by R J Scott
I didn’t answer that. Yes, I’d bought them, a long time ago, back when I’d been in the grip of real addiction.
“Mistake or not, you deliberately took more than you should anyway – your downfall was that they were stronger than you were used to.”
I wanted to hurt him, wanted to curl my hand into a fist and punch his perfect fucking face.
I don’t want to hurt him. He needs to go.
“You can leave,” I said. The temper inside me was making me irrational.
He shook his head, seeming determined to pick at the scab that hid my past.
“When did you take the last pill?”
“I didn’t,” I said, and I sure as hell knew I was being irrational. Didn’t what? What was I even denying anymore?
Trent worried his lip, and his chocolate eyes were bright, like he was trying not to cry. What the hell? Why was he crying?
“However long it’s been, about seventy-two hours after that last dose, symptoms of withdrawal tend to peak – severe, intense. It’s only going to get worse. You understand that, right?”
He sounded like he was reading from a technical manual, and believe me, I’d read them all.
I wanted to say something clever about how Trent was overreacting and how I was fine, but all I could think of was to tell him to go, with added expletives. The anger inside me was making it impossible to form a coherent sentence.
He stood. “I don’t expect you’ll be in tomorrow. I’ll tell the team you have food poisoning or something.”
Wait. No. “I’ve never missed a game, or an appearance, I’ll be there.”
I rubbed my arms. Abruptly I was chilled, even though my head was burning, and nausea threatened again.
“Withdrawal starts when your body expects its next dose,” Trent said. “Remember that. You need to get some help with this.”
“I don’t need anyone else’s help.”
“You do,” he insisted. “You’re an addict and you’re in denial about having relapsed. Do you have a sponsor?”
Mike was my sponsor, a quiet librarian from my hometown. Not even an NHLer, just some guy who talked sense and was always there for me. I didn’t need him; he was part of my past.
“I can’t do this with you,” Trent murmured when I didn’t answer.
He’d decided my addiction was too much for him? Well, whatever. It wasn’t like I needed him in my life, with his glittery shit and his figure skating.
But wait. What if I was losing the chance of being with the only man who’d made me think I wanted more? I wanted his brightness in my life. I wanted the glitter and the smile and the fun, and the taste of him, and the flirting and sex.
Great. Now I was going through the pathetic post-sick stage of this whole shitfest. This was all Trent’s fault.
Why am I doing this? What’s wrong with me? Why is Trent giving up on me after one fuck?
Trent pushed his hands into the pockets of the robe he was using, my robe. It swamped him. I looked down. I was naked. Sitting on my balcony, balls naked.
And hot.
And cold.
Abruptly, the anger subsided, and I felt pathetic and stupid, and Trent was leaving.
“Please don’t go,” I said, and I could hear how pathetic I sounded, how needy. What did Trent owe me? Nothing.
“I wish I could stay,” he said, but the tone he used told me he was lying. “But it’s late and I need to get up early and face another battle.”
I held out a hand. “Please stay.” I sounded broken and pathetic and all the things that the tablets stopped.
Trent sighed, crossed back to me and sat on the edge of the other chair, taking my hand in his. I loved the way he held my hand, and affection swelled inside me. He understood. He wasn’t leaving; he was going to be my friend, my lover, my support. He half smiled at me, and I knew everything would be okay; I hadn’t fucked up too bad.
And then he ruined it all.
“Dieter, there’s an NHL substances program,” he said. “They have counseling as well so I assume you’ve been in contact with them. Don’t they want to see you every so often? You could call them.”
What? I yanked away my hand. “Fuck you,” I snarled.
“Dieter, if you don’t call them…”
“What? You will? You’ll fuck up my career because of one lousy misstep?”
“It isn’t one, you know that.”
“Just fucking go. I don’t need your shit, however good of a fuck you are.”
He nodded, stood, and left.
And I sat naked on my balcony feeling like everything was going wrong.
I woke up still naked on the balcony, to the early light of a Philadelphia day. Feeling like shit. Trent had seen me at my worst and he’d left. Just up and left.
