“I didn’t know whether to start with my diagnosis,” he said, “or what got me there in the first place. But this can’t go any further until you know. It’s not fair to you.”
“You are sick. You’re okay, right? Please tell me you’re okay.”
“It’s not that kind of sick. Read this. And then I’ll explain.” He handed her the notebook.
“Poetry?”
“Kind of, I guess. Maybe song lyrics. I don’t know. Just needed to get some stuff out.”
She read from the first page to the last one on which he’d written. His pain inscribed in each line: for her, for the baby, the injury, the loneliness. Singing her his scars. But it changed in the later poems, a veil of darkness shrouding each word, lamenting how his mind had betrayed him.
“What does this mean? Alex, what’s going on?”
“Remember when I would get angry and lash out? Of course you do. That’s why you moved, or at least part of it.”
“Alex—”
He raised a hand. “Hear me out. You know some of the stupid things I did, like at the strip club and in Ibiza. I could drink and dance, and fuck and play hockey, and for weeks at a time, everything was great. Except it wasn’t. After the injury, I started going in the opposite direction. It wasn’t the first time I’d gotten sad. I did a lot; I hid it and kept pretending. I did some things…” He scrubbed a hand over his mouth. “Gospod′ Bog,” he whispered.
Stephanie twined her fingers with his. “Whatever it is, Alex, you can tell me.”
He drew in a deep, slow breath, but tears burned his eyes, and his bowels clenched. “Back in March, I went on a week-long coke binge. And during that week…” He drew another breath. Shaking. “There were a lot of women. I gave some of them money. And some of them brought more drugs.”
Her hand fell away. He’d known she would not want to touch him any longer. She would regret he had ever come.
“That’s prostitution, Alex.” Her voice was rising. Her breath shuddered. “Since when do you have to pay anyone to sleep with you?”
“It wasn’t for that. They took the time to come over, and I was lonely. Just trying to feel better.” Keep digging. “But one day I woke up, and I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t stand the thought of living like that. And…first I tried it with a knife, but it reminded me too much of…” He glanced at his foot. “So then I took the pills and vodka.” His voice broke. “I tried to kill myself.” And couldn’t even do that right. He could not bring himself to look at her, to face the judgment he had earned.
“Alex, why didn’t you call me? I would’ve—Why?” Her shriek ripped through his ears and gashed his heart. He cringed.
“I didn’t want to hurt you anymore.”
“Do you think I want you dead? Would I be better off then?”
Entirely possible. “I called Jacob, so I guess I wasn’t so ready to die. They put me on a seventy-two-hour psych hold. After I started therapy, I found out I have type-two bipolar disorder. I have for years; I just didn’t know. Now I’m on medication. And trying to get better.”
She was silent for so long he turned from the windows to make sure she hadn’t sneaked out. She was cradling her head in her hands.
“Steph.” He laid a hand on her shoulder, though he feared she would crumble beneath him like the sand upon which he had built his pretty dream. To his horror, she shrugged him off and bolted from the chair. She stopped at the door, one hand pressed to her mouth and tears cutting down her cheeks. Something sparkled in the darkness.
The promise ring. She hadn’t been wearing it yesterday.
“Oh…” He swallowed around the briars in his throat, her tears washing away bits of him because he was disintegrating along with that dream.
“I need to process this, Alex. Not that you’re bipolar. I can deal with that. Shit, it explains just about everything. But the things you did…And I get it was because you were sick. But I need to figure out if I can live with what happens when you can’t cope.”
“But I’m getting help now,” he said, because he did not know what else to do.
The door closed.
“But I love you,” he whispered. He pulled the box from his pocket and hurled the forty-thousand-dollar ring across the room. It bounced off the headboard and landed in the center of the bed. He dropped into the chair still warm from her, clawing at his hair and grinding his elbows into his thighs. Breathing as though he could not any longer. Tears spattered his jeans. That he had expected another outcome had been the pinnacle of idiocy. He could not guarantee her the terrible things he’d done wouldn’t happen again despite medication and his best efforts. No matter how much he loved her.
He called the airline and changed his flight to Seattle for Wednesday. Tomorrow he’d salvage something of this trip, at least, and talk to his old general manager.
With the walls closing in, he locked the ring in the room safe and went for a long walk, his fingers so tight around the cane’s handle his knuckles throbbed. He stopped to light a cigarette. Less than two miles to Canalside and back, an easy trip once, minutes on a hockey player’s legs. But he wasn’t a hockey player anymore. He was nothing anymore. And while being free of expectations, the sole crafter of his future, should have excited him, he felt only pointlessness. He had failed at the most important thing of all, and whatever else he might be was a charade. Like always.
***
Stephanie
She sobbed into her pillow like a teenaged girl suffering her first heartbreak. It wasn’t even about the women, given Alex’s notorious past, though it hurt to imagine others pleasuring what in a denial of reality she had continued to deem hers. She’d relinquished her rights the second she had walked out of his condo. That she’d remained celibate these six months was her own damned fault. Brandon would’ve gone to bed with her if she had asked. She hadn’t owed Alex her fidelity.
