Chapter Seventeen
Dustin
He drove Elliot out to the rink that afternoon. It was a facility for Portland’s elite junior team as there was no official NHL presence in the city. They got there early and hung out in the bleachers, watching the juniors.
“That kid is too fast.” Elliot leaned in and pointed at a guy about half his size wheeling down the wing.
Dustin laughed. “Better get used to it. They’re all gonna be coming for your crown, Amigo.”
Elliot folded his arms and scowled at the kid as he went back down the boards the other way.
The whistle went ten minutes later and the kids piled out, and Rodriguez got up to go put on his gear. As he stood up, he paused and said, “Are you staying?”
Dustin squinted up at him. “Guess so? How else are you getting back?” He looked apprehensive, so Dustin added, “Unless you don’t want me to.”
“I think I do. Hopefully I don’t fall down and embarrass myself.”
Dustin smiled. “You won’t.”
Fifteen minutes later, he stepped onto the ice and Dustin felt like his heart stopped.
He was so fucking fast. Dustin had forgotten, but sitting in the bleachers, watching him crush drill after drill, there was no way not to see it.
And Dustin sitting here on an extra rest day because he’d gone too hard at basketball.
It was like watching a sports car come up behind him in the rearview mirror while he limped along in his janky Ford Focus with the blinker stuck permanently on.
It was a difficult cocktail of feelings to swallow.
He was jealous, which felt awful. Part of him wanted Elliot to fail at something.
Drop a pass. Mishandle the stick. Something.
There was even a moment, halfway through a footwork drill, when he imagined him going down.
Pulling something, tearing something. Getting laid up with an injury that took him out of next season.
Gave Dustin just one more year to hang on to his title.
Dustin was trying to shove this feeling as far into a box in the back of his mind as possible.
Because when he actually imagined watching that happen – Roddy catching an edge, stumbling – it ripped a hole in the middle of his chest that threatened to swallow everything else inside him.
What if it was really serious? What if he hit his head?
Then there was the other feeling, which was even more frightening: Roddy was beautiful.
Not just physically, although he was definitely that.
Deeply, humanly beautiful, with an undeniable love of the game that made everyone around him better.
He was a fucking delight. He was never not doing his best. He was always smiling. He sang.
Dustin wasn’t sure he’d ever loved hockey in such a pure, uncomplicated way.
For him, it was too much about Dad and Jordan.
It was growing up in a house where love was contingent on ice time and joy was never the objective.
There was no singing at a QMJHL practice run by Coach Bennet.
You got caught singing there you’d likely find yourself performing the national anthem solo at the Memorial Cup Final as punishment.
He drove Roddy back to his hotel afterwards.
Roddy seemed transformed from the morning: he talked breathlessly about balance and acted like he understood the physics of ice friction for thirty solid minutes.
Dustin kissed him in the car outside and asked him to come over later.
Make dinner, sit by the window. Let’s get shitfaced and talk garbage about lateral force and Newton’s Third Law.
He wanted to know more about Roddy’s family, his mom’s cooking, what happened last night.
But Roddy seemed reluctant. He wanted to spend the night in his room. He needed to call Diego. He needed to do laundry. He wasn’t sure he could sleep in Dustin’s bed again yet when he’d been so thoroughly humiliated in it the night before.
There was something Roddy wasn’t telling him. But they’d done a lot of talking that day, and maybe he was being greedy wanting to know everything. Dustin noticed he said ‘yet’ and tried not to think too hard about that.
He watched him walk up the steps to the lobby, disappointed, and trying not to be.
Jealous, and trying not to be. Fascinated, and trying not to be.
He drove across the river and went back to the market they’d been to and trawled the aisles, looking for something to cook, mostly as a distraction.
He didn’t know where to begin, so he texted Jordan for a recommendation.
Eggs are easy, said Jordan.
He bought a dozen eggs, a bell pepper, an onion, and some cheddar, figuring a Denver omelet would be an apt first meal for the guy who’d made a name for himself playing for Denver.
The eggs stuck to the pan. He didn’t know the difference between stainless steel and non-stick; Rodriguez made it look so easy. Confused and frustrated, about more than just the eggs, he threw the whole thing – pan included – into the trash and went to Pineapple.
At the brewery, Jackie told him he looked rough and asked what he’d been up to. That surprised him – but when he went into the bathroom, he kind of did. Not rough, maybe. Just bummed. Pineapple wasn’t as fun without Elliot there. And his knee hurt.
By the time he got home that night, the knee felt worse. He wasn’t sure why – all he’d done was walk with Elliot and sit on the bleachers watching drills. It was pretty cold in that facility, though, so maybe that had something to do with it.
Jesus Christ, that really was some old man shit. Cold? Now his knees hurt because of the cold?
He went to the cupboard over the stove for ibuprofen and found the bottle empty.
Sighing, he did the habitual bend and flex to see how bad the pain actually was.
It wasn’t bad – or maybe it was and he was just terrible at knowing where the line was.
That was the problem: if it had been incapacitating, he would have been forced to reckon with it.
Like he had the first week, when he’d been fresh out of surgery and barely able to walk because the pain was unbelievable.
That felt serious. This was just a constant, grinding limitation.
It was irritating. Sometimes he felt like he would cry not from the pain but out of sheer frustration.
He went to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom to check the ibuprofen situation there.
Nothing. He checked his watch and pulled out his phone to see what was open nearby.
A twenty-four-hour drugstore on the other side of the city that he really didn’t feel like driving to.
He put the phone in his pocket and opened the cabinet again.
The oxycodone was in the middle of the bottom shelf where he’d put it.
He’d known it would be there because it was the first thing that popped into his head when he’d found the ibuprofen empty.
Coming into the bathroom in search of more ibuprofen was a ruse.
Checking the phone to see if anything was open was a ruse.
Deciding he didn’t want to drive all the way across town was a ruse.
Because he’d known this was here all along, and he knew that not only would it take care of the knee, it would also take care of the shit that had been going around in his head since Roddy stepped onto the ice today and Dustin realized his skating would never look like that again.
Knee or no knee. That was never coming back.
He picked up the bottle and read the back label.
Not that he needed to read the back label. There was no ‘recommended dose’ of opioids for people who weren’t supposed to be taking them anymore. The recommended dose in that case was zero, and people who took more than that tended to get into trouble.
He cracked open the bottle and shook one into his palm.
He took that to the kitchen and got a glass of water to take to the couch, where he put his feet on the coffee table and opened the laptop.
He spent ten minutes Googling to reassure himself that what he was about to do was fine, because he didn’t have any of the factors that would put him at risk of addiction, and then he took the pill and drank the water and closed the laptop and went to get in the shower.
By the time he went to bed, he felt much, much better.