Chapter 10 Ben #2
I’m in, I told her. But I don’t have skis. I’ll have to order some first.
Don’t bother. I don’t want you to waste the money if you end up hating it and never use them again. I can just borrow a pair from someone close-ish to your height. What are you, like 7’5”?
Ha. I’m only 6’4”.
Only 6’4”, he says. This was followed by a rolling eye emoji. When did you want to plan on coming by? Tomorrow looks nice, weather-wise.
Tomorrow. I couldn’t commit to that. Or the next day. Or the one after that. My last depressive bout had kept me in bed for nearly a week. The earliest date I was willing to risk making plans for happened to fall on the last day of the year.
Can’t escape the house until New Year’s Eve, I told her. I’m sure you already have plans, though.
Yeah, sorry. I’m going to be super busy that day. You know, prepping with the girls. Selecting the perfect dress. Deciding which club is throwing the best party. And then I need to have a long, hard think about which of the many, MANY eligible bachelors I should smooch at midnight.
Clubs? Was there some secret underground rave culture up here I wasn’t aware of? Or was she going out of town? And why was I suddenly fixated on who she was thinking about kissing?
Another text came through. #sarcasm. What time did you want to come over?
Oh, she’d been kidding. Relief flooded through me.
Can we set a time closer to the day of? I asked. I couldn’t make a decision yet. Just trying to act normal in this conversation was taking every ounce of my willpower, and I was almost drained.
Absolutely! I’ll text you the night before.
I went to set the phone down and caught sight of my Twitter app. The bubble in the top right-hand corner of it said I had over a thousand notifications waiting for me.
“I think it’s time to take another social media break,” Brian had suggested earlier. “At least until this blowup with the Commissioner dies down or you feel like you’re in a better place to interact with others online.”
Taking his advice, I tapped the Twitter icon and held it.
When the little (x) popped up to delete it, I hit it without hesitation.
Next was Instagram. TikTok. Snapchat. I removed each and every social media app from my phone.
And then I moved on to my news apps. I didn’t think I’d ever seen a positive notification from one of them.
It was always headlines like North Korea Threatens to Annihilate South Korea, or Twenty Killed in Latest School Shooting.
Normally, I thought it was important to keep up with the news. To look, eyes wide open, at this world we lived in. But right now, my mental health needed to be my priority.
Finished with my mass deleting, I tossed the phone away, rolled onto my side, and fell asleep.
***
The next day was a little easier. I got out of bed for a few hours. I didn’t drink coffee. I poured all of the alcohol in the house down the kitchen sink. I was able to eat a decent-sized lunch. My morning session with Brian went well – we always switched to two-a-days when I had these episodes.
A few weeks ago, when we first discussed dropping my dosages, he was very upfront about the pros and cons of cutting back.
At the time of that discussion, I thought the benefits outweighed the costs.
I wasn’t sure if I still believed that, but hopefully in the coming days I’d feel better, and it would seem…
well, not worth it, exactly, but maybe it wouldn’t seem so bad when I was on the other side of this.
After lunch I crawled back into bed, exhausted.
“Don’t let yourself dwell on the negativity or ruminate on Zach’s death. No more videos of him and his family,” Brian said during our afternoon session. “Employ distraction techniques. Watch funny animal videos on YouTube.”
“My mom thinks I should get a dog,” I told him.
“It’s not a terrible idea. Pets have been proven to help combat depression.”
After we hung up, I took his advice. What were Fred and Sam like as puppies? I googled “Husky puppies” and then fell down the rabbit hole of baby animal videos. When I was done, I turned on the TV, pulled up my Netflix account, and binge-watched one of their latest shows.
***
The day after that was even better. I got out of bed in the morning and ate a huge breakfast, ravenously hungry.
I worked out. The endorphins did wonders to help my mindset.
Later, during our afternoon session, I told Brian about Ella.
I hadn’t been keeping her from him exactly; I just didn’t want to bring her up until I was sure that she was someone I might see with frequency.
Brian heartily approved of our budding friendship, especially when I told him about the conversations we’d had and how much she made me laugh.
“As long as you don’t use that humor as a crutch when you’re feeling anxious or depressed,” he cautioned.
I assured him that I’d be careful to avoid that.
***
New Year’s Eve day, I was up before the sun. I felt good this morning. Not great, but that was okay. Good was a big step forward from where I was a few days ago.
Soon, I’d leave for Ella’s. We planned for an early start because a squall was building just across the Canadian border, and it might roll east over the mountains later.
I wasn’t even halfway through my first winter here and I was already wary of snowfall forecasts.
The weather patterns were so unpredictable.
Storms had a way of settling into our valley and lingering, hemmed in by the mountains, dumping inches more than the weatherpeople said they would.
