9
Rocco spends two weeks in Santa Fe, soaking up the sun and listening to stories of rock bottom and the reasons why you need to keep coming back. After that he goes back to LA, but the distance between us feels as large as ever. He says he loves me and that he misses me, but his words have a reflexive quality that sets me on edge. Before he got sick again he knew his words well. He knew how to use them to make me shiver and sigh and sometimes – even though it was forbidden – spill over, phone in hand. “It scares me,” he said. “How much I want you when I know I’m not supposed to have you. When you’re out of reach like this you make me fucking ache with wanting you. No, don’t say anything – just let me listen to you breathe, and keep doing what I know you’re doing. Please, Daniel…keep going. I need this. I can hardly see straight for thinking about the way your thighs tremble when you come.”
We cheated. I know that now. Sometimes we’d get around our prescription by him asking me to read out long sections of podcast to him, so that we could pretend we were having a perfectly normal conversation, but really it was so that he could listen to the catch in my voice as I got more and more aroused.
And we slipped.
It was only once. Okay, twice if you count the parking garage incident, but it was impossible to sit there week after week and talk about our feelings without wanting to act on them. “You have to understand,” he said, one afternoon in that glass zoo box of an office, his hand in mine and his eyes on Claudia. “How flat and gray everything feels when you come off heroin. Everything is the same soiled shade of brownish-gray, even your own flesh. Especially when you look down and see what a sorry mess you made of yourself. You’re cold and sad and lumpy and you totally forget that your body was ever an instrument of pure, unmedicated pleasure.” And then squeezed my hand tighter. He didn’t look at me, but his smile was a thing of unrepentant beauty. “The first time I held Daniel naked in my arms it felt like I’d been raised from the dead. He was warm and breathing and human, and the first touch of his body reminded me that life could be beautiful again, and that there were new adventures to be had.”
Ten minutes later I still felt as though I was holding my breath. We walked out of that session very quietly, as if we somehow psychically knew what we were about to do. As we turned the corner in the corridor he held out a hand, and I took it as we walked the ten or fifteen feet to the bathroom.
We pounced on each other and fucked in a frenzy. It was a hard, panting scramble of buckles and buttons and kisses smothering cries. I thought I was going to pass out at one point: the joy of having his hands on me again was that fierce. “We should stop,” he kept saying, but we didn’t. We were love-drunk and pornographic and so unhealthy, but we couldn’t help ourselves.
Perhaps we weren’t codependent, I said, afterwards. Maybe we were just sluts. Maybe – if we went back to banging each other – we’d stop using our therapy sessions as an elaborate form of foreplay. Maybe we just needed to get it out of our systems.
That was my way of saying, “Let’s go back to your hotel room and try to beat our five-times-a-night Memorial Day record,” but Rocco was already feeling guilty.
“No, Daniel,” he said. “You said you’d never be my drug, but you’re acting like one right now. Just a little taste. May as well keep going, since you’re off the wagon and all. That’s how a slip turns into a relapse.”
I should have known then that we were headed for a crash. It was our own fault for not taking things seriously enough. Now when he calls me there’s a distance. He said back at the hotel that it was as if the nerves letting him feel what he felt for me had been severed, but what if they weren’t? What if I was the one responsible for burning them out? I made him feel too much at once and fried them forever.
I’ve been walking around with a sense of doom lately, so when Rocco calls and sounds even stiffer than usual my heart is already beating double time and my stomach is doing strange, sick little somersaults.
“Listen,” he says. “There’s a problem.”
He’s over me. I know it. I’m a symptom of his disease and he has to leave me. “Oh?”
“There are pictures,” says Rocco. “Of us. Paparazzi pictures.”
I breathe slightly easier, but only for a second. Where did they photograph us? Not when we were away for Memorial Day. Oh God, please not that. I don’t think my mother has seen me from that angle since before I was potty trained. “Not the Olympic…” I start to say, but he steps in.
“No. Thank God. It was when we’d meet for coffee before therapy. Long story short, I have a special pet paparazzo who is the subject of numerous restraining orders in California, and now in Washington, too.”
“Why would anyone want pictures of us having coffee?”
“Because I’m back in Hollywood,” says Rocco. “People see me walking around and they remember the gossip and the rehab and they’re all like ‘Oh, hey – so he’s not dead yet, but let’s watch to see how long he stays clean.’ Some days I get the sense everyone is waiting for me to pull a River Phoenix and turn blue on the sidewalk outside a nightclub.”
