11. Roman
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.”
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.”