Chapter 3 - Deacon
DEACON
“Is this the fresh start?”
I look over the multiple frozen containers of leftover food on the kitchen island and answer my friend Bailey’s question. “Something like that.”
She holds her tote bag open. “Load me up.”
“You can’t take everything. I invited Ryan and Mal, too.”
She makes a face. “I got here first. That at least gives me dibs.”
“Knock knock,” a female voice that’s neither Ryan nor Malcolm’s calls out from the hallway.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Bailey grumbles as my across-the-hall neighbor Millie peeks her head in the door. Her huge brown eyes pop open wide as she sees the amount of containers I have laid out.
“Is this a giveaway?”
“I was here first,” Bailey snaps.
Millie ignores Bailey’s tone and skips up to the island, clapping her hands in what looks like excitement. I cook a lot. The freezer was overflowing, and yes—today is officially meant to be a fresh start. I even marked it that way on my calendar.
Until you get to know her, Bailey’s personality could probably be described as off-putting.
Ryan called her slow to warm up, which, as a cooking comparison made sense.
However, slow to warm up means she should eventually warm up to Millie, but I haven’t seen any signs of that.
When Millie hip checks her at the island in greeting, Bailey takes a sidestep and eventually comes to stand next to me.
Millie doesn’t seem to notice. “I love that color on you!”
Bailey looks down at her beige pantsuit and then back at Millie.
If I didn’t already understand the concept of opposites, Bailey and Millie would be a great case study.
Bailey is white, pale, plain, and virtually colorless except for a smattering of dark freckles across her cheeks.
She never wears makeup, her curly hair stays in a bun, and she always has this look on her face like if you cross her, you die.
Millie, on the other hand, is half white, half Korean. Her hair changes color at least once a month. She has two full sleeves of bright, intricate tattoos she designed herself, and she’s always, always smiling. She’s also a glitter bomb. Literally. She leaves glitter everywhere she goes.
“Aren’t you a vegetarian?” Bailey asks her.
Millie nods enthusiastically. “Uh-huh.”
“Then you won’t want this…or this.” Bailey starts stacking containers in her tote bag.
I have to stop her from swiping the second container of clam chowder. “That’s Ryan’s favorite.”
“It’s mine, too,” she argues.
“I eat clams,” Millie says, reaching for the container.
Bailey loses what’s left of her patience. “Did he invite you?”
Millie blinks her huge eyes. “Deacon doesn’t mind when I pop by.”
Bailey looks up at me as if to confirm this, and I shrug. She grabs the clam chowder from my hand. “I’ll save it for Ryan. Vegetarians don’t eat clams.”
“What else do you have?” Millie asks in her bright voice, ignoring Bailey’s overt bitchiness. “I’m more of a pescatarian, I guess. And I eat duck, too. On special occasions. Duck is my favorite.”
“I don’t have anything with duck,” I say, “But this is a vegetable lasagna.”
“Oh! Gimme!”
Millie holds out her hands, and I pass her the container.
Just then, I notice Malcolm coming through the door, his hand looped under Apollo’s collar. “Look who I found at the downstairs door.”
“Oh, shoot!” Millie says. “I left your door open.”
Apollo is Evan’s Great Dane. “Thanks,” I say to Mal. “He would have killed me. Is Ryan with you?”
“No, he had to work. Damn, you beat me,” he says when he sees Bailey.
She snickers. “Came straight from work.”
“If I show up without clam chowder, I won’t have a boyfriend anymore.”
“Sounds like you need to step up your game,” Bailey says.
I grab the clam chowder she’s trying to hide and hand it over to Malcolm. “I have some chili for you guys, too.”
“Awesome. Hey, Mills.”
Millie throws herself at Malcolm, greeting him with a hug.
He oofs but accepts her exuberance in stride.
I’m a little disappointed not to see Ryan.
He lived with me for nearly a year before moving out to live with Malcolm.
We weren’t close, but now that he’s with Mal, he and I have gotten to kind of be friends.
I’ll need all these people if I’m going to make the fresh start my therapist is insisting I make.
It all starts with this freezer clean out and a blind date tonight.
Dating was my therapist’s idea, which Bailey seconded.
They’ve been trying to talk me into doing something like this for months.
If it weren’t for my total wreck of a weekend two weeks ago, I might have kept putting it off, but it turns out rock bottom is a real place, and it does, in fact, wake a person the fuck up.
All I know is I can’t sit around the apartment and do nothing between Friday afternoon and Monday morning.
