The Fix

by Kristin Rouse

  Mac helped me move into this place. He sat with me while I signed my lease, he made trips up and down the stairs, lifting boxes I shouldn’t have packed so heavy with a smile on his face like nothing could have made him happier than to move me into my own place. This was the first—the only—place of my own. Dylan had moved out years earlier, so maybe it was just that Mac was happy I was finally growing up. Maybe he was just proud of me. I’d like to think it was the latter, even when I think back on how he kept catching me taking nips of my flask throughout the day. He hadn’t said anything—thinking back, he never did when he caught me drinking—and averted his gaze. I wonder if he’d looked away to pretend he didn’t see, or to keep me from seeing that, in those moments, he wasn’t so proud of me after all.

  “I’m really sorry,” I whisper to the empty room, like Mac is there, Birdie purring on his lap in between hissing at me. “I’m trying to do better. I’m going to do better, I promise.”

  I must stay wrapped in my thoughts longer than I realize, because Jules taps on the doorframe and nods over her shoulder.

  “They’ve already dropped off the Goodwill stuff and they don’t have a key to my house,” she says. “I don’t want to rush you, but….”

  “Sorry. I’m good now.”

  I turn towards the door, still trying to banish the image of Mac from my head when Jules strides across me towards the kitchen.

  “You forgot your broom,” she says as she picks it up and makes to bring it out with her.

  I grasp her by her forearm and shake my head. “You never take your broom when you move,” I tell her.

  “What? Says who?”

  It’s been ages since Mac, Dylan, and I moved out of my mother’s house. But still, why question Mac?

  “Said Mac.” It’s all I need to say. She nods and twines her fingers in mine, then we leave my apartment—and all its memories—behind.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The same sort of thing happens the first few nights I live with Juliana. We’ll be settling in for bed, me working through some of the reading and journaling exercises that my group counselors want me to do, Juliana rubbing what seems like mounds of cocoa butter into her skin, and I’ll start to want her. I’ll want her so badly it aches. Or, at least my head does. My heart does. Anything south of that is a no-go. This seems both unfair and messed up, because I’m only twenty-six. Other than being a hopeless drunk, I’m healthy. So why the hell can’t I get it up to make love to my amazingly gorgeous girlfriend?

  She’ll smile at me, slip between the sheets, and read until I’m ready to turn out the light on my side of the bed and hunker down. She’ll roll around a little in bed, trying to get comfortable around my weight next to her, I suppose, and then end up touching me somehow. Usually she wedges her fingers under my arm or torso. Sometimes she rolls all the way over and nestles her head in the crook of my arm. Eventually, I’ll gather her in my arms and we’ll fall asleep that way, absorbed in each other in all ways except the way I’m craving most and can’t get myself fully geared up for. I could chalk it up to being tired—it really is amazing how tired you can be when you literally do nothing all day but think about not drinking—which is actually thinking quite hard about drinking. But there’s a niggling sort of feeling I can’t quell that there’s something else going on, something in my brain chemistry that’s affecting me physically.

  But she’s unendingly patient, this girl of mine—she seems content with these little touches, with this sort of innocent bed-sharing. It helps me feel a little less useless, and a little less bothered by my uselessness.

  A very little bit, anyway.

  ***

  It doesn’t take more than a couple of days to unpack my things. On the day I finish once and for all, I’m finding a place for my kitchen stuff when she gets home from work, a scowl set deep in her face and her shoulders hunched up to her ears.

  “Rough day?” I ask.

  She mutters something that sounds vicious, even though I don’t understand Portuguese. This is where most boyfriends would pour her a glass of wine, but she’s thrown away anything in her house that has any alcohol content whatsoever—even her NyQuil and rubbing alcohol. Instead I make her a cup of tea as she launches into a tirade about a new solar panel sales rep her company is working with who seems like a good guy, but has a bad habit of taking credit for ideas that aren’t his. I slip off the precariously high heels strapped to her feet as I sit on the ottoman and listen. She falls silent and her jaw hangs open when one of my knuckles finds a tender spot in the arch of her foot.