“Jesus, Rocco – that’s sick.”
He sighs. “Welcome to fucking La La Land. Anyway, junkies like me generally aren’t interesting when they’re off the wagon, but when they’ve apparently switched teams…well, that might generate a few clicks.”
Right. He always had a reputation as a womanizer, and none of the women he’d hooked up with could have been described as remotely masculine. Even model Mona, with her tiny boobs and boyish ass, was ferociously feminine in that give-no-fucks French way that few American woman can muster but most envy. “Where do they get ‘switched teams’ from pictures of two men having coffee?” I ask.
“The photos make us look pretty intimate, Daniel.” Ugh. There’s that word again. “Actually I’m surprised they didn’t toss us out of the coffee shop for excessive PDA.”
“Oh my God. Please don’t say he got us in the parking garage.”
“No. It’s not a huge story, so don’t worry. We’re not at the top of the page anyway. No doubt we’ll get bumped down for the next round of Taylor Swift drama, and that can’t be far away: she just can’t fucking help herself.”
The gossipy, throwaway tone reminds me that he actually knows Taylor Swift, at least on nodding terms. At one time there were rumors she wanted to date him, but then she snagged that British boyband guy and Rocco wouldn’t have been interested anyway, because at the time he was in the middle of a hot and heavy love affair with cocaine. Heroin was the one illegal drug he had always avoided, until he had to have surgery for severe carpal tunnel syndrome and they prescribed him Oxy. Like so many other heroin addicts, Rocco came by his craving through legal, medical channels.
“It shouldn’t be a problem,” he says. “But I’m just gonna email you some stuff on this guy anyway. His picture, license plates and so on. If you catch him in Seattle, call my attorney. We’re trying to put the creep away this time.”
“Of course. Is he likely to come up here again?”
“Doubtful,” says Rocco. “The hope is he stays here in LA and keeps following me around, because then he really is going to do time for stalking. I know it’s probably not great karma to wish prison on another human being, but I can really do without the agita right now.”
“Okay, but other than that, how are you?”
“Oh. You know.” He sounds flat and tired and I feel a flicker of the desperation I keep feeling more and more these days. If he were here right now I’d be on my knees, trying to remind him how good it was between us. And what does that say that my last resort is sex? Nothing good, I’m sure.
“It’s so good to hear your voice again,” I say. “You sound a lot better.”
“I’m getting there. Listen, I gotta go, but I’ll speak to you again soon, okay?”
“Yeah.” He’s slipping away. I can feel it. “I love you.”
“Yeah,” he says, and hesitates for a long moment. Too long. “I know. Me, too.”
When he hangs up I sit there staring at the phone for a long time. He only said ‘me, too’, not ‘I love you’ and my obsessive brain immediately starts gnawing on that detail, hungry for meaning. The phone rings again and I snatch it up with a lurching stomach, prepared for what I know must be coming next.
“Do it,” I say, without looking at the number. “If you’re going to do it, just get it over with.”
“Danny?”
I’m so braced for impact that it takes me a second to recalibrate. “Matt?”
“Hey. How you doing?”
“Uh, good,” I lie. It’s like hearing a voice from beyond the grave. He’s been gone so long. “I didn’t think you were supposed to have a phone?”
“Relax, Dannyboy. I’m legit. I’m allowed to have a phone now.”
“Really? What did you do?”
He laughs. “I did what I was told,” he says. “Believe it or not.”
“Yeah. Excuse me if I’m skeptical…”
“Funny,” he says, and he sounds good. His voice is unslurred and in my own jittery, uncertain state I’m immediately jealous of the clarity I can hear radiating down the phone. “I’m in great shape. Never better. Listen, have you heard from Rocco lately? Did he relapse or something?”
“No. He just had a bit of an episode, I think. Depression.”
“Figures,” says Matt. “Guy’s a moody bastard. The number of times I thought I was going to have to stick my fingers down his throat. Where’s he at? Do you know?”
“LA. I think the weather here was bumming him out.”
“Eesh. I feel that.”
I take a breath for a moment, a little overwhelmed. I wasn’t prepared to hear from him and I have no idea what to say. “Uh…how’s the place?” I ask.
“The rehab? Rainy. Although I have to say, it is fucking beautiful up here. Clean air, quiet. Trees. Lot of trees. Kind of reminds me of Lost Lake. Remember?”