I didn’t need him anyway. I was in the NHL now, and there were any amount of puck bunnies out there who wanted me. Hell, one gay club and they’d be all falling over the muscled guy with the contract.
I was the man.
A broken man.
I stumbled back into the bedroom, stopping just inside and turning back to pick up the beer bottle, dropping it in the trash. I made my bed, or at least tried, pulling the covers straight, and sat heavily when I spotted the bright blue of the scarf Trent had been wearing when he’d arrived. I picked up the soft fabric and instinctively buried my nose in it, the scent of my lover just as I remembered.
Lover? No, one-night stand I’d completely fucked things up with.
I picked up my cell, pulling out the charger and thumbing through my contacts. First name I considered connecting to was Layton, telling him to spin something to the team about why I wasn’t in today. Then I’d have to be honest about what I was in the middle of right now, and he already had the whole mess of a possible sex tape, and blackmail, although that had been very quiet since that text from Marianna.
The next name on my list was Mike, a number I hadn’t used in a long time. I keyed it in before I’d even really thought about it. I hadn’t considered time differences, and I almost hung up on my old sponsor. The one who’d held my hand through some bad times.
Then he answered, his voice sleep-rough and slightly unfocused.
“Dieter?” Mike said my name, just my name. No hello or how are you? I hadn’t spoken to him for over a year, and even though he’d called and left me a couple of messages, I hadn’t needed him. Or at least I hadn’t felt like I needed him.
“Mike,” I responded, because I didn’t know what the hell to say.
There was silence. Not unusual – my conversations with Mike had often included silences where we just sat and thought on opposite ends of the line. I heard movement, the soft exhalation of Mike getting up and out of bed.
“I’ll put the coffee on,” he murmured.
I did the same, putting him on speaker phone because I needed some distance from the man who’d been my confidant and support for a long time.
I had coffee, I felt sick, my chest tight with anxiety, and coldly I knew this was withdrawal, and that one tablet would ease the pain and confusion.
But Trent said I needed help.
I hated him for that, but I’d made the call to my sponsor, hadn’t I?
“I saw you got a contract for a year with the Railers,” Mike said, starting the way we used to, exchanging news. I’d received invites to meet up with him and I’d known I really should make the effort, but when I’d been meds-free I hadn’t wanted to connect with him again. I’d wanted to consign him to my past.
He would never be part of my past. He would be my everyday support if I needed him.
My friend with all the messy parts included.
“It’s a good contract,” I said.
“You’ve worked hard for it,” Mike agreed.
“I’m fucking it all up.” That pretty much summed it up. “I’m a grinder, I’m not ready for the NHL, my knee hurts all the fucking time, and I don’t think I can do it.”
Silence again. He was waiting for me
to expand, but I didn’t know what to say or how to explain it. I needed him to ask me the right questions. I wasn’t ready to talk, and I closed my eyes and hoped he would understand.
“Mike, please help me.”
Nine
Trent
To be honest, I don’t remember much of the ride home. It was chilly for the middle of summer. My throat and neck were the coldest, because my scarf was still lying beside Dieter’s bed. You know, the bed on which I’d spread myself out like an Easter all-you-can-eat buffet. The bed of the man I was supposed to be “only friends” with, yet had allowed to fuck me into a near orgasmic coma with a dildo and his dick, because obviously just the man’s fat cock wasn’t quite enough fuckery. What the shit was my problem? Why had I given in to lust so easily? That was not the behavior of a friend trying to help another friend.
“You’re a slut, Trent. Oh yes you are. What are you looking at?!” I snapped at a man tossing newspapers out of the back of a red van. He flipped me off, and rightfully so.
My scooter tires grabbed some pavement and actually squealed a bit as I flew through a yellow light. My neck was painfully cold. I wished I had my scarf. Admittedly, it was probably only seventy degrees with a light summer breeze, but when one has a cold and shamed soul, one’s neck gets frosty.
