17. Roman
ROMAN
They put me behind a folding table with a stack of jerseys and a row of cameras, and they call it good news.
It’s a press event. The club rents the atrium with the championship banners.
They wheel out a backdrop with the sponsor logos, and Dara stands me up at a microphone in a suit that fits looser than it did in the fall.
The announcement is the announcement everyone’s been starving for: Roman Vane returns to the lineup March first. There’s a date on a screen behind me, enormous, white numbers on team blue.
There’s a graphic with my face on it from two seasons ago, the good face, the winning one.
And the room actually applauds when Sloane says the date, a real ripple of it from the beat reporters and the season-ticket people they let in for the optics.
The comeback. The story sells itself. Captain felled, captain rises, banner night by spring.
They’ve built the whole machine around a date, and not one person in this bright loud room knows the date is a lie a doctor is privately making sure I’ll miss, least of all me, because some animal part of me sits up at those white numbers and believes them, wants them, March first, a door back into being the guy on the old graphic.
Then they sit me down to sign.
It’s a stack of jerseys for the sponsors and the kids’ foundation, a hundred of them.
I uncap the marker, pull the first one over, and my hand won’t hold still.
It’s small at first, a tremor I can press flat against the fabric.
But the cameras are close, the shutters going, and by the tenth jersey, the shake has climbed up into my whole forearm.
The R of my own name comes out jagged, a kid’s signature, the pen skating.
I clamp my jaw and try to hide it under the table between sheets, and it won’t hide.
I see one of the photographers lower his camera and look at my hand instead of through the lens, just look at it, the bare human curiosity of a man noticing something’s wrong. And the panic comes up cold and total.
Because there are two of me in this room and only one of them is real anymore.
There’s the one on the graphic behind my head, twenty feet tall, jaw set, the captain mid-stride with the puck on his tape and eighteen thousand people on their feet, and that one is who they applauded, who Vic sells, who March first belongs to.
And there’s the one at the folding table who can’t sign his own name, who hasn’t slept anywhere but a doctor’s bed without chemical help in weeks, whose suit is hanging off him because he keeps forgetting to eat, who came here straight from a parking-lot pill last week and will go to another tonight.
They built the whole afternoon for the giant on the wall.
Nobody in this room would clap for the one holding the pen.
And the sick joke of it, the thing that makes my throat close as the shutters keep firing, is that I can’t tell which one is the lie anymore, whether the captain on the banner is a ghost I’m dressing up in or the wrecked man at the table is a thing that happened to the real one.
The not-knowing is a slow kind of falling.
And I’ve got a marker in a hand that won’t hold still, a hundred more jerseys to ruin.
Dara reads it in half a second. She’s good, Dara, she’s saved me from worse than this.
She steps in smooth with a hand on my shoulder and a bright voice, okay, let’s let him rest that knee, big day.
She lifts me up and out from behind the table, steers me toward the tunnel before a single reporter can get a question past their teeth.
The cameras eat the exit alive, the captain led away.
She keeps her hand on my back the whole way out and doesn’t say anything until we’re in the dark of the tunnel, and then all she says is, low, “Roman. Are you okay.” It’s not even a question, it’s a door, and I tell her I’m fine, it’s the meds, the knee’s been rough.
I watch her not believe me and let it go, because letting it go is her job today.
—
Vic calls before I’ve even made it to my truck.
I take it in the parking garage, in the gray concrete quiet, leaning against the door of the truck with my hand still buzzing.
Vic’s voice comes through loud and delighted, entirely about the thing it’s always about.
“There he is. There’s my guy. You see the numbers on this?
March first and the phone hasn’t stopped, you understand what a healthy return does to your next deal, this is the comeback narrative, this writes itself, the name means something again—” and he’s off, the money, the deals, the name, the name means something again.
And I stand there in the concrete cold, and I wait for it, the question, the one a person asks, how are you, how are you really, you looked thin on the feed.