“Yes.”
“We had some good times up there as kids, didn’t we? Like when you went fossil hunting without a shirt and all the skin peeled away from your back.”
“How was that a good time? That was the worst sunburn of my life. I still have freckles on my shoulders from that shit.”
“Yeah,” he says. “But you should have seen it come away. All in one go. It was really cool.”
I laugh, remembering Mom’s reaction. She was not amused. “You weren’t supposed to pick it. It was my sunburn. I should have been the one to pick at it.”
“You would never have got it off in one go from that angle. You needed me to do it for you. It came away in one big sheet, like you were a lizard or something.”
“Jesus Christ, this conversation is disgusting. Is this what you’ve been waiting to say to me all this time while you were away? Fun adventures in exfoliation?”
“No, of course not,” Matt says. “There’s a…there’s a lot I’ve been meaning to say to you, Daniel. And to Meg, and Mom and Dad. And even that moody sonofabitch back in LA.”
“Okay,” I say. “I’m listening.”
“No,” he says. “Not now. I wanna see you. Face to face. And I should warn you right now that most of things I have to say are heavy and obnoxiously group-therapy flavored, so…you know. Bear with me.”
Matt, talking about how he feels. This I have to see. “You want me to come over?” I ask. Me and the Southworth ferry are old friends by now.
“No. No, you don’t have to. I’m getting out.”
“What? For real?”
“Yes, for real, Doubting fucking Thomas here. I’m getting discharged.”
“That’s amazing news. Well done. I mean it. Congratulations.”
“Hey, don’t say that yet, Danny. It’s easy staying sober in rehab. Staying sober out of rehab – now that’s the hard part.”
When I hang up the phone my head is spinning. He’s been in there all summer, and part of me thought he’d never make it that long. And what have I been doing this whole time while he’s been getting sober? Making a fool of myself over Rocco, risking his recovery because I couldn’t keep my hands out of his pants. Oh, and getting stalked, apparently.
There’s a whole new thing to worry about. What is my brother about to discover when he steps out of his safe little rehab bubble? Is he going to see those pictures? How bad are they?
My hands are tingling with nerves as I Google, with a mind to assess the damage. Rocco’s right. We are way down the list on the gossip sites, but there’s no question about what’s going on in those photos. He looks Byronic and beautiful. I look like a pointy-nosed nerd, holding out a biscotti in my spindle-tipped fingers. But then there’s another, with our hands all tangled up the way they always get when we’re together, and another when his tongue is all the way out, teasing my lips with those feline licks that make my heart beat faster every time. Intimate, yes, and this time the word doesn’t make me cringe. Even the inevitable discomfort of seeing myself on camera can’t dim my relief at seeing how besotted we look, how tender and easy and warm. We’re okay. We have to be okay, because we look like two people in love.
*
I can’t concentrate.
Last time I spoke to him I felt it again, like a cold draft sneaking under a window. And it’s not right, because we had such heat between us. Last night I reached under the covers and felt the blaze coming from inside my belly and the crackle of coarse hair. My dick was hot in my hand and I knew if he were here he’d love me again, because I was cranking out just the kind of heat he loves to warm himself against.
This isn’t healthy. If he were here right now we’d get naked and stay that way. And we’d fuck and fuck and fuck some more. When we’re together we binge on each other, going off on benders for days at a time and ignoring the world outside.
The new house feels too big. Even Rerun thinks so, because she turns clingy and huddles in smaller and smaller spaces. I have to check the dryer even more carefully than usual in case she’s crawled in there. At night she gets in my bed and I undo years of careful training with the water spray bottle by letting her, just so I can listen to her purr.
I know what’s coming. No matter how large the house feels I can’t avoid it. That Sword of Damocles follows me, hanging over my head wherever I go, like those green plumbob things from the Sims. Some days I feel so unreal that I’m almost waiting for some unseen computer God to wall me up in a tiny room with a chair, a lit barbecue and a painting of a clown. Or just to delete the pool ladder. Put me out of my goddamn misery.
But I’m real. And I have my own agency, which is why one day I finally snap and call him, meaning to have this out.
“Hey,” he says, and there’s half a sigh in his voice already. “What’s up?”
I don’t want to picture him when I do this, but I know the look on his face right now. Absorbed but impatient, his slight frown deepening the fine vertical line between his eyebrows.
