Chapter Twenty
Dustin
Three weeks after he ran into Roddy at the gym, Dr. Wu called to check in. Dustin was doing the riverfront walk. She took him through the usual checks – pain, swelling, mobility.
Everything felt fine. Three weeks of digging after the basketball flare-up had turned up nothing, the pain had resolved itself, the scans were clean, and Tom and the rest of the Force team had chalked it up to a temporary neurological glitch. Which was a massive relief.
“Great.” Her voice was brisk. “Well, we had a little setback, but it sounds like everything is moving in the right direction. These things happen. We have a couple weeks until pre-season training starts – has Coach Klein been in touch?”
He had. Dustin had known since March he wouldn’t be competing for a spot on the roster when the season started. He was on Injured Reserve and should be playing by January. It wasn’t what he wanted, but as long as he was on some list.
“Do you have any questions for me?” said Dr. Wu.
He stood at the lookout with the view back down the river and thought about the day he’d stood there and told Rodriguez not to do hockey like he’d done it. He stood by that. Dustin wasn’t the role model he needed.
Did he have any questions for Dr. Wu?
A few.
Like: how long did it take to become dependent on oxycodone if you took one ten milligram pill to unwind before bed every night while you scrolled through Grindr, trying to figure out if any of these guys were someone you could see yourself with?
He’d been doing it about three weeks. Was that long enough?
What if you weren’t sure if Tom’s ‘neurological glitch’ theory was correct – because the knee pain may have ‘resolved itself’…
or it may have been resolved by your nightly painkiller habit.
Which meant it wasn’t actually resolved at all.
But the scans were clean. So probably nothing was wrong.
So could you just keep taking the pills?
Could you get another season out of the knee that way, if nothing was actually wrong and all you needed to do was manage the pain?
He didn’t ask her any of this, obviously. He’d Googled it all already anyway, and none of the answers were great.
That night, he went to the medicine cabinet and discovered the bottle was empty.
A moment of quiet panic while his lizard brain rattled at breakneck speed through the maze of problems that opened up, and then he shut it down. He was a professional hockey player, not a drug addict.
He’d done the research. He knew that what he’d been doing was dumb. But being called a fag by the guy who turned you queer, when a month before that you were straight as a desert road, made a person do dumb things.
He’d said he’d take them until the bottle ran out. And now the bottle had run out.
He put the cap back on and tossed it into the trash.
There was no wine in the fridge, which caused another mild panic, but that was easily remedied by calling an Uber Eats. He didn’t even have to leave the apartment. Good thing there wasn’t an Uber Opioids, although the way the United States was going, it was probably on the way.
He lay on the couch with the phone over his head and his glass of wine on the floor beside him and swiped through Grindr while he didn’t think about Elliot.
He hadn’t hooked up with anyone since Elliot stopped texting.
He just couldn’t get excited about any of these guys.
Which was reassuring, because it meant maybe he wasn’t bi.
Which would make being in the NHL a lot easier.
If he really was just ‘gay for Elliot Rodriguez’, then this summer would be nothing more than that weird stretch he remembered in forty years as, “I wonder whatever happened to that guy?”
Fuck, that actually made him really sad.
He closed Grindr and put the phone face down on his chest. Probably it was time to start putting this whole off-season behind him. Training camp was coming up. Time to focus. Time to delete Grindr. And that other stupid app – what was it called?
He tilted the phone up and swiped around to find it. Body Count. He hadn’t looked at it since July; he tapped it open now.
His heart stopped. The floor seemed to open underneath him and the world rose up grim and enormous like a chasm.
Elliot had logged another takedown.
The entry was from three weeks ago. From the same day Dustin ran into him at the gym. Dustin hadn’t seen it because he’d silenced notifications on the app months ago at the farmer’s market.
There was no identifying information: just the gender – female, age – 22, and the toggle set to indicate that they had used protection.
Protection! So something Dustin said had gotten through.
