself off, and the sex was just the cheaper twin of the pills, another door out. This was the opposite. This kept me in my body so hard I couldn’t have left it if I tried, every nerve reporting, his stubble, his weight, the leather snug at my throat, my own pulse hammering under it, all of me here, all of me choosing. I didn’t disappear once. I didn’t want to. For a man who spent a year paying everything he had to not be present for his own life, staying all the way through something that good, on purpose, eyes open, is its own kind of ninety-day chip.

—

At midnight he makes eggs, which is the most surreal and the best part of the whole night. The clock over the stove reads 12:04. I hear him crack the shells against the counter, two clean taps, then the whisk against the bowl.

I’m wrung out and sore in the good way, wearing his T-shirt and a pair of his sweats. He’s at the stove in the low kitchen light scrambling eggs in a pan with the radio turned down to almost nothing, some old station. I sit at the counter and watch this man who spent a winter being the most dangerous person in my life stand there pushing eggs around a pan because I said I was hungry. It isn’t lost on me how strange it is, how far we came to get to something this ordinary. The butter hisses. He salts the pan, scrapes the eggs soft, plates them steaming. He slides a plate in front of me and we eat at the counter, hips not quite touching, not talking much, the radio low. The fork is cold in my hand. My knee aches where I knelt on the floor. Nobody’s hiding, nothing’s secret, there’s no pill in the equation anywhere, just eggs and a radio and the ache of good sex still humming in me.

I reach up without thinking and touch the collar, still on, my fingers running over the leather at my throat. I wait for it to feel like a leash, like a thing that owns me the bad way, like everything used to own me—the scoreboard, my father, the off-switch, the man at this stove. It doesn’t. It feels like being chosen and choosing back. I think about the word in my pocket, whistle, the one I haven’t needed and could’ve used any second. That’s the whole point, that I held the power to stop it the entire time and didn’t want to. Being owned when you’re the one holding the whistle isn’t being owned at all. It’s something I don’t have a clear word for yet, but it feels like home with the lights on.

And here’s the thing ninety days taught me that no amount of white-knuckling ever could: wanting this was never the sickness. I spent months in the dark half-believing the kink was the rot, that a man who wanted to kneel and wear a collar for someone bigger than him was already broken halfway to the pills, like the wanting and the dying were the same hunger. They’re not. The collar at my throat right now isn’t hurting anybody, isn’t lying to anybody, isn’t costing me a single morning of being clear. The disease was never that I liked to give myself over. The disease was doing it in secret, doing it loaded, doing it with a man who fed me poison to keep me kneeling. Take away the secret, the chemical, the predator, and what’s left is just this, a thing I like, out loud, sober, safe, with a word in my mouth that ends it on command. I get to keep the part that was always mine. I just had to learn to do it in the light. Elias catches me touching it and doesn’t say anything smug, just reaches over and runs his thumb over my knuckles once where they rest against my throat. Then he goes back to his eggs.

—

In the morning we make exactly one plan, because Russ says you don’t build a future in a night, you build it one Thursday at a time.

Breakfast Thursday. That’s it. That’s the plan, a diner, a Thursday, the two of us, and the rule attached to it that we both said out loud before I left, which is meetings first. His group, my group, both of us, before anything between us, every week, no exceptions, because the floor we stand on is the only thing that holds the rest of it up. He walks me to the door in the morning light, no collar now, that comes off and goes back on the dresser by agreement, a thing for the room and not a thing I wear out into the world. He doesn’t kiss me goodbye like we’re sure of anything. He just says, “Thursday. Meetings first,” and I say it back, and I mean it.

I drive to practice with the ninety-day chip in my pocket and the radio up, not down, all the way up, some song I don’t even like. The knee is good under me, the morning is bright, and I’m not driving toward a comeback or away from a hole. I’m just driving to the rink to do the work because I love the work, sore from a man I chose in the daylight, ninety days clean with a Thursday on the calendar. For the first time since a hit into the boards took my whole name away from me, I am exactly where I want to be and nobody had to make me.

26

ELIAS

Opening night, I watch him from a seat I paid for, section 114, row J, with a paper ticket in my pocket and nothing around my neck.