Somehow I find the breath to say it. “I don’t think I can take this any more, Rocco.”
He hesitates. The silence makes my sinuses burn. I won’t cry.
“Take what?” he says.
“You know what,” I say, already frustrated. “I know you feel it, too. Every time I speak to you it’s like there’s another couple of inches of distance between us.”
Rocco exhales. I can hear an engine of some sort in the background, a helicopter, perhaps, flying over the scrubby Hollywood hills. It fades and I imagine him drawing a sliding door closed against the outside world. He has to be alone for what he’s going to say next.
“I’m sick, Daniel,” he says, with too much patience. “I’m really sick. I’ve always been sick, and I’ve only made it worse because of all those years I spent cramming shit up my nose or injecting myself with poison. I’m going to be living with a chronic brain condition for the rest of my life. Do you know the relapse statistics for addicts with a history of depression? They’re pretty fucking grim.”
“I knew it.”
“Knew what?”
“That this was coming.” I can’t take any more. Just ask. Just do it. “Are you breaking up with me?”
He sighs, and that’s all the answer I need. I don’t trust myself to speak for a moment, and it’s just as well, because I have nothing to say, or at least nothing that won’t make me look needy or delusional or just plain stupid. He’s right. He’s damaged. I’ve always known that, but I was dumb enough to think I could fix him with love.
“Daniel, I wish this could work,” he says. “I really, really do, but you could do so much better than me.”
“How? You’re Rocco Ponti.” I should never talk again. Everything I say is idiotic.
“I know I am,” he says. “And that’s half the problem, because Rocco Ponti ain’t what he used to be. I’m thirty-five, Daniel. I’m hobbling towards dadrock irrelevance. There are kids over ten years younger than me who can tear it up on stage in ways I never could, the talented little fucking fetuses. My septum is perforated, my brain chemistry is shot and I have so many carpal tunnel issues that it’s doubtful I’ll ever be able to play the kind of touring schedule I used to–”
“–I don’t care. You’re misunderstanding me. I don’t want you because you’re a rock star. I want you because you’re you.” My face is awash with tears now. I’m desperate. I’ll do anything. Say anything.
“What I am,” says Rocco. “Is washed up. You say you don’t care, sweet thing, but you will. You will. This band is over. It’s going to have to be over, or at least go on without me, because I can’t live that rock and roll lifestyle any more, not without risking my life. And do you know what the worst part is?”
“No.”
“I have no idea how I’m ever going to break that news to Matt. At some point I’m going to have to, and even if I don’t destroy him completely he’s going to hate me. Never mind what happens when he finds out I’ve been sleeping with his baby brother.”
“I’m not a fucking baby, Rocco,” I say, crying down the phone. “I’m almost thirty-one.”
“That’s still far too young to get shackled up with a has-been rock star with a headful of crazy.”
“You’re not a has-been. You’re just making up excuses now.”
“I’m not, Daniel. Please don’t say that. I’ve thought this through so many times.” He sounds absolutely defeated, and I know he’s already lost the argument in his own head. It’s over. “I’ve been famous my entire adult life. I was a millionaire by the time I was twenty-one. I never went to college. I have…I have no idea what my life is going to be from now on, but I know it can’t be what it used to be, because I’ll never survive it. All I have is this constant feeling that my future might look ugly, and bitter, and the thought of you seeing that ugliness…I don’t think I can stand that. I couldn’t keep you from the stalkers and the therapy and all the other rock and roll nonsense that comes with me, and I hate that I couldn’t. You’re too clean and sweet and normal to watch me fall off my pedestal, and if I do one good thing in my life I’m going to spare you that.”
I’m useless. I’m all snot and tears, and when I speak my voice is full of both. “You’re really doing this, aren’t you?”
“I’m sorry. I think we have to. You know we have to.”
“We. I love how you want to drag me into this.”
“Please, Daniel,” he says, making me almost regret lashing out. “You’re part of this. We did what we did together, and I’ll never forget it, but come on – deep down we both knew that our timing sucked.” He sighs down the phone. “I would really, really like it if we could be friends.”
Oh. There he is. Therapybot. Spouting all the milquetoast things you’re supposed to say in difficult situations.
I don’t want to be your friend. I can never be your friend, because every second I’m with you my heart will be breaking because you’re not my lover. I don’t want the consolation prize. I want you. You, you, you. I want all of you. How can you even say you want to be friends when you know that would never work? Can’t you see I fucking burn for you with every fiber of my being?
