Page 75 of Wingmen

And was this girl he’d logged going to take care of Elliot if he broke down and tried to leave in the middle of things? Was she going to lie in the dark with her arms around him for hours while he cried? Was she going to make him coffee the next morning, and drive him to hockey practice, and fall in love with him from the bleachers while he was out there doing footwork drills? Was she going to spend the next three weeks regretting that she didn’t just make himtalk to herthat day, because obviously that waswhen everything started unraveling and instead of getting to the bottom of it, she’d dropped him off at his hotel and watched him walk away and gone back to her loft in the Pearl District to wallow in her own self-pity, and take drugs because her knee hurt?

No. She probably wasn’t going to do any of that.

And he wasn’tin lovewith Rodriguez. Where the fuck had that come from?

He paced in front of the coffee table, then picked up the phone and began typing a message to Fatima. He was halfway through it when he realized that what he was about to do wasabsurdlyfucked up, and stopped.

He was about to text Fatima so he could log her to the app like a big middle finger to Rodriguez. Which was so unspeakably gross, Dustin had to marvel.Hetaught Elliot this: how to weaponize women.

He went back to the couch and sat staring through the window for a long time. Then he opened the laptop.

One thing Dustin had learned about himself this summer was that research made him feel better. He’d spent a lot of time on the internet trying to figure out what the hell was going on with him while he was hooking up with Elliot, and found it soothing to learn specific information. Ditto the oxycodone: once you knew enough about it, you could decide how to proceed.

So was there a way to proceed with that?

Because three weeks ago, the vague threat of ‘mild withdrawal from physical dependence on opioids’ felt like an abstract thing that would be totally manageable. Right now, in the face of what Elliot had done – in the face of whathe’d taught Elliot to do and hated himself for– it felt like a lot.

He hadn’t taken the stuff for long. It wouldn’t be terrible. A bad flu. He just needed a small amount of something legal to gethim through a few days until he wasn’t so bent out of shape about Elliot.

Was there such a thing?

There was.

There was one small obstacle: it was in Canada.

In Canada, Google told him, you could buy low-dose codeine over the counter. You had to talk to a pharmacist and you needed a legitimate reason for taking it, but you didn’t need a prescription, and you could walk out of a pharmacy with a legal thing that didroughlywhat the oxycodone did. You could also get something called ‘kratom’ without having to go to Canada, but that was just powdered leaves you bought at a gas station, and it sounded like bullshit, so, no thank you.

Was he or someone he knew struggling with addiction?the AI summary wanted to know.Did he need the number for a hotline?

He swiped that away and looked at a map.

The Canadian border was a six-hour drive from Portland…but the flight was only an hour. The cost was negligible. He was Canadian, so hopefully there wouldn’t be a lot of hoops to jump through. Jordan was in Vancouver, and he hadn’t visited him for a while.

It all sounded pretty reasonable. Apart from the fact that he’d be crossing an international border to buy opioids.

What was the alternative? Call Dr. Wu and see if there was an alternative? That would trigger all kinds of NHL safeguards. It might get out to the press and then the public. And he was so fucking close to retirement.

He looked at flights and found one early the next morning. He sat with his finger over the purchase button for a long time.

Then he told himself he was being insane, closed the laptop without booking anything, and went back to the fridge to finish the bottle of wine.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Elliot

“Elliot? Are you okay in there?”

Drew knocked on the door. Elliot looked up from where he was sitting naked on the side of the bathtub with his phone in his hands. “Yeah, all good. Did you need to get in here?”

“Eventually. Just checking in. You’ve…been in there a while. Sorry. That’s awkward. Um…”

“No worries. I’ll be right out.”

Her footsteps retreated and Elliot went back to the phone. He was looking at the Body Count app. When he’d logged Drew three weeks ago, drunk, it had felt like a win. Getting back at Dustin for stealing Katie from him, maybe — or just proving he could get through sex with someone without crying.

Tonight, it didn’t feel like a win.

Drew was great. She was funny and smart and drank beer like a champ. She was good at bowling and pool. They had a good time. Elliot thought about her when he wasn’t with her sometimes. It was how he’d thought falling in love withsomeone should feel…until they got to the sex and everything kind of died. For him, at least. He was pretty sure he was doing a good enough job that she was having a good time.