I knew we’d be outside most of the morning, and that the fresh air and skiing – and Ella’s goofiness – would function as natural mood boosters, but I still planned to work out before I left. I’d take all the help I could get at this point.
I ate another huge breakfast. A frame as large as mine needed constant fuel, and after so many days in a row with a limited caloric intake, there was a risk my body would cannibalize my muscles to burn as energy.
Once I finished with breakfast, I went upstairs and stripped my bed.
I’d gone through all of my spare sheets over the last few days.
I dumped them in the washing machine, turned it on, and then threw open the windows in my bedroom to air it out.
It smelled like an animal den in here. Musky.
Slightly ripe. I wished I had something to burn – a candle, or incense, or hell, even sage.
I made a mental note to order some later, and in the interim I doused the room in cologne and then closed the windows.
Skiing might trash my legs, so I chose an upper-body routine for my workout. I tired faster than I would have a week ago, and instead of pushing myself, I listened to my body and stopped.
I was stepping into the shower, my muscles already sore and overinflated from lifting, when I remembered Ella’s hamstring. Hopefully she was feeling better by now. I tore my right one in high school, and it took months to fully heal. I’d hate for her to push herself too early and do more damage.
An image of her wrapping that heating pad around her thigh flashed through my mind, followed by the sound of bliss she’d made.
My dick decided that now was the perfect time to stir back to life.
“Is your relationship with Ella entirely platonic?” Brian asked me yesterday.
“Yeah,” I’d told him. “Why do you ask? Do you think I’m not ready for anything romantic?”
“I think you think you’re not ready, which is important, and we should talk about that soon. But the main reason I’m asking is that with this new lower dosage regiment, you might start feeling and experiencing things more intensely. Your sex drive will start to return, for example.”
That was welcome news. I’d had a pretty respectable sex drive since puberty. Chalk it up to elevated hormone levels brought on by my involvement in competitive sports. When the depression set in, it plummeted, another symptom I’d overlooked. The meds had only further curbed it.
No wonder the sight of Ella’s bliss had stirred something in me.
I was less concerned about it now than I was at the time.
She was beautiful, and she had arched her back and made a face that could have been construed as sexual.
My libido, just waking up after a prolonged slumber, saw it and overreacted.
I reached down, thinking back to a particularly memorable sexual partner I’d had a few years ago, and brushed my fingers up the length of my cock. It swelled even further, straining against my abdomen.
I dropped my hand to my side and leaned back against the shower wall, letting the water run over me, reveling in the sensation of being turned on. The sheer novelty of it. The glorious, borderline painful need to ejaculate.
Jesus. This was worth dropping the dosage for. Hopefully I didn’t have any more regressions; I didn’t want to up the meds again and lose this feeling.
I washed the sweat from my body and then lingered in the shower, my fingers wrapped around my girth as I stroked myself. All too soon, it was over, my release spilling out of me in a rush that, while it felt damn good, still seemed muted compared to my memories.
I climbed into my Jeep an hour later. Ella texted me a detailed list of instructions in case I lost signal on the way to her house, taking me up the hill I lived on instead of down it, out of what she said was an abundance of caution.
I checked her route on my phone before I left, comparing it against what my GPS wanted me to do.
It was a full seven minutes longer, but that was because she had me taking back roads, avoiding town completely, most likely to keep someone from somehow recognizing me through these blackout-tinted windows.
I grinned. Jack was right. Ella was good people.
I decided to forgo my phone’s map and instead followed her instructions.
She went through all that trouble putting them together, after all.
Several of the roads I took were new to me.
There was no one else on them – not a surprise in an area this sparsely populated – and so I drove below the speed limit, taking in my surroundings and the distant views of the mountains.
It was beautiful up here. Stark. Still pristine.
How it must have looked everywhere hundreds of years ago.
Ella’s place was so out of the way that I thought I was on the wrong street when I got toward the end of the directions.
I hadn’t seen a single house yet. Did anyone even live out here?
I was just beginning to worry there was a typo in her texts when I noticed a mailbox peeking out of a snowbank.
I slowed the Jeep. The mailbox had her house number on it.
I turned the wheel and followed the narrow lane that led into the trees.
Pines lined the driveway. Their trunks were massive.
It looked like I was driving through an old-growth forest. Up ahead, sunlight streamed through the trees.
I passed from the woods into a wide clearing with a squat log cabin nestled in the middle of it.
Snow clung to its roof. Smoke curled up from the chimney.
The scene looked like something from one of Ella’s greeting cards, too quaint to be real.
I knew I had the right house when the front door opened and she emerged from it to stride down the porch steps, her dogs right on her heels. She lifted a hand and waved at me when I rolled to a stop, a huge smile spread over her face.
Seeing that smile lifted my mood from good to great.