It was that the spontaneity she so loved also made him unpredictable. If she could not foresee he might view a drug binge as an appropriate coping mechanism, what other shocks lay ahead? He had a terrible temper. Had he ever been violent off-ice toward anyone other than himself? He hated discussing personal problems. What if he did something stupid instead of talking to her?
She wandered into the kitchen, her eyes half swollen shut, and uncorked a bottle of wine. Hypocrite or not, she wasn’t about to get sanctimonious over self-medication. Stephanie sprawled on the couch and drank the whole thing straight from the bottle. Her skull throbbed; she would puke sooner rather than later.
It would have to be something like mental illness. Something intangible and capricious, compelling him to do what was otherwise unthinkable in his right mind. That would cause the most pain, because it had convinced him he did not warrant the happiness they had found, however fleeting, in each other. His brain, she wagered, sounded a great deal like her father.
She picked up her phone, though not to call Alex; the vindictive little part of her mind that clung to the idea he’d betrayed her wouldn’t permit it. Tonight, bad judgment reigned supreme. “Brandon?”
“Stephanie? I was wondering what happened to you this weekend.”
“I, uh…Oh, God.” She crumbled again.
“What’s wrong?”
“Can you come over? I really need someone to talk to.”
“Of course. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“Thank you.” She hung up and wandered into the bathroom, where two of her stared back from the mirror, and both revolted her. Red and puffy eyes, red nose, tearstained cheeks, tottering into anything she could hang on to. No fixing it now.
She buzzed Brandon in. He assessed her with a pronounced crease in his forehead and declared, “You’re wasted.”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”
“What the hell is going on?” He sat on the couch and patted the cushion beside him.
“I-I’ll be right back.” She dashed down the hall, kicked the bathroom door shut, and flung herself before the toilet ju
st in time for dinner and the wine to come back up.
Brandon knocked. “Can I get you something?”
“There’s ginger ale in the fridge. Please…I’ll be out in a minute.”
“You got it.”
She flushed, wiped her mouth, and brushed her teeth. As if the night wasn’t bad enough, humiliating herself in front of a co-worker. A potential lover. Stephanie trudged back to the living room, flopped onto the couch, and sipped the ginger ale Brandon had poured for her.
“Rough day, eh? Something happen at work?”
“No. The reason I wasn’t around all weekend was because…” She blew out a breath. “Aleksandr showed up on Friday afternoon.”
“Oh.” Brandon’s gaze smoldered with resentment over an opportunity lost. Plenty of hockey players, even retired ones, held grudges against Alex. No one wanted to compete with him. Couldn’t.
“I didn’t know he was sick, and the things he did…I don’t want to feel like this. Like I’m dying inside.” She took Brandon’s face in her hands and mashed her lips to his. “I want to forget. Help me forget. Please.”
“Steph, you are so drunk—ˮ
“I’m consenting.”
“You can’t.”
“I’m not going to change my mind tomorrow morning. Help me fix this.”
“This won’t fix anything.”
“Stop being so goddamned nice, Brandon. I’m offering.”
Gripping her upper arms, he shunted her away. “I really like you, Steph. But this isn’t how I want it. I want you to want it. Not because I’m a Band-Aid for a wound that won’t heal.”
“You don’t know it won’t help.”
“But you do. A lot of guys would take advantage of this situation, but I’m not one of them. Maybe that does make me too nice. But whatever is going on, you need to work it out with Volynsky. And then you can let me know when—if—you’re ready.”
“He’s mentally ill,” she said as Brandon stood at the door. Wondering if she should have divulged information not hers to give. “I knew there was something wrong, but am I a bad person to say I don’t know if I can handle it?”
“Everyone has their limits.”
“Love doesn’t. Shouldn’t.”
“Then it sounds like you’ve already decided. What he probably needs most right now is someone who will love him no matter what. Can’t say I’m not a little jealous.” Brandon smiled and shrugged. “But I’m not about to take away his support system.”
“Thank you. You’ve been a really good friend.”
“This isn’t easy, I know. But I’m always here to talk. Try to get some rest, okay?”
She nodded.
“I’ll see you soon, I hope. Good night, Steph.”
She bowed her face to her hands. Time, the one thing she needed most. The one thing they did not have.
***
Aleksandr
Alex had set the alarm for five a.m. The one time he wished for Latuda’s drowsiness, it had refused him all night. He shut off the alarm, then changed into his swim trunks and flip-flops for a dip in the pool before he began packing. He would not tell Stephanie he had gone until he was back in Seattle. If they ever spoke again. He’d received no calls, not even a text, at all yesterday.
His mind grappled with many things. He’d met his old GM for lunch to let him know he held no grudges about the trade and its consequences, but the guilt had been palpable. Not like Connor Talbot’s, though. Alex had called him after the Tornadoes were eliminated from the playoffs and asked him to reconsider retirement, assured him he was doing fine—he had learned to walk again; that was the important thing—but Connor wouldn’t hear it. Couldn’t have that hanging over his head every time he played. Commentators would always refer to him as the man who had ended Aleksandr Volynsky’s career, and so Alex, by extension, had ended Connor’s in an inadvertent act of media-instigated retaliation.