I pulled up to my mother’s house. The front tire bumped the curb, because I was so sick and upset and disgusted with myself that my mind was elsewhere. The scooter tipped and we both fell sideways onto the sidewalk.
With the dawn of another new day tickling the sky with salmon, lilac and cyan, I lay there beside my yellow scooter and stared at the sky, tears leaking from my eyes and streaming into my ears.
What are you doing with your life, Trent? How did the world’s premier men’s figure-skating star end up sprawled on the sidewalk in front of his mother’s house weeping like a kid who’s just skinned his knee?
I sat up, tugged off my safflower helmet, and pushed the tips of my cold fingers into my eyes. I had to get my shit together. I sniffled and coughed, wiped my sleeve under my running nose, and slowly got to my feet. When I turned, helmet in hand, my mother was coming down the short walk, her face set and lined
“How many times do I have to tell you to get rid of that damn scooter?!” Her voice was far louder than it should be at this time of the morning. “Are you okay?”
“Like you really care,” I snarled.
How dare she come out here in her summer robe and get in my face? I stormed around her, intent on taking this indoors so everyone who lived on 16th Street didn’t hear our discussion. She grabbed my arm as I passed. I flew around to face her. Her brown eyes flared and she took a step in reverse, her hand falling to her side.
“Do not do that!” I yelled, and whipped my helmet into the neighbor’s yard. It landed on their rhododendrons. “Don’t grab me. Not ever! Don’t pretend that you give two shits about me.”
She opened her mouth to reply. I barreled over her, the only sounds on our street the hum of the streetlights, the flitter of a million moths against glass bulbs, and the reverberation of my shouts bouncing off the small, cramped row houses.
“You went to see him. Why? After all he did to us, to me, your only son, you took a day off work to see Clay.”
“Trent…”
“I begged you to come spend a day with me at the rink, to be on this miserable fucking show that I’m doing only because it will keep a roof over your head!” I inhaled deeply and rolled on, not allowing her any chance to reply. She had hurt me. Badly. And I’d hurt Dieter. And Dieter was hurting himself. So much hurting. We were all drowning in hurt.
“Trent, I just— It’s not that I didn’t want to see you on the show.” She pulled the collar of her robe tighter around her throat. Must be her neck was cold with shame too. “I was too embarrassed to be on it. I married Clay. It’s my fault that you’re broke now and whoring yourself out to keep me and your Lola cared for.”
Wonderful. So my mother agreed that I was a slutty whore. This day was just getting better and better, and it wasn’t even six a.m. yet.
“Tell me why, then. Make me understand why you chose him over me.” I waved my hands around in the air. Her eyes darted around trying to follow them. A light came on across the street in Mr. Cho’s bedroom window. “Make me understand why you can’t give your son an hour or two to be on his show but you can drive up to Mercer and saunter into the State Correctional Institute and not be ashamed.” Words were pouring out of me. I felt lightheaded, and wondered if I was taking time to breathe as I berated my mother. “You could go see the man who stole all my money and gambled it away on dogs, but Trent gets nothing! How can you do that? How the fuck can you pick that miserable human being over me?”
“I didn’t! I went to see him because I love him, Trent!” Her shouts bounced off the sides of the low-income homes. A few more lights flickered on inside our neighbor’s houses.
“Love him?” I blinked at her. “How can you love a man who leaves you broken and starving? Who stole all your son’s money and bought booze and other women with it – whatever he didn’t drop on the fucking greyhounds, that is. How can you possibly love someone like Clay?”
“He has addictions, Trent.” Now she sounded weak, teary, just like she always did when confronted with her choice of men. “He asked about you. He wants to see you…to talk.”
“Then why the hell would you be with him?” I refused to comment on the whole Clay wanting to see me comment. Hell would freeze over before that happened.
“Because I love him!”
“Only idiots love people with addictions!” I roared. My words echoed back at me, resonating off the front of Mr. Cho’s battered brick row house. I slapped my hands over my mouth. What had I just said? What had I just said?