But of course I don’t say any of that. Instead I meekly say okay and hang up.
I’m crying, but the tears are of pure frustration right now. When I dry my eyes and clench my jaw they stop, and I know they’re only a foretaste of the hell ahead. I don’t feel much right now, but my numbness is like a warning. Somewhere behind it – like a distant but huge rumble – I sense the frightening size of the wave that’s coming for me when the shock wears off.
I get up from the couch and start automatically folding laundry. When I carry it into the bedroom my heart flips over. It’s September and the lilacs are over, but look what I’ve done to myself. I bought a house because I kissed him for the first time in this room. Stupid. So stupid. A million times dumber than getting a tattoo. He can cover his mistake with fresh ink. I’m going to be living in mine.
My hand flies up and covers my mouth. I stand there breathing hard into my palm, hearing the wave draw closer. Oh God, it’s a monster. I’ll never survive it. I’m finished. I’m fucked.
The cat stirs on the bed and gives me an uncertain look as I sit down. Poor thing doesn’t know any more if she’s going to get the ironing spray or affection. I scoop her up and bury my face in her soft fur, smothering the animal in endearments she’ll never understand as I start to cry again.
“Cat, darling. Good baby. Good girl. I love you. Yes, I do. I love you so much.”
*
A week later I’m having dinner with Matt and Meg. There’s wine on the table, and there shouldn’t be, but he was the one who insisted on it. “I gotta get used to it,” he said, handing us the wine list. “The world’s not going to tiptoe around my drink problem, so I may as well just deal with that straight off. Go ahead. Enjoy yourselves.”
Meg looked at me like there was a landmine under the dining table, but when that bottle of Pinot Grigio blush arrived, cool and tempting in its metal sleeve, I started pouring and couldn’t seem to stop.
Now my spine is softening and my brain is sloshing and I’ve still got my nose in the wine glass. My tolerance is shot: I barely touched a drop the whole time I was seeing Rocco.
And Matt is still talking.
We’ve gone through an A-Z of grievances, both real and imagined. He’s apologized for missing out on the celebration when Meg got her doctorate, for calling my podcast ‘stupid nerd shit’, for getting puke drunk at Grandma’s funeral, and for all the other shitty things he did when he was drinking.
I don’t give a shit. I really, really do not care any more. I’m drunk and I’m hurt and I’m bored out of my mind listening to him drone on about himself, because I’m dying here. I’ve spent the last week being smashed and tumbled by that monster wave of misery, snatching shallow breaths where I can catch them.
I’m a blasted out shell of myself and surely anyone who knows me can see it. Meg has that landmine look in her eye again, but Matt’s oblivious, because he’s the star. He’s always been the star, the one who shot to fame while we plodded along our ordinary paths.
“Excuse me,” Meg says, and gets up. I envy her right now, because I can’t follow her behind the door of the Ladies Room. And there’s man-stuff afoot, I can tell. Matt’s got that confidential all-boys-here look that he’s tried on me numerous times over the years, with minimal success. I was always too gay and too nerdy to be the brother he really wanted.
“Listen,” he says, and pulls me close, his hand on the back of my neck. I’m conscious of the booze on my breath and wonder if he’s trying to get a buzz off my fumes. “You and me.”
“Uh huh?”
Matt scruffs the back of my hair and releases his grip. “I know we’ve got more issues than this. Than what we talked about tonight.”
“Yeah,” I say, and he’s right. It was always going to be easier for him to make it up with Meg. She always moved in her own orbit, being the only girl and outnumbered. Same sex siblings are messier somehow, because they lack that sexual polarity. There are only points of comparison that can just as easily cause aggravation as harmony.
“I know I haven’t always been the best brother to you…” says Matt.
“No.” It’s the truth. I can’t help it. In vino veritas, and all that.
“And you gave as good as you go, sometimes.” He touches the scar on his arm where I bit him once, so deep that he had to go to the hospital and Dad went fucking nuts at me. (“What are you? A vampire? Do you have rabies? Who does that to a person?”)
