13. Roman
ROMAN
Iwake up somewhere that isn’t my apartment, and for one second it’s the best I’ve felt in months.
Gray light, a real bed, the weight and warmth of a room that someone keeps clean.
A body-memory of having slept, actually slept, deep and dreamless, the first full night since the injury.
His apartment. His bed. He’s not in it. I can hear water running somewhere.
I lie there in the unfamiliar quiet and let myself have about four seconds of something close to peace before I reach for my phone out of habit, and the four seconds end.
Eleven missed notifications. I know before I open them. I know by the dread coming up my throat.
Theo’s boy. Sammy. The birthday party was yesterday afternoon, three o’clock, the bouncy castle, the dinosaur cake, the whole loud beautiful circus.
I’m the godfather. I’m Uncle Roman. I bought the kid his first pair of skates.
I promised. I promised Theo on the phone two weeks ago that whatever else was going on I’d be there for Sammy’s party.
And there’s a photo. Theo sent it last night, no caption, just the picture: the cake, the candles, six of them, an empty chair with a party hat sitting on it that some kid must have set out for me.
The empty chair is the single worst thing I have ever been shown.
I was at a recovery group, I told him. I was getting better. And instead, I was here, on this man’s floor and then in this man’s bed, while a six-year-old who loves me looked at a door that didn’t open.
I think about the skates. That’s where my head goes, lying in the gray light with the photo burning a hole in my hand.
When Sammy turned three, I bought him his first pair, little double-bladed things.
I took him out on the pond behind Theo’s place and held him up under the arms while his legs went everywhere.
He laughed so hard he got the hiccups. Theo filmed the whole thing, and I’ve watched it more times than I’d admit.
I was going to be that for him. The uncle who teaches him to skate, who’s at every birthday, who shows up.
That was a thing I was actually good at, before, the showing up.
I never missed one. Hospital visits, birthdays, the bad week after Theo’s dad died, I was always there.
It was the one kind of person I knew how to be off the ice.
And I traded it. I traded being the man who shows up for a chair with a party hat on it, traded it for a locked room and an orange bottle.
The kid set out a plate for me, and I wasn’t getting better.
I was getting worse on purpose two miles away, and there is no version of that I can dress up enough to live with.
So I do what I do with everything now. I move it one room over, behind the wall, where I can see it but I don’t have to touch it.
I’m getting good at that. It’s the only thing I’m getting good at.
I text Theo an apology and I can hear how thin it is even as I type it.
Theo I’m so sorry. Knee locked up bad yesterday, couldn’t drive, didn’t want to bring that to Sammy’s day. Make it up to him I promise. Tell him uncle Roman loves him.
Lies stacked on lies, smooth now, frictionless.
I hate every word, and I send it anyway.
The replies come fast, one after another, and they’re not even angry.
That’s what guts me. Theo’s not angry. Hey no worries man, knee stuff is brutal, we get it.
Then: Sammy made you a plate, it’s in our freezer whenever you want it.
Then, after a minute, the one that actually lands the blow: Roman I’m not mad about the party.
I’m worried about you. Something’s wrong and you keep telling me it’s not. Just talk to me. Please.
I look at that one for a long time. Something’s wrong and you keep telling me it’s not.
He knows. Not the details, not the man in the shower twenty feet away, but he knows it, knows it like old friends do, in the gut, across any distance.
He’s leaving the door open the same as he always does, just talk to me, and all I’d have to do is type the truth.
I’m drowning. Come get me. Six words. He’d be in his truck in ten minutes.
I don’t type them. I turn the phone face-down on the strange nightstand.
When Elias comes out of the bathroom and asks if I want coffee, I say yes, and I stay.
I stay in the apartment of the man who’s killing me instead of driving to the friend who’d save me.
I tell myself it’s because I’m tired, because the knee’s stiff, because the coffee’s already made.
The truth is I can’t face Theo’s face. Theo’s face would show me what I’ve become and I’d have to do something about it, and I am not ready to do something about it.
I’m ready to drink his coffee, let him not-quite-look at me, pretend the empty chair didn’t happen.