“Trent, you don’t mean that. You loved Jonah so much…”
She took a step toward me. I stumbled in reverse, shaking my head violently. “He never loved me,” I coughed into my palms. “He couldn’t, because he loved the dope more. Same as Dieter.” I dropped into a crouch, resting my back against the cheap fencing that ran around the postage-stamp-sized yard.
“Dieter? Who’s Dieter?” Mom asked.
I ignored her and just cried. For so long that 16th Street was waking up in earnest before I got myself together enough to go to the rink, my mother begging and pleading with me to come inside and talk more. There were no more words or emotions in me, so I righted my scooter and took off, leaving my helmet on Mrs. Patel’s pink rhododendrons. Who cared if I T-boned a car without my skid lid? Not Jonah. Not my mother. Not Clay. Not my father, who got himself killed before I could even talk. And certainly not Dieter.
Rainbow Skate appeared mysteriously in front of me. Had I crossed the city already? Huh. I’d wept and scooted all the way there without kissing a phone pole or the back of a Subaru, so yay me. First stop once inside the empty rink was a bathroom. I looked at myself and wanted to weep again. My hair was a windblown, sexed-up mess. My eyes were puffy and red, my cheeks splotchy, and my neck bore a brilliant purple hickey the size of my thumb.
“This right here is a complete mess,” I muttered.
I turned on the cold water and patted down my cheeks and hair, to no avail. Knowing it was beyond a sink bath, I went to the showers and stood under the hot water, lost as a man could be, soaping my ass and wincing at the reminder of being loved by a hockey player on the edge. I had to put on my dirty clothes. I skipped the day-old briefs and threw them in the trash. Then I went to the manager’s office, sat behind Dan’s desk, and pretended to work. Work consisted of staring at Dieter on a continual loop of video.
What was I doing allowing myself to fall into this kind of relationship again? I turned off the tapes of Dieter Lehmann and let my eyes drift shut. I had a couple of hours before the Railers and the fucking cameras would show up. I’d push through the training today, make my calls to the charity event I’d missed in order to tumble into Dieter’s bed, then go home to m
y place and sew. Or eat tubs of frozen whipped topping while watching Steel Magnolias and wallowing in self-pity and disgrace. Or I could get drunk. Either would work.
I’d been asleep for only a short while when a thunderous rap on the open door jarred me awake. Heart in throat, I found Stan filling the doorway of Dan’s small office.
“We work me good.” He folded his arms over his massive chest after ducking to enter the
room. I scrubbed at my face with my hands. He smelled of coffee and doughnuts. My stomach rumbled but there was no way I was feeding it.
“You hungry. Should eat.”
“I’m not eating today. I’ve stuffed enough food into me the past couple of weeks to sink a tubby old ship.”
His gray eyes narrowed a bit, not so much in anger but in concern.
“I need to abstain a bit. Maybe just do a liquid diet. I’ll be fine.” I found my Superstar Trent smile and glued it into place.
“You eat. Not eating is bad.”
“Not when you’re a fatty potato like I am.” I patted my flat stomach, then slowly pushed out of the creaky chair. Or were those sounds coming from my stiff back? “Let me get some coffee and we’ll—”
“No. We eat now. Skate needs food. Mm-Mm good.”
“Soup? We’re having soup for breakfast?”
He nodded, then took me by the wrist and led me to the row of vending machines. I peeked up at the huge man. Stan smiled down, then waved a hand the size of a hubcap at the machines.
“Eat Mm-Mm soup. Drink milk. Make energy for skating. I wait.”
“Fine.” I sighed and fed some money into the damn machines.
When I had soup and a container of two percent milk, my diet guru and I went back to Dan’s office. I ate. Stan sat across from me, all eighteen feet of him folded into a puny chair, talking away as I sipped on my chicken rice. It tasted rather good.
“I keep eye on food for you like Layton.”
“Okay.” I spooned in some rice and broth. It slid down my tender throat. Crying for hours on end is tough on a soul. “Do you think I’m being a twat?”