  “I’m not venting so you’ll do th—oh!” she yelps when I move a fraction of an inch.

  “What, it’s not like I do anything else all day, other than search job ads and roll on my foam roller. You might as well get something out of me being your man of leisure.”

  “You’re not a man of leisure. You’re recovering and that’s important,” she says, a little too seriously.

  “I’m trying to add a little levity to your day, Jules. Let me rub your damn feet before I forget how to do what I was trained to do.”And maybe I don’t want the reminder of my recovery, but I won’t say it out loud. I already know I’ve got to get moving in an hour or so if I want to make my AA meeting at the church across the street.

  She’s a little less enthusiastic with her complaints as I work up into her always-tight calves, and her words fall away entirely once I knead her muscles into mush. I scoot her legs off my lap and curl into the chaise next to her. She lolls her head on my shoulder and grins up at me, like she hadn’t been tempted to kill the sales rep in question twenty minutes ago.

  “How do you do that?” she asks, her voice dreamy.

  I shrug. “How do you calculate carbon emissions acceptable for minimum environmental detriment?” Not a bad phrase to have memorized for a guy who barely made it out of high school.

  “No, I mean… The massage felt good and all, and my feet feel better, but I’m not feeling so nasty now. That was you.”

  “Oh. Well. I don’t know what to tell you on that,” I say, because it’s true. “I’m glad, though. It’s good to know I’m good around here for something.”

  Her scowl returns. Clearly I’m not as good as calming her down as she says I am.

  “I hate it when you say that sort of stuff about yourself, you know. I know you think you sound self-deprecating, but it worries me.”

  “Jules, I haven’t worked in almost two months. Literally all I do with my time is read the classic novels I lied about reading in high school English and go to my rehab sessions. I am sort of a loser right now. That’s not exactly up to interpretation. It’s just true. I can’t even—”

  I stop. I wonder if she knows what I’m about to say, since she’s more than aware of how useless I’ve been in bed in the weeks since my relapse.

  “You’re not a loser. You’re brave. I see how brave you are, even if you don’t. It frustrates me that you don’t see it. It really does.”

  I hang my head. “I don’t know what to tell you, honey. I’m sorry you’re frustrated with me.”

  “No, it’s not… You’re just… I don’t….” She’s cute when she stammers, but it’s unnerving when she’s stammering because she doesn’t know what to make of me.

  “I’m gonna head to my meeting. I can pick us up food on the way home, if you’d like,” I say, because yeah, I want to get out of this weird mess I’ve managed to make since she got home.

  “No, it’s all right. I’ll cook. Have a good meeting.”

  She doesn’t send me off with a kiss, which sort of hurts. I palm my cigarettes and stalk down the street, smoking two in rapid succession before I let myself into the church basement meeting room and find a usual spot near the back. I’m prepared to sit there and stew, which is usually all I do at these meetings despite my new sponsor, Ryan, pushing me to open up.

  After the opening salvo, when everyone begins to look around shifty-eyed to see who’s going to be the first to speak up
about their day, their week, their year or whatever, I feel this strange wiggling in my feet. It’s not just that I’m antsy to leave so that I might be able to set things right with Jules again, although that’s a part of it. I can’t seem to stay still in my seat. I want… I need to get up. The problem is, if I get up, everyone is going to assume I’m going to be the first one to talk. So I’ll have to get up and talk, and let out all the crap in my head about how useless I feel, how I keep sliding backwards instead of pummeling forwards, how I can’t seem to do anything right. And we’ve heard that story over and over again, day after day after week after week. It’s not the prevailing theme of an AA meeting, but it’s certainly one of them.

