25. Roman
ROMAN
Dara brings the contract to her own kitchen table instead of the office, which is how I know she fought for it, because Dara only takes meetings to her house when she’s already won and wants to watch you read the good news with a cup of coffee in your hand.
It’s a one-year deal, and it’s not the deal the old me wanted, which is exactly why it’s the right one.
There’s no games-played bonus in it, no production threshold, no clause that pays me for goals and benches me for the lack of them.
What’s in it instead is a recovery framework the league built with the union after a couple of guys went down the same hole I did: scheduled testing, mandatory counseling, a medical staff that reports to the league and not the team so no one in the building can ever again be the only set of eyes on me.
My ice time is up to the coaches and my health is up to people who don’t answer to the coaches, and the two are kept in separate rooms on purpose.
I read it twice. A year ago, a contract that didn’t pay me for production would have read like an insult, like they’d stopped believing I was a scorer.
Now I read it as the first deal anyone’s ever offered me that treats me like a person who could break.
I pick up Dara’s nice pen and sign it at her kitchen table.
She doesn’t say welcome back, kid, she says, “Meetings first. Always. Or I’ll tear it up myself.
” I tell her I know. I mean it, and that’s the difference between this signature and every one before it.
—
I take my ninety-day chip on a Tuesday with Theo and Russ both in the room, which has never happened before, my oldest friend and my sponsor in the same circle of folding chairs.
When they call my days and I close my hand around the coin I look up.
Theo’s got his jaw set hard trying not to do the thing he’s about to do anyway.
Russ just nods, one slow nod, the nod of a man who’s handed out a lot of these and means every one.
Ninety days. A season ago I counted my life in shifts, shot totals, a date on a press release; now I count it in coins that say I didn’t die this month.
The second one weighs more than the first, not because it’s bigger, it’s the same cheap aluminum, but because thirty days is hope and ninety days is evidence.
After, in the lot, Theo hugs me too long and Russ tells me to call him tonight same as always.
Then I get in my truck and drive across town in the middle of a bright weekday afternoon to Elias’s building, sober, clear, nobody’s secret.
I park out front in plain view. I walk up to the door and do the thing I came to do, which is press the buzzer.
The actual buzzer. Not the side code he gave me in the winter for coming and going in the dark, the one I used to use at two in the morning so no front desk would clock me.
I’m done coming in the dark through side doors.
I stand in the daylight at the front of his building.
I ring the bell like a man with nothing to hide, and I wait for him to come let me in.
—
He lets me up, and we don’t fall into anything, because we agreed in the diner that there’d be no falling into things ever again, so we sit on the edge of his bed with all our clothes on like two people about to do something difficult, which we are.
“We say it out loud first,” I tell him, because it’s my term and I’m going to be the one who keeps it.
“All of it. What this is. What I want, what you want, where the line is.” So we do.
It’s not smooth and it’s not sexy, it’s two grown men sitting fully dressed on a bed talking plainly about what we’re about to do to each other.
It should feel cold, businesslike. It doesn’t.
It feels like the bravest thing I’ve done sober.
I tell him I want the dynamic. I’m not going to pretend I don’t, that I’ve talked myself out of liking what I like, because that was never the problem; the problem was never that I wanted to kneel for him, the problem was a chemical and a secret and a man who used both to take what I’d have given him anyway if he’d just asked in the light.
So I’m asking in the light. I tell him I want him to run it, in the room, with the door unlocked.
I tell him the collar’s fine, more than fine, but the leash from before is gone, that was never about me.
He tells me what he wants, plainly, and I make him say it, every want, out loud, because a thing said out loud can’t become a thing done to you in the dark.
And then I give him my word, the one I chose myself, sitting in a program meeting thinking about exactly this.
“Whistle,” I say. “That’s the word. Anything’s happening I want stopped, I say whistle, and you stop like the ref blew it, full stop, no question, no finishing the play.
” He asks if I understand that he’ll check too, that stopping isn’t only on me.
“I know,” I say. “But the word’s mine. In a game, everybody skates till the whistle.
I spent my whole life waiting for somebody else to blow it.
I’m holding it now.” He looks at me a moment, and something moves in his face that isn’t his old hunger, it’s steadier than that.
He says, “Okay. Whistle,” like he’s filing it somewhere it’ll never be lost. Then he stands up.
Now we both know the talking’s done, the choosing is made, and what comes next is the thing we both want with every wall down.
—
He picks the collar up off the dresser, and he doesn’t make a show of it.
He just comes to stand in front of me where I’m sitting on the edge of the bed and tips my chin up with two fingers.
I let my head go back. He fastens it around my throat, his hands gentle in a way they never let themselves be in the winter when gentle would’ve given too much away.
The leather settles against my pulse, snug, warm.
I feel it close, feel something in my chest unlock at the same time, which makes no sense and perfect sense, because this is the thing I was chasing in the dark with pills in my fist, this exact feeling of being held in place by someone I chose.
I get to have it now with my eyes open, my blood clean, a word in my mouth that stops the world if I use it.
“There,” he says, low, his thumb running once over the leather at my throat. “Look at you.”
I go down for him on my own, slide off the bed onto my knees on the floor.
He lets me, lets me set the pace of this part because I asked to.
I get his belt open, his cock out, and I take him in my mouth like I’ve wanted to when I was sober enough to remember it, slow first, my tongue flat under the head, then deeper.
He groans above me and gets a hand in my hair, not yanking, just holding, guiding.
I take him to the back of my throat, swallow around him, feel his thighs go tight.
“Good,” he says, rough, “just like that, take it,” and the praise lands somewhere the degradation never reached, because this time it’s true and this time I earned it on purpose.
He fucks my mouth slow, shallow, watching me the whole time.
I look up at him with my lips stretched around his cock, the collar snug on my throat, and I have never in my life felt more like I chose to be exactly where I am.
He pulls me off before he’s close, thumb on my jaw, and tells me to get on the bed, and I do, on my back this time because I told him I wanted to see him, another thing the dark never allowed.
He preps me properly, which he never bothered with in the winter when it was all spit and hurry and the hurt was half the point.
Now he warms the lube between his fingers first and works me open slow, one finger then two, curling, patient, watching my face for every flinch, every want.
The care of it isn’t soft, it’s its own kind of dominance, the kind that says I’m going to take you apart right and you’re going to let me.
By the time he lines up I’m shaking, leaking against my own stomach, begging him, actually begging, “Please, Elias, I’m ready, please.
” He pushes into me slow and full. We both go still at the top of it, breathing, his forehead dropping to mine.
“Okay?” he asks, one word, and I say “Yes, God, yes, move,” and he does.
He fucks me deep and steady, one hand braced by my head, the other wrapped around my cock, stroking me in time.
It’s nothing like before. Before was about disappearing; this is about being completely here, every nerve, every breath, his weight, his stubble against my jaw, the collar tight on my throat, his eyes on mine the whole way.
The heat climbs and climbs. He feels me start to go and says, “With me, come with me, look at me,” and I do.
I hold his eyes and come hard over his fist with him buried deep.
He follows me right there, groaning into my neck, pulsing inside me, the two of us shaking through it together at the same time, which we never once did in the winter, because back then he always made sure I came alone.
Not this time. This time we go over together, and that, more than anything, is how I know the thing between us finally turned clean.