He grabbed a towel, the card key, and his phone and headed upstairs to the pool. After arranging his things on a deck chair and kicking off the flip-flops, he stumbled down the metal ladder into the shallow end. A gray-haired man, likely one of the executives who frequented the hotel, exited at the same time, as though sadness were some waterborne illness he could detect on sight. Alex rolled onto his back and stared at the recessed white ceiling. A blank slate like the life before him, a story he was inventing as he went along. But he did not know how to write it without her.
He closed his eyes. Hoped he would drift into sleep and sink to the bottom, a strange Ophelia, mad and clinging to a love that had perhaps made him more so.
When he did not, he swam a few laps, then hauled himself out and dried off. The hall to his room was quiet. He was not yet used to a life without noise. He could not bear silence and the things dwelling in it.
Alex step-thumped through the corridor but stopped a few feet from his door. His knees wobbled. “Wh-what are you doing here?”
***
Stephanie
She had knocked for the better part of five minutes to no avail. He might have checked out already. She hadn’t bothered to ask at the front desk and doubted he’d used his real name. His turn to be the first to leave, but neither would make another journey of reconciliation.
She sank to the carpeted floor, knees drawn up and her head in her hands. She’d left work early yesterday, because the choice required of her prevented her from concentrating on meaningless things like trades and free-agency signings. She had lain awake all night, locked in an internal debate, until she had decided.
She did not want to live this lifetime without him.
The shup-shup of flip-flops and the dull thud of a cane roused her.
“What are you doing here?” Alex was wearing nothing but swim trunks, the body whose phantom curled around her at night now standing before her in all its tattooed glory. Thinner, true, and the right calf smaller than the left, but he’d put obvious effort into maintaining his chiseled muscles during bed rest. The firebird’s brilliant oranges and reds blazed against his fair skin. Hope. Healing for the sick. If only it had brought him those things.
He glanced down at himself, and a faint smile graced his lips. His beard obscured his dimples. As good as it looked on him, she preferred those little indentations. He inserted the card into the lock; she pushed herself up and stood behind him.
“Don’t you have to work?” he asked.
“In a couple hours. That wasn’t me turning my back on you, Alex. I did once already, and it’s shitty to abandon someone when they need you the most. I just had to get my head together.”
“Maybe it’s for the best. For you, I mean.” He opened the door and let her pass. “I gave you such a hard time about the interview. I broke up your engagement. Then you were fired because of me. All I do is fuck up your life.” He gestured to a chair, but she didn’t sit.
“That interview led to my dream job.”
“Far away from me.” He sighed and shook his head. “I didn’t mean to put you on the spot the other night. I don’t want to interfere with the life you’re making here.” Alex tossed his towel into the bathroom, then bumped the heels of his flip-flops against the carpet until they dislodged from his feet. “You deserve better.”
She pressed her trembling lips together. It didn’t matter, even if there was someone better. He wouldn’t be Alex. “We could’ve fixed this sooner.”
“Could we?ˮ
“You wouldn’t have done it if I’d been there.” If she’d listened to her instincts, dug in a little harder, fought for him instead of running away…
“I would’ve. I happened to do it when everything else was falling apart too. This is mine, Steph. How I deal with it or don’t is all on me, and there’s no guarantee it won’t happen again. That’s why I was afraid to tell you, but I owe you the choice to end this once and for all.”
“Or the choice to stay.”
His face reddened, and his chin quivered. He walked to the closet and hefted out his suitcase.
>
“What are you doing?”
“I changed my flight. I’m leaving this morning.”
“So that’s it, then.”
He sniffed, his crystalline eyes ready to unleash a deluge. “I don’t know what else to do.” He tossed clothes from the dresser into the suitcase. “Maybe we’re too broken to be together.”
“Or maybe each of us has the parts the other is missing.”
“Let me rephrase. Maybe I’m too broken.”
“Do you really think you don’t deserve to be loved? I’m here, aren’t I?”
“I don’t know if I can be what you need. What you should have. I don’t even know who I am anymore.”
“I know who you are. And I know I love you.” In the darkness near the door, Stephanie kicked off her sandals, shimmied out of her panties, and pulled off her dress and bra. If he refused to listen to her words, she would communicate by any means necessary. “Where is my choice, if you’re just going to leave?”
“Love and pity aren’t the same thing, Stephanie. It’s—ˮ Alex straightened and turned toward her. His gaze roamed her body, and he let out a long breath.
She crossed the room. He stood still, arms at his sides. Stephanie unfastened his damp swim trunks and pushed them down his legs. His hard cock sprang free. She backed him to the bed, and he sat on the edge, his eyes huge and confused but his body enticing her into connection. To be what they were together.
“How long has it been?”
“Over three months. But—ˮ
She straddled him and angled herself so the head of his cock rested between her lower lips. He moaned as she gripped his shoulders and inched down his shaft, filling every emptiness. Only children loved perfect things; perfection was simple, asking nothing. It did not challenge, but it also did not reward. For all the tribulations loving Alex might entail, no man on Earth would return that love with his unswerving, heartbreaking devotion.
Firebird (The Firebird Trilogy #1) Page 28