Sitting in the crowd in a sweater like any other man who bought his way in; there’s no credential on a lanyard against my chest, no laminated thing that says I belong on the bench or in the tunnel or anywhere a player’s body is. I’m not staff. I’m not the one they call. I’m a spectator in a building full of spectators, and a year ago that demotion would have felt like death, being on the outside of the glass instead of the trusted hand inside it. Tonight, it just feels like the correct distance for a man like me to stand from an athlete. The far side of the boards. A paid seat. The healthiest place I’ve ever occupied in relation to Roman Vane is a chair I have no special right to, and I take it, and I’m grateful for it.

They announce him for the home opener, and the building comes up to its feet before he’s even over the boards, a full arena standing for a man a lot of them had written off for dead, and he takes his first shift back to a noise I can feel in my sternum three sections up. He doesn’t score. He doesn’t need to. He wins a puck battle along the wall, makes a clean outlet pass, skates off after forty-five seconds breathing hard. The place roars for a forty-five-second shift with no point on it. They’re not cheering a stat tonight. They’re cheering that he’s alive, upright, back. I sit in my paid seat with my throat tight and clap for him with everybody else, one more pair of hands in a building full of them, no different and no closer. It’s enough. It’s more than I have any right to. I came to watch him be well from the distance the wellness requires, and he is, gloriously, in front of eighteen thousand people, none of whom will ever know my name, which is exactly as it should be.

The furnace in my chest, the nameless heat I carried through the worst of it, has a name now and a temperature I can live beside. It isn’t gone. I don’t think it goes. But it stopped being the thing it was in the hospital corridor, the unbearable burning of a man feeling something his whole architecture was built to prevent, and became something quieter, a banked warmth I carry around with me, that flares clean watching him win a puck battle and settles again when the whistle blows. That’s what loving him is now, after everything: not the hunger that nearly killed us both, not the appetite wearing a coat, just this steady low fire I tend from a paid seat, glad past speaking that he’s out there and well, wanting nothing from the wanting except that he go on being exactly this alive. I spent years certain that any feeling that returned nothing was a feeling to be eliminated. I sit in section 114 and let one cost me everything. It gives me back nothing but the sight of him skating. I wouldn’t trade it for a single thing the old life ever paid me.

—

I still have my license, but it lives on conditions, and I’ve stopped experiencing the conditions as a leash.

The board didn’t pull it, in the end. They suspended, reviewed, weighed the self-report I sent before they could ask, the cooperation, the testimony I gave against my own interest in the Aldridge matter when the case reopened, and they handed down something with my name still on it and a cage built around it. Supervised practice only. An addiction-medicine clinic on the east side, a senior physician who signs off on me, my prescribing watched by people who are paid to watch it. And no athletes. Not ever again, not anywhere, a permanent line through the one population I used to hunt, written into the terms of my licensure in black and white. I should resent it. The old me would have experienced a supervised practice as a humiliation, a brilliant clinician leashed to a junior’s signature. Instead I drive to that clinic four days a week and I treat people clawing their way out of the exact hole I used to dig for others, and I am, for the first time in my career, useful in a direction that doesn’t feed me, because there’s nothing at that clinic for my appetite, no dependence to cultivate, no one to own, just sick people getting incrementally less sick under a set of eyes that aren’t only mine. The cage is the point. A man like me should be practiced on a leash. I’ve become someone who can say that and mean it.

There’s a thing that happens at the clinic I didn’t expect, and I’ve stopped trying not to feel it. The people who come through are mostly young, mostly frightened, mostly in the early ugly part where the body is in revolt and the shame is louder than the sickness, and every one of them, when they first sit down across from me, is some version of the brother I buried. Caleb at twenty, Caleb sweating through a taper, Caleb lying about his count. For twenty years, I built a life designed to never sit in that chair again, to never be the helpless one beside the wrecked kid, and I did it by becoming the man who held all the power in the room, and it harmed the next two people I loved. Now I sit across from a Caleb four days a week and I have almost no power at all, just a supervised pad, a set of protocols, a colleague checking my work. I help them anyway, in small unglamorous increments, and not one of them becomes mine. That’s the amends I can actually make. Not to Caleb, who’s gone, and not to Sam, who’s gone, and not really to Roman, who got well without me. To the next frightened kid, and the one after, by being a doctor who finally treats the disease instead of feeding on the diseased.