Chapter Twenty-Two
Dustin
The room was nice.
He buzzed into it with a backpack over one shoulder and his passport between his teeth.
Maple leaf red, mostly, was what he saw.
The bed spread, the curtains, the upholstery on the chair tucked under a sleek wooden desk in the corner.
He hadn’t sprung for five stars, but he was only gonna be here one night.
He slung the backpack onto the bed and put the passport on the nightstand and sat to take off his shoes.
His heart was going a mile a minute, like it had been all the way from Portland, and he wasn’t sure if that was just nerves or the oxycodone wearing off, but ideally what he was about to do would take care of it.
When the shoes were lined up beside the bed he pulled the backpack into his lap.
He zipped it open and took out the paper bag he’d gotten from the pharmacy, and took out the bottle that was inside that.
He set the bottle on the nightstand, then threw the paper bag away and pulled out his phone to research the next step.
Steps. It was all just steps.
Ultimately he’d decided not to involve Jordan, so he’d just booked a flight and a hotel, gotten into Vancouver about an hour ago, got an Uber straight to a pharmacy, found it empty because it was almost closing time, explained to the pharmacist that he was a hockey player from Montreal, in town visiting family.
Twisted my knee while I was training out here. My team doctor recommended T1?
What’s the injury. Which team doctor. Have you tried ibuprofen or naproxen. Do you have any history of opioid use. Are you currently taking anything else.
He answered all the questions. Showed the pharmacist his Canadian passport.
It was like running a hockey play. He liked running plays. He was good at them.
He’d gone to dinner to kill a few hours, because going immediately back to the hotel and taking these pills at five PM would be drug addict behavior. Dinner was fine. He made sure not to drink any alcohol. He couldn’t remember what he’d eaten.
He tapped the phone to check the time. It was nine PM; his flight out was in twelve hours. He opened the browser and went about figuring out how much of this stuff he was supposed to take.
Steps.
In order to match the single oxycodone he’d been taking nightly for the last three weeks, he’d have to take ten of these.
Which was…more than he’d been expecting.
He picked up the bottle and looked at the label.
On the back was a massive sticker with a skull and crossbones on it.
This stuff carried a high risk of liver damage; the pharmacist had been very clear about this when she gave him the talk.
He’d told her no worries: he was a professional athlete, he drank a gallon of water a day, and he’d been living on smoothies and vegan takeout all summer. His liver was in excellent shape.
He’d been hoping that might get a laugh, but she’d just looked at him over the top of her glasses, and he’d said, “But obviously this isn’t a joke,” and then stood there with a serious expression and his heart going hell-for-leather while she rang him up.
He opened the bottle and counted ten pills onto the bed spread.
It was a lot. When you looked at it like that.
There were fifty in the bottle. Which meant it would last five days. Was that long enough?
Was the skull and crossbones really necessary? Honestly, calm down, Canada.
He went back to the phone to do math.
Ten of these weren’t going to damage his liver, but it was a fucking lot of pills to take all at once. And if you factored in the glass of wine…
Okay, so maybe he didn’t take ten. Maybe he took five. Maybe he started with two and tapered up from there – no, that made no sense, he was supposed to be tapering down, fuck, he really should’ve researched all the steps before he got on the plane.
He put the phone down and went into the bathroom to splash water on his face. When he got back, a text was waiting. He sat on the edge of the bed and tapped it open.
Hey viejo.
It hit him like a freight train.
He couldn’t decide if it was worse than nothing at all.
His heart was going a hundred billion miles an hour and this had stopped it dead.
He sat staring at it while an insanely complicated avalanche of feelings fell through him, then he locked the phone and set it aside.
If Elliot wanted to talk to him, he was going to have to do better than that.
Where was he?
Right: looking at the mountain of pills he’d just shaken out on the comforter and wondering how many he could take at once with a glass of wine without lethally dosing his liver.
Steps.
Five made sense. It was safer, and he could taper off for longer, which was what this was all about. Maybe even lay off the wine until he was done with this. Probably for the best: it was only gonna make him fat–
The phone buzzed.
Dustin glanced at it. The blue light from the screen lighting up the dim room. Elliot’s nickname – Amigo – at the top of the notification. He waited for the screen to time out and go dark, then went back to his math.
It buzzed again.
Jesus fucking Christ, this kid. He picked up the phone and opened the texts.
I’m really sorry for what I said and I want to tell you in person, said the second one.
And then,
What are you doing?