  I think that’s when it clicks. I’m not the odd-man-out here, just like I’m not the odd-man-out at rehab. I can talk about what’s going on in my head here, and these people aren’t going to judge me like I judge myself, like I’m worried everyone is always judging me, because it’s the same sort of stuff that’s going on in their heads.

  My feet wiggle again, and I stand. There’s that sort of hush that comes over a group of people when someone is about to be the center of attention, and I clear my throat.

  This particular group doesn’t employ the standard, “I’m Whoever and I’m an alcoholic,” you see on TV, which is one of the reasons I prefer it over other meetings. You can say your name or not. At the moment, introducing myself doesn’t really feel necessary. Instead, what feels necessary is this:

  “I just… I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing. I fucked up two months ago and I’ve had to start all over again. And no matter how many people tell me I’m doing everything right, I still feel like I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  My brain turns on autopilot, and my words just… flow. I don’t remember half of what I say as soon as I say it. I don’t realize I’ve even stopped talking until people start clapping for me and a few people I’ve always thought of as strangers get up and ask if they can give me a hug.

  I’m not special. I’m just like everyone else here. And that, in fact, might be the best thing to be.

  ***

  Me: Look, I know we aren’t talking right now, and I get why… I just wanted you to be the first to know I spoke in my meeting tonight. About the relapse. About everything going on right now.

  There’s a long pause in which I can actually smoke two whole cigarettes before Anja texts me back. Then:

  Anja: So how do you feel now?

  Me: About a billion times lighter. I wish you’d been there. I feel like you would have been really proud of me. I’m pretty proud of me, too.

  She doesn’t text back. Instead, she calls, and she’s sobbing. We’re on the phone for a long time, apologizing to each other about how much of a mess we’ve been lately and telling each other we love one another. It still stings not having her as my sponsor, but I have my best friend back.

  That means more than I can possibly say.

  ***

  Juliana is still in her work clothes, her feet stuffed into a pair of fluffy bunny slippers while she stirs a pot of something hardcore spicy—some sort of red bean mixture, I figure, given the pot of rice on the burner next to her.

  “Go okay?” she asks, not looking up from her rapid stirring.

  “I talked about the relapse.”

  This gets her to stop stirring and look up and me. Like Anja, she understands the significance of this. That this is one of the biggest things my counselors and Ryan have been harping on me to talk about since it happened, to deal with it fully and put it behind me. I don’t think I can be blamed for not wanting to talk about the day I flushed all my progress from the last year down the drain in one fell swoop, but I kept saying I wasn’t ready, I didn’t know when I would be ready.

  It had poured out of me like water at the meeting. I could barely believe I was the one talking.

  “That’s a good thing, right? That’s what they’ve been wanting you to do.”

  I nod.

  “That’s awesome, Ez. I’m really glad to hear it.” Her face is a full-on smile, but her lips twitch, like she wants to say something else and doesn’t quite know how or what. Instead she goes back to stirring the pot.

  “Jules, put the spoon down a second.”

  “It’ll burn. What’s so import—”

  I cut her off with my mouth on hers. My fingers find my way into her hair to guide her face towards mine, and I back her up against the counter nearest the stove. My body presses hungrily into hers, and I can feel her hesitate a moment before she sinks into me.

  There’s freedom in talking, a lightness that only comes when you get your bullshit off your own chest and out into the ether. It weighs your heart down less and gets you out of your own head. When I stepped through the door, all I could think about was Juliana and how much I want to be worthy of someone like her. I have so far to go in that respect, so much work still to do before I’m anywhere near good enough, but finally feeling like I’m trying and succeeding—it stirred something deep in my gut and set my body ablaze. And I think she’s the only way to truly quench it.

  I pivot her into the bedroom, not even bothering to turn off the burners on the stove before I sweep her into my arms. She doesn’t hesitate helping me out of my clothes as I tug on hers, and only when we’re both naked do I feel the full weight of everything that I said, every admission of my mistakes and fuck-ups, truly melt away.