And it doesn’t come. It never comes. Vic has never once asked me how I am, because the part of me Vic concerns himself with doesn’t have a how-I-am, it has a market value.
And I’ve known that my whole career, let it slide off me the same as everything slides off me now, except today, standing here shaking, it doesn’t slide. Today it lands.
“Vic,” I say, into the middle of a sentence about jersey sales.
“Vic, I gotta go.” And I hang up. Mid-word.
I just take the phone away from my ear and end it, the first time in my life I’ve hung up on Vic.
The silence after is enormous, and I stand there in it, holding a dead phone in a shaking hand under the concrete ceiling, the most wanted man in the building and the loneliest. And I do the thing I came down here to do, which I knew before Vic ever called.
I get the bottle out of my jacket. I shake one into my palm, and I don’t have water, so I dry-swallow it right there against the side of my truck, throat working against the chalk of it.
I close my eyes and wait for the floor to stop tilting, for the white numbers, Vic’s voice, the photographer’s lowered camera to back off a few feet.
And when it comes, when the first soft edge of it comes, I let out a breath I’ve been holding since the applause started.
Then I get in the truck and point it at the only place I’m ever pointed now.
—
“Make it stop,” I tell him at the door, because that’s the only sentence I have left, and he steps back and lets me in.
He’s already read the whole day off me. He always has.
He takes my jacket, feels the bottle in it, says nothing about how light it already is.
He puts his hand on the back of my neck, that grip I’ve come to need more than air, and he walks me back into the dark apartment.
And tonight, something’s different in how he handles me, and it takes me a while in the haze to understand what.
He’s gentle.
Not soft, he’s never soft, he still tells me what to do and I still do it, still on his terms, still his hands deciding where I go and how.
But the edge is off it tonight. There’s no collar, no leash, no degradation, none of the hard apparatus of the other nights.
He undresses me slow. He lays me down instead of bending me over.
He works me open with slick fingers, one and then two, taking his time where every other night he took none, curling into me slowly until my breath goes ragged, my hips lifting into his hand before I’ve decided to let them.
He watches my face the whole way, reading every breath.
When he finally pushes into me it’s deep and unhurried.
He keeps me facing him, keeps his forehead down against mine, one hand spread flat over my sternum like he’s keeping count of my heart.
And he fucks me like he’s trying to hold something together instead of take it apart.
It undoes me worse than any of the rough nights did.
I know what to do with the cruelty. This, I don’t.
Here’s the thing nobody warns you about when you’ve gone as far down as I’ve gone: everyone who loves you wants the old you back.
Theo wants the friend who showed up. Niko wants his captain.
Vic wants the name. Dara wants the comeback.
Sammy wants the uncle who teaches him to skate.
Every single person who reaches for me is reaching past the man I actually am tonight to grab at the ghost on the banner, and every one of those open hands is a debt I can’t pay.
Because the guy they want is gone, and I’m what’s left, and what’s left is not enough for any of them.
And then there’s Elias, who wants nothing from me but the wreck.
Who has never once asked me to be the old Roman, never left a hopeful door open for the captain to walk back through, never made me feel the distance between who I was and what I’ve become, because in his apartment that distance doesn’t exist, there’s only this, only now, only the ruined man and the hands that take him exactly as ruined as he comes.
It should be the loneliest thing in the world, being wanted only at your worst. Instead, it’s the one place I can breathe.
He’s gentle with me tonight and it wrecks me because it’s the only gentleness in my life that isn’t also a hope I’m going to disappoint.
He moves in me slow and steady, looks at me like I’m a person and not a wreck he’s managing.
And I come with my hands fisted in the sheets, wet on my face that I don’t understand.
He stays in me after, forehead to forehead, breathing with me, not saying a word.
And for once the silence in his apartment isn’t empty.
It’s full of a thing neither of us is going to name, a thing that’s grown up between us out of all this poison, and it terrifies me more than the shaking did, because you can quit a man who’s only cruel to you.