My brain would never allow it. Dating, however, might be pushing it.
I bottle a lot of shit up during the workweek.
Middle management means I take it from both ends five days out of seven.
Everybody’s bitching while I just want to sit quietly and code.
Being a senior coder at Polytech means I have both a team to manage, and someone to answer to for our work.
Like, I get my own office, but I’m rarely left alone inside it. While I prefer to communicate via email, most of my team likes to get things off their chests in person.
However, the way I’ve been coping with my own stress for as long as I can remember—getting high with my toxic friend group and fucking random men all weekend––has left me exhausted, wound even tighter than normal, and two weeks ago, in the emergency room.
“Lose the crew,” my therapist said because he refuses to call that particular group of people my friends, and he has a strong point about that.
But for someone like me who struggles socially, those five people—however unsafe they’ve become—were my original comfort zone.
But no amount of “they get me” swayed Gray, because apparently he gets me, too.
Or so he says. I am honest with him, though.
I learned a long time ago that our sessions are useless if I lie all the time, which, admittedly is what I used to do.
However, staying silent or only giving him the glossy edges while leaving out the dirty details left me stagnant. Still, it wasn’t until recently that I truly opened up and told him what I’ve actually been dealing with. Drugs. Sex. A seemingly unbreakable cycle.
In my defense, I’ve tried to create something healthier with the people here now.
I throw dinner parties about once a month for Bailey, Malcolm, Ryan and some of their other friends.
My new roommate Evan and I talk a lot more than Ryan and I ever did—and that’s mostly because Millie drives him nuts, and she spends a decent amount of time here.
I’ll probably never get a chance to tell him this, but Evan’s got a lot to do with me wanting to be better.
His easy smiles and quiet confidence got me thinking that he’s the kind of friend I should have, if not the kind of man I should be.
If he knew what I was like on the weekends, he probably would have moved out months ago.
Gray has asked why I never considered dating him, and the answer to that is simple: Ryan.
I had a huge crush on my former roommate, and all that did was make me feel awkward and broken when he wound up with Malcolm.
Am I attracted to Evan? Of course. He’s attractive.
But he’s off limits. He’s a good roommate, I like his dog, and I’m not about to fuck up our living situation, especially when so many other parts of my life are in flux. I need the one stable thing.
Because I’m not superhuman, and my therapist isn’t a sadist who wants me to go cold turkey, he referred me to a psychiatrist to start medicating my anxiety, impulsivity, and cravings once I signed a pledge saying I’d stop doing drugs and drinking hard liquor.
It was all very informal, and I’m not technically an addict.
I’m more of a substance abuser. A binge user.
He and I talked about rehab–or he did, I mostly shook my head.
In the end, we decided to try a medication and therapy approach first. I’m bumping up my sessions with him to twice a week for now, and I’ve started an SSRI for underlying anxiety, another med for ADHD, and an opioid antagonist called naltrexone to take when I’m in high-risk situations.
I’ve been taking it every day for a week, and I haven’t even thought about alcohol or drugs.
I have a whole note in my phone that’s a letter to the company that made it to tell them how amazing I think it is in case I ever want to give them my compliments.
It's done nothing to curb my sex drive, however, so I’m saving the letter. Fingers crossed this date goes well tonight. With my mind on that and Bailey’s attention on Malcolm, Millie gets a phone call and rushes out, claiming it’s work. She takes the one container of vegetarian lasagna with her.
Bailey visibly relaxes when she leaves. “I don’t know how you guys stand her.”
Malcolm laughs. “You don’t think she’s even a little cute?”
“Are you sure you’re gay?” Bailey asks him. “Do I need to card you?”
“I didn’t say I was attracted to her.”
“I don’t do manic pixie dream girls,” Bailey says.
I frown at the expression, but apparently Malcolm gets it. “Dream girl, huh?”
“Ugh,” she groans. “It’s a trope, Mal. Haven’t you seen Garden State?”
“Are there aliens in it?”
She snorts.
“Then no,” he says.
I’m lost, too. “If I watch it, will I understand what you’re talking about?”
“Definitely.”
“Well, I hate movies,” I say.
Malcolm has his phone out and he’s reading from the screen. He laughs. “This totally fits. Deacon. See if this helps. ‘The manic pixie dream girl or MPDG is a stock character in fiction who’s quirky, eccentric and exists to help a male protagonist overcome his personal issues and embrace life.’”