And there’s a smaller, uglier truth under that one, which is that staying here is easier than going home would be.
Elias doesn’t ask me how I am. He doesn’t leave a door open for me to walk through and get saved.
He doesn’t have a worried face. He just hands me a cup of coffee and tells me to drink it.
We don’t talk about the party because the party isn’t a thing that exists in his apartment.
Nothing exists in his apartment but the arrangement, and there’s a horrible rest in that, in being somewhere that doesn’t expect me to be a good man.
Theo’s love is a weight, even when it’s gentle, maybe especially when it’s gentle.
It’s a love that’s still waiting for the old Roman to come back, and I can’t pay it, and the unpaid debt of it crushes me.
Elias wants nothing from me but my surrender, and surrender is a thing I can do.
Surrender’s the one thing I’ve got left in stock.
So I sit at his bare counter and drink coffee that has no kindness in it.
The mug is plain white, heavy, still hot enough to sting my lip.
It’s the most comfortable I’ve been in weeks.
That should tell me everything, and I let it tell me nothing.
—
Blake catches me at the next session.
I almost get out clean. The session’s over, Elias has gone cold-professional the second the hour ended like he always does in daylight.
I’m heading for the door when Blake steps into the hall in front of me, not blocking exactly, just there, with that decent steady face. She says, “Roman. Got a second?”
I don’t. I make one because making a scene is worse.
She doesn’t do small talk. That’s the thing about Blake, she’s too honest for the run-up.
“I’m going to ask you straight,” she says, low, just us in the corridor, “and you can tell me to mind my business. Are you okay? Because the meds don’t add up.
The refills, the dosing, it’s climbing faster than the protocol should need, and you don’t look—” She stops, picks a kinder word.
“You don’t look like a guy who’s recovering.
You look like a guy who’s going under. So I’m asking. What’s going on?”
And here’s the moment. She’s handing me the rope, same as Theo, a good person looking right at me and asking the real question, and all I have to do is not lie.
Just this once. The dosing’s climbing because I’m taking them with whiskey and I can’t stop and the man writing the scripts is the same man I’m— I could say it.
She’d help. She’s the one person in this building who already half-knows, who’s been trying to flag it for weeks.
She’s standing here giving me the chance to confirm it so she can act.
I look her in the eye and I lie. “I’m fine, Blake.
Knee’s just been rough, so the pain management’s been aggressive, that’s all.
Elias has it handled. We’ve got a taper plan for after the strength phase.
” Smooth. Reassuring. The exact phrases he’d use.
I’ve learned his language. I speak doctor now.
“I appreciate you looking out. Really. But I’m okay. ”
She doesn’t buy it. I can see she doesn’t buy it, something closing down behind her eyes, the look of a person who’s just been lied to and knows it and can’t prove it.
“Okay,” she says slowly. “Okay. But the offer stands. Anytime. Day or night, Roman, I mean it.” And I say thanks and I walk out.
I feel her watching me go, and I’ve just done something worse than miss a birthday.
I’ve taken a person who was reaching to pull me out and I’ve slapped her hand away with a smile.
I know it. I get in my truck and I shake for a minute before I can drive.
My keys clatter twice against the ignition before they go in.
What scares me, sitting there gripping the wheel, is how easy the lie was.
There was a version of me even a month ago who couldn’t have done that, looked a decent person dead in the eye and fed them a smooth false sentence without a twitch.
I was a bad liar my whole life. It’s half of why people trusted me, the captain who couldn’t keep a secret to save his life, whose face showed everything.
And now I’ve got a second face, a calm reassuring one I can put on over the wreck.
I built it out of his, out of Elias, out of weeks of watching the most controlled man alive say true-sounding things that hide the thing underneath.
I’m becoming like him. That’s the part I can’t move one room over, not all the way.
He’s not just running my pain. He’s teaching me, by example, how to be the kind of man who can do this and keep a straight face, and the lessons are taking.
The worst of it is that the better I get at lying to the people who love me, the smoother the road runs back to him, the only person I never have to lie to because he’s the only one who already knows exactly what I am.
—