Page 74 of Wingmen

“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 onsomelist.

“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 painmayhave ‘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 doingwas 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 wasfrom 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 somethingDustin 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 thenlogged 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.