Such a great question. It hit him hard somewhere behind the ribs, but he pretended it didn’t and sent, Out to dinner.
The three dots bubbled immediately. Oh okay. When will you be back?
I don’t know.
A long time with nothing. Then: Maybe I could come over in the morning?
Dustin closed his eyes and bent his forehead to the phone and sat like that for a long time with a very dark feeling inside him, then sent, I don’t know.
Okay. Tomorrow night?
Relentless. Fucking relentless. No Elliot, you don’t just get to say you’re sorry and make everything fucking okay again. He sent, Maybe.
Okay. Can I text you in the morning?
Maybe.
Okay.
The three dots bubbled and disappeared. Dustin hated how long he sat there waiting for them to come back. When they didn’t, he locked the phone and set it aside and turned back to the pile of pills.
Lying to Elliot wasn’t supposed to be one of the steps.
He tried not to think about it, and scooped them into his hand. Fuck it, just take ten. He hadn’t had any wine tonight.
‘Out to dinner’ is not where you are, though, is it?
He took the pills to the mini bar, opened it, and squatted to look for a bottle of water.
And you know he can’t come over in the morning, because you won’t be there.
There was a bottle on the shelf in the door, which he took out, closing the door behind him with his foot as he stood.
Because you are in a foreign country, buying a controlled substance with a fucking skull and crossbones on the side of the bottle.
He went across the room to the desk with the pills in one hand and the bottle of water in the other.
Which you had to lie to a pharmacist to get…
He tipped the pills onto the desk so he could crack the lid off the bottle of water.
…and which you’ve been telling yourself is sensible tapering off behavior...
He set the lid on the desk and scooped the pills back into his hand.
…but you know that’s bullshit because if this was sensible, you would’ve told Jordan you were coming.
He shook them all together in the center of his palm and did a quick recount to make sure there were actually ten there.
The phone buzzed on the bed.
He looked up and stared at it across the room. Then went back to see what it said.
I miss you.
Goddammit, Elliot.
God.
Dammit.
Dustin couldn’t move. He felt like something had shut down inside him and stuck him to the floor.
He stared at the phone. The pills in one hand; the water bottle in the other.
The passport on the nightstand. The red carpet and upholstered chair tucked under the desk.
Maple leaf red. Because he was in Canada.
He looked around at where he was and what he was doing, and a voice in his head said, “Stop.”
It was Tom’s voice, weirdly, and it sounded exactly like it had the day Dustin had been trying to get Marisol to give him one more run at that agility ladder.
“You have just lied to a person you care about,” said Tom. “This is not ‘sensible tapering off behavior’, Bennet. This is just textbook drug stuff.”
Dustin sat on the edge of the bed with the pills and his water bottle. He was going to have to put one down if he was going to pick up the phone.
He tipped the pills onto the bed and put the water on the floor and picked up the phone and typed, Miss you too.
He didn’t send it.
But he picked up the pill bottle, scooped the ten pills back into it, took the bottle into the bathroom, dumped everything out into the toilet, flushed it, closed the lid, sat down, and called Jordan.
Jordan’s voice was surprised and slightly suspicious as he picked up on the other end. “Hey! Did I miss a chat?”
Dustin sat with his eyes closed and the phone against his ear, not knowing how to begin.
“Hello?” said Jordan. “What’s up?”
“I’m in Vancouver.”
“Oh! Great. Are you coming by?”
“No. Ah – no. I wasn’t planning on it.”
“Oh. Alright. Well… Hold on, let me put you on speaker.” Jordan was probably washing dishes or wrangling May into pajamas or something. He sounded distracted, and Dustin hated that he was about to blow apart his evening with what he was about to say.
“Don’t put it on speaker,” he said.
Jordan must have covered the phone, because Dustin heard him say something to someone – probably Sarah – then come back. “Sorry. Say that again?”
“Am I on speaker?”
“No.”
“I can’t come there. But I was hoping you could come over here.”
“Okay…” Another word to Sarah. “Sure. Yeah, I could meet up tomorrow.”
With his eyes still closed, Dustin said, “No, I meant…tonight. Like now.”
“Tonight?” Jordan was probably checking the time on his phone. It was far too late, obviously. “We just got May down.”
“Right.”
“Uh…but I guess…if it’s an emergency? Is everything okay?”
Dustin opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling and sat like that for so long that by the time he spoke, Jordan probably already knew it wasn’t.
“No,” he said. “Not at all.”
A long pause. Then: “Where are you?”