He sat on the edge of the couch staring at the phone.
If he was understanding this correctly, then the order of events that day went like this: Elliot Rodriguez had called him a fag, taken a shower, left the gym, gone out that night and hooked up with a woman, and then logged it to the fucking app, presumably so Dustin would see it.
It was one of the most fucked up things anyone had ever done to him.
The wine glass was on the floor beside his foot. He drained it and went to the fridge for another.
There was always the possibility that Rodriguez was lying.
It was possible this entry was bullshit, but that didn’t make Dustin feel better.
The intention was the same. And the frustrating part was that while it made him furious, it also made him sad.
And worried. Because a guy who did something like this was clearly not okay.
And was this girl he’d logged going to take care of Elliot if he broke down and tried to leave in the middle of things?
Was she going to lie in the dark with her arms around him for hours while he cried?
Was she going to make him coffee the next morning, and drive him to hockey practice, and fall in love with him from the bleachers while he was out there doing footwork drills?
Was she going to spend the next three weeks regretting that she didn’t just make him talk to her that day, because obviously that was when everything started unraveling and instead of getting to the bottom of it, she’d dropped him off at his hotel and watched him walk away and gone back to her loft in the Pearl District to wallow in her own self-pity, and take drugs because her knee hurt?
No. She probably wasn’t going to do any of that.
And he wasn’t in love with Rodriguez. Where the fuck had that come from?
He paced in front of the coffee table, then picked up the phone and began typing a message to Fatima. He was halfway through it when he realized that what he was about to do was absurdly fucked up, and stopped.
He was about to text Fatima so he could log her to the app like a big middle finger to Rodriguez. Which was so unspeakably gross, Dustin had to marvel. He taught Elliot this: how to weaponize women.
He went back to the couch and sat staring through the window for a long time. Then he opened the laptop.
One thing Dustin had learned about himself this summer was that research made him feel better.
He’d spent a lot of time on the internet trying to figure out what the hell was going on with him while he was hooking up with Elliot, and found it soothing to learn specific information.
Ditto the oxycodone: once you knew enough about it, you could decide how to proceed.
So was there a way to proceed with that?
Because three weeks ago, the vague threat of ‘mild withdrawal from physical dependence on opioids’ felt like an abstract thing that would be totally manageable. Right now, in the face of what Elliot had done – in the face of what he’d taught Elliot to do and hated himself for – it felt like a lot.
He hadn’t taken the stuff for long. It wouldn’t be terrible. A bad flu. He just needed a small amount of something legal to get him through a few days until he wasn’t so bent out of shape about Elliot.
Was there such a thing?
There was.
There was one small obstacle: it was in Canada.
In Canada, Google told him, you could buy low-dose codeine over the counter.
You had to talk to a pharmacist and you needed a legitimate reason for taking it, but you didn’t need a prescription, and you could walk out of a pharmacy with a legal thing that did roughly what the oxycodone did.
You could also get something called ‘kratom’ without having to go to Canada, but that was just powdered leaves you bought at a gas station, and it sounded like bullshit, so, no thank you.
Was he or someone he knew struggling with addiction? the AI summary wanted to know. Did he need the number for a hotline?
He swiped that away and looked at a map.
The Canadian border was a six-hour drive from Portland…but the flight was only an hour. The cost was negligible. He was Canadian, so hopefully there wouldn’t be a lot of hoops to jump through. Jordan was in Vancouver, and he hadn’t visited him for a while.
It all sounded pretty reasonable. Apart from the fact that he’d be crossing an international border to buy opioids.
What was the alternative? Call Dr. Wu and see if there was an alternative? That would trigger all kinds of NHL safeguards. It might get out to the press and then the public. And he was so fucking close to retirement.
He looked at flights and found one early the next morning. He sat with his finger over the purchase button for a long time.
Then he told himself he was being insane, closed the laptop without booking anything, and went back to the fridge to finish the bottle of wine.