  “I love you, Jules,” I say, and lay her down. My body melts into hers as soon as I lower myself on top of her, finding any and every inch of skin to kiss and worship as she hums my name in return with sweet, melodic grace.

  It’s the first time since that aggressive, stupid moment in the cafe bathroom we don’t use a condom—she’s gone on the Pill since I moved in, and feeling her, every inch of her, is heaven. Everything about us in this moment is perfect and infinite. There’s something different about the way we make love. We don’t hold anything back. She knows she can finish me when she gasps into my ears how much she loves me, and she holds me when I’m shaking with aftershocks of pleasure and struggling to catch my breath. For a second, I think about how much I love her and it scares me. You shouldn’t be scared of how much you love someone, but I am with her, a little bit. She didn’t ask me to love her—she only asked me not to give up on us. To give us the future we deserve together.

  That, I tell myself over and over again, is what I’m doing. We’re giving ourselves a chance, and I’m giving myself one. We’re aiming for forever at the same time I’m aiming for ‘better.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  It isn’t even all that long after that revelation at the meeting that I feel things begin to slide. I go on a few job interviews, but I am apparently too honest in my interviews, because people don’t seem to want to take a chance on an addict who hasn’t even earned back his three-month chip. I hear a lot of “You do great work; call us when you’re a little more stable,” and “Shouldn’t you be focusing on your recovery?”

  I think my luck is turning around when a chiropractor decides to bring me on full time, and seems utterly unfazed by my admission, my meetings and group schedule, and my lack of personal clients. I’m literally putting together a website and business cards with her office’s information when she calls at the last damn minute and changes her mind. This sucks even more than the people who’d told me thanks-but-no-thanks from the beginning. And I think I’m understandably bitter about it, all told.

  Jules says the same thing, but far more delicately. It’s no secret that an engineer is going to make more money than a massage therapist, but I’m not used to the idea of not contributing financially at all. We strike a bargain that I’ll keep the house clean and cook—well, more like learn how to cook anything besides pasta and rice. At least that keeps me busy while she’s at work.

  Still, I’m not sure how Jules can stand me being around all the time. When she gets home from work, I practically pounce on her—not even in a sexual way, but in the sort of way one
craves human contact after being alone with one’s thoughts. And with her projects at work ramping up, I get the impression that some nights she just wants a little peace and quiet. So, with the weather on its way to balmy, I get back into running and become uniquely acquainted with the library nearby, so she can have some time to decompress,. Only half the books I check out are on addiction, if that’s interesting to note.

  There isn’t anything wrong with our relationship—at least, I don’t think there is. We don’t bicker, we make love as often as Jules has energy. And she always seems to have energy. We go on day trips into the mountains with Mattias and Anja or play soccer in City Park with Lukas and whomever he’s dating at that particular moment. Lukas and I have become closer, too, since I’m free during the weekdays and he tends to work mainly nights and evenings. When Anja and Mattias buy their house, it’s the five of us who paint the place from floor to ceiling and decorate for their housewarming. The three of them come up to our place for dinners as I figure out how to mill about the kitchen and not start fires. We dine with Mama A every Wednesday, even if I take care of our laundry during the week as needed. And the longer I’m sober, the more I realize other sober allies are important—Constance is slowly becoming my mom, not just my mother, and Gemma has gotten so attached to Jules as to call her ‘her big sister.’ I’m still not sure the kid really realizes that I’m her big brother, but that’s neither here nor there.

  We seem like any other couple, with friends and family we love, and a little rental house that is slowly becoming less hers and more ours. We’re playing house and playing it well. And I’m only an asshole, like, forty percent of the time.

  … maybe forty-five.

  So it shouldn’t surprise me the day Jules, strangely quiet and pensive all day long, looks over at me and says, “You really don’t remember anything about the days you were out of it?”

  I look up from my book and probably pull some sort of real goober-face. “No, I remember plenty. I did it for years.”