17. Roman #2
And then it ebbs, like it always does, faster, and the dread comes back up. I reach for my clothes, and my hands are still shaking, still, even now, even with the pill in me and his warmth still on my skin. The tremor’s still there in my fingers as I try to do up my shirt, and I see him see it.
—
“I need the script stronger,” I say. “What I’m on isn’t holding anymore. By morning it’s gone, Elias, it’s just gone and I’m right back in it. I need more in each one. Please.”
He’s at the little desk by the window with his pad already out, and he doesn’t answer right away, and that’s new.
Every other time the pen has just moved, smooth, automatic, the most natural thing in the world for him to write me down deeper.
Tonight the pen stops. He holds it above the pad and looks at me, really looks, across the dark room, my shirt half-buttoned, my hands jumping, the wet barely dry on my face.
And for the first time since the first night there’s something working in him that looks close to hesitation.
Like the pen is heavier than it was. Like somewhere behind those flat eyes a thing I can’t see is arguing, and for one strange suspended second, I think he’s going to say no, and I don’t know if the lurch in my chest is fear or hope.
Then he writes it.
Of course he writes it. The pen comes down and moves.
He tears the sheet off clean and holds it out across the room.
I cross to him fast, too fast, too grateful, and I take it out of his hand.
Our fingers touch, and neither of us says anything about the second he stopped.
But I felt it. I’ll think about it later, in the truck, that he stopped, that for one breath the man who’s never hesitated hesitated, and I won’t know what to do with it any more than I knew what to do with the gentleness, and both of them will sit in me like cracks of light coming through a wall I’ve been leaning all my weight against.
—
I drive home with the script on the passenger seat where a person would sit.
That’s where it rides, folded once, his clean blue handwriting facing up, and I keep glancing at it at the red lights the same as you’d glance at someone you’re giving a ride to.
It’s better company than I’ve got anywhere else tonight, which is the saddest sentence I know about my own life, and I think it anyway.
My phone’s going in the cupholder. I make myself look at it at a light.
Nine messages. Theo, three of them, you good?
/ saw the presser, you looked off man, call me / Roman please.
Niko, two, my own winger, yo cap proud of you, march 1, let’s gooo and then an hour later …
you okay though? Dara, checking I got home.
A couple others. Nine people who reached for me today, and the screen lights up with all of them stacked there waiting.
I lock it, put it face-down, let them wait, every one, because answering any of them means being the Roman they think they’re texting.
And that Roman shook so hard he couldn’t sign his own name this afternoon and is currently driving home with a controlled substance riding shotgun like a date.
I get to the apartment and don’t turn on the lights.
I know the wreck of it by heart now, don’t need to see it, and the dark is kinder to it anyway.
I set the new script on the counter with the others.
The others are a small paper drift by the toaster now, curled at the edges, each one dated in his clean blue hand.
I pour a drink in the dark, the good whiskey going into a glass I don’t bother to rinse, and I stand at the black window with the city going on without me down below, all those lit windows full of people who got asked how they are today and answered.
And I drink it down and pour the next one.
I know I’m not supposed to mix them. That’s the one rule even a wrecked man knows, the label says it, the seminar said it, Blake said it to my face once before I learned to lie to her, not with alcohol, Roman, never with the alcohol.
And I take the new pill anyway, the stronger one, his clean blue handwriting cashed out into my palm, and I wash it down with the second whiskey.
The pill alone doesn’t reach the bottom of today, and the whiskey alone doesn’t either.
Only the two of them together get me all the way under, down past the white numbers, the shaking hand, the nine missed messages, Vic never asking.
I know what I’m doing. I keep coming back to that, it’s the part I’ll never be able to explain to Theo or to whoever else ends up across a table from me someday, that I wasn’t confused, I wasn’t tricked, I knew the rule and I knew the danger and I did it on purpose because being under was worth more to me than being safe.
The math had stopped having a downside I could feel.
That’s what going under really is. Not the substance.
The moment the bottom stops scaring you.
And somewhere across town a man hesitated over a pad tonight for one whole second before he fed me deeper.
And I hold onto that second in the dark like it’s the only proof left that any of this is happening between two actual people.
I drink to it, alone, with my phone face-down on the counter.