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FIVE
Axel
I did a long, sweaty session in my yoga room, but for once it didn’t help. I lay on my back on the floor when I finished, my arms and legs aching, and stared at the ceiling.
Instead of feeling emptied of tension, which yoga was supposed to do, I was vibrating with it. I was buzzing with some kind of dissatisfaction, a feeling that was physical and mental at the same time. I’d been an addict long enough to recognize it as a craving, except for once the craving wasn’t for a hit.
“Complete honesty,” I said aloud, chiding myself.
Like every addict, I’d spent a long time lying to myself. One of the keys to sobriety was to be honest in your thoughts about what you’re thinking and feeling instead of dulling anything uncomfortable with whatever you could dump into your system.
So, the truth: this dissatisfaction had to do with Brit Creighton.
Specifically, I was having a visceral, physical reaction to her that was in no way platonic.
I groaned aloud at this thought. “Jesus Christ, man, get a grip,” I told myself.
This was bad. Very bad.
On paper, there was no reason why my neighbor and I couldn’t get dirty. We were both adults, and we were both single—at least, I was, and Brit had only mentioned an ex-boyfriend, not a current one. In most situations, this could mean orgasms and mutual good times.
Plus, she had those big brown eyes and that nice mouth. That cascade of brown hair over her shoulders. The snug way her T-shirts fit, especially when she shoved her hands into the back pockets of her jeans, a pose she did unconsciously. I was a nice guy, but that pose made me a horndog. So did the way she’d licked her lip in the coffee shop. In that moment, I had the revelation that if Brit and I got naked together, we would be really, really good.
But I saw other things about her, too. How guarded she was. How she almost never left the house. How she kept her physical distance and had flinched away from my handshake, as if she avoided being touched. How her laugh was reluctant and hard-won. How, when I’d seen her reading on the porch, her expression had been carefully blank for a second, as if she was prepared for me to ignore her.
She had left a successful business and career in L.A., broken up with the boyfriend, and come to Portland to live with her elderly great aunt, with no job. People didn’t just do that on a whim. She must have done it because something pushed her out of her life, something bad enough to make her leave everything she knew behind and start over with nothing.
In short, Brit was vulnerable. I not only saw it, I’d lived it. I’dbeenthat person when I first left the road and quit drugs, stumbling through each day, psychically bleeding, feeling like a pound of raw meat. In one stroke, I’d had no choice but to confront everything I was, every decision I’d made in my life, from childhood on. I’d had to face the fact that addiction had made me fuck over the people I loved and hurt them. I’d had to face everything ugly about myself while trying my best to excavate something halfway beautiful.
Whatever Brit was dealing with, fucking me wouldn’t help her with it. Assuming she even wanted to, which she didn’t.
So I had a problem. I thought of texting one of the two women I saw occasionally, when one or the other of us had the urge.
One was a divorce lawyer, divorced herself, who had made partner in her firm and had too many work hours and too much bitterness to want more than sex from me.
The other woman sold Reiki healing and sacred sound retreats. She wore boho clothes and beaded bracelets, she thought sex was a spiritual practice, and she most definitely saw other men besides me. The lawyer probably did, too, if she had time in her schedule. Exclusivity and connection weren’t part of those relationships—they were about sex and nothing else, and they were convenient all around. The perfect post-rehab release for me.
Maybe one of those women was available tonight, but when I thought it over, I decided against texting them. Mindless sex wasn’t going to satisfy me right now, not more than my own hand would. I wanted something I couldn’t have. I’d have to rely on the first and most powerful love of my life, music.
I got off the floor and changed clothes in my bedroom, not caring about the sweat drying on my skin. I was about to sweat again, anyway. Then I went downstairs, heading for the drum room in the basement.
I still thought of myself as a Road King. I’d seen my bandmates only sporadically over the past five years, and we rarely talked. Our lead singer, Denver, had quit the music business and disappeared from view. Neal, our bassist, had a daughter with a woman he’d hooked up with on the road, and after the band broke up, he dedicated himself to session work and raising his kid. Stone, our lead guitarist, had traveled, bouncing restlessly around the world with only a few belongings in a bag.
Oddly, it was Stone—maybe the grumpiest man on planet Earth—I talked to the most. One night, when I was first out of rehab three years ago, determined to make it take this time, I’d had a bout of terrible craving. Instead of calling my sponsor, I’d dialed Stone out of the blue. I couldn’t have said why.
“De Vries,” Stone had said in his growly voice, answering the phone as if I’d interrupted something. He always sounded like that.
“Hey,” I said, trying to make my voice sound normal and most likely failing. “What are you up to tonight, man? Maybe we could do something.”
A long silence greeted these words. I had never in my life called Stone and asked him to hang out. Stone knew how strung out I had been by the end of the last tour, knew I was trying to get clean. I could hear him silently thinking on the other end of the line.
“I was about to go to the fucking movies,” he finally said, his tone annoyed. “I’m going to be late. I guess you can meet me there if you want.”
That fucker. He hadn’t been going to the movies at all.
“Sure, I’ll come,” I said.
Stone told me where and when to meet him, and then he hung up without another word.
