25. Roman #2
He stays in me after, breathing, his weight on his forearms so he doesn’t crush me.
He doesn’t pull out and turn away and go cold like the winter always ended.
He stays, presses his mouth to the side of my throat above the collar.
I lie there full and sore, shaking under him, and let myself feel every part of it instead of chasing the next thing.
That’s the part I keep turning over even now, with him still inside me and my heart slowing down.
Every other time I let him have me it was to get out of my own body, to switch myself off, and the sex was just the cheaper twin of the pills, another door out.
This was the opposite. This kept me in my body so hard I couldn’t have left it if I tried, every nerve reporting, his stubble, his weight, the leather snug at my throat, my own pulse hammering under it, all of me here, all of me choosing.
I didn’t disappear once. I didn’t want to.
For a man who spent a year paying everything he had to not be present for his own life, staying all the way through something that good, on purpose, eyes open, is its own kind of ninety-day chip.
—
At midnight he makes eggs, which is the most surreal and the best part of the whole night. The clock over the stove reads 12:04. I hear him crack the shells against the counter, two clean taps, then the whisk against the bowl.
I’m wrung out and sore in the good way, wearing his T-shirt and a pair of his sweats.
He’s at the stove in the low kitchen light scrambling eggs in a pan with the radio turned down to almost nothing, some old station.
I sit at the counter and watch this man who spent a winter being the most dangerous person in my life stand there pushing eggs around a pan because I said I was hungry.
It isn’t lost on me how strange it is, how far we came to get to something this ordinary.
The butter hisses. He salts the pan, scrapes the eggs soft, plates them steaming.
He slides a plate in front of me and we eat at the counter, hips not quite touching, not talking much, the radio low.
The fork is cold in my hand. My knee aches where I knelt on the floor.
Nobody’s hiding, nothing’s secret, there’s no pill in the equation anywhere, just eggs and a radio and the ache of good sex still humming in me.
I reach up without thinking and touch the collar, still on, my fingers running over the leather at my throat.
I wait for it to feel like a leash, like a thing that owns me the bad way, like everything used to own me—the scoreboard, my father, the off-switch, the man at this stove.
It doesn’t. It feels like being chosen and choosing back.
I think about the word in my pocket, whistle, the one I haven’t needed and could’ve used any second.
That’s the whole point, that I held the power to stop it the entire time and didn’t want to.
Being owned when you’re the one holding the whistle isn’t being owned at all.
It’s something I don’t have a clear word for yet, but it feels like home with the lights on.
And here’s the thing ninety days taught me that no amount of white-knuckling ever could: wanting this was never the sickness.
I spent months in the dark half-believing the kink was the rot, that a man who wanted to kneel and wear a collar for someone bigger than him was already broken halfway to the pills, like the wanting and the dying were the same hunger.
They’re not. The collar at my throat right now isn’t hurting anybody, isn’t lying to anybody, isn’t costing me a single morning of being clear.
The disease was never that I liked to give myself over.
The disease was doing it in secret, doing it loaded, doing it with a man who fed me poison to keep me kneeling.
Take away the secret, the chemical, the predator, and what’s left is just this, a thing I like, out loud, sober, safe, with a word in my mouth that ends it on command.
I get to keep the part that was always mine.
I just had to learn to do it in the light.
Elias catches me touching it and doesn’t say anything smug, just reaches over and runs his thumb over my knuckles once where they rest against my throat. Then he goes back to his eggs.
—
In the morning we make exactly one plan, because Russ says you don’t build a future in a night, you build it one Thursday at a time.
Breakfast Thursday. That’s it. That’s the plan, a diner, a Thursday, the two of us, and the rule attached to it that we both said out loud before I left, which is meetings first. His group, my group, both of us, before anything between us, every week, no exceptions, because the floor we stand on is the only thing that holds the rest of it up.
He walks me to the door in the morning light, no collar now, that comes off and goes back on the dresser by agreement, a thing for the room and not a thing I wear out into the world.
He doesn’t kiss me goodbye like we’re sure of anything.
He just says, “Thursday. Meetings first,” and I say it back, and I mean it.
I drive to practice with the ninety-day chip in my pocket and the radio up, not down, all the way up, some song I don’t even like.
The knee is good under me, the morning is bright, and I’m not driving toward a comeback or away from a hole.
I’m just driving to the rink to do the work because I love the work, sore from a man I chose in the daylight, ninety days clean with a Thursday on the calendar.
For the first time since a hit into the boards took my whole name away from me, I am exactly where I want to be and nobody had to make me.