Matt laughs, but it’s not funny. It was never funny. He was trying to noogie me, and just the night before I’d reached the end of my rope with it. Even the word filled me with rage – noogie – a cutesy, stupid word for what had become a form of torture for me. When I complained I couldn’t take it any more, Mom said that maybe I should explain to Matt why I hated it. So I did. I felt like a fool, because how do you say things like “I don’t want you to noogie me any more,” with any degree of seriousness, but I did it and all the way through Matt listened and nodded and said uh huh and okay and I breathed easier, relieved that we’d settled the matter in such a mature way.
So was it really any wonder that the next time he grabbed me I sank my teeth into his forearm like an enraged pitbull? He hadn’t listened to a fucking word I’d said.
“I asked nicely, you prick,” I screamed, spraying a mouthful of his blood all over the wall of the landing.
I smooth down the back of my hair where he’s ruffled it, and rinse my mouth with more wine. Oh boy, do we ever have issues.
“Matt, I’m drunk,” I say, reflexively defending myself again. There are so many things I could say right now, and none of them are nice.
“What? On that girly wine?”
I press my back teeth together and swallow. “Yes. I don’t hold my drink so well these days.” I drank coffee and Pellegrino when I was with Rocco. God, I could stand a cup of spine stiffening Italian coffee right about now, only the smell would probably make me cry. It used to perfume my entire apartment on Sunday mornings, when Rocco would bring me brunch in bed – eggs poached in leftover red sauce, topped with melted parmesan and torn fresh basil. Lots of black pepper.
Matt sees the look in my eyes, but he doesn’t understand it. “You hate me, don’t you?” he says.
“No,” I say, although sometimes I do. “It’s just…I don’t know. I’m not myself right now. The move and everything – it’s been really stressful.”
“Sure,” he says. “Top three, isn’t it? Most stressful things you can go through. Bereavement, divorce and moving house.”
“I think so, yeah.”
He smiles, baring the slightly sharp canines that give him a vampiric look. One reviewer even called him a ‘pocket Lestat’ back in the day. “I’ve got just the thing for you,” he says.
“You do?”
“Oh yeah. Remember that cabin up at Lost Lake? I got it.”
“The same cabin?” The one where I hit puberty at one hundred miles an hour, while thinking about your best friend? Who I have also been fucking, by the way.
“The exact same,” says Matt. “We’re going. You and me. It’s going to be great. Just like old times.”
When you never listened to me and Dad accused me of having rabies? Yeah, good times. “I don’t…” I try to say.
“Daniel…” he says, and that pulls me up short. Not Danny or Dannyboy. Daniel. He’s trying, he really is. And I owe him to meet him halfway.
“Okay,” I say, and regret it almost immediately, but then Meg comes back from the bathroom.
“What are you two gossiping about?” she says.
“Boy stuff,” says Matt, checking his phone. “Hey, I gotta get back, because I turn into a pumpkin after eleven. You two gonna be okay?”
“Sure,” she says. “We’ll share a cab.”
“Cool. And don’t try to pay the bill, because I already settled up. Love you guys.”
He kisses us both and leaves. I let out a breath I didn’t even know I was holding. That’s Matt for you. At his best he’s so charismatic that he can consume all the oxygen in a room like a fire. At his worst he’s a black hole.
“He looks good,” says Meg, echoing my relief.
“Yeah.”
“You don’t.” She turns her focus on me. Sometimes Meg can feel as remote as a satellite, but she’s just as precise. “You look like a plant that’s been kept in the dark. What’s going on?”
My throat aches. “I broke up with Rocco. Actually, he broke up with me.”
Meg touches my arm. “Oh my God, Daniel. I’m so sorry.”
“No. It’s okay. You tried to warn me.” I can’t tell her all of it. I can’t tell her how stupid I’ve been. Like how the other day I was so desperate for some outward expression of inward pain that I went to a tattooist, and let a biker bear named Sandy write Rocco’s name on my hip. I start to cry again, and Meg puts her arm around me.
I don’t think I’ve ever cried so much in my life. I grew up learning to hold back every tear because Matt would call me a crybaby, but these last six months I’ve been awash. I even caught myself looking in the mirror, in case that old wives’ tale about crying making the color of your eyes fade proved true.
“I’m a mess,” I say, my voice high and cracking. “I love him, Meg. I still fucking love him and I can’t make it stop. What am I going to do?”
“Shh.” She strokes my hair. “What happened? I thought you were taking a break was all. Did he fall off the wagon?”
“No. There was some bullshit with the paparazzi and I think it just…it just set things off. I could feel him drawing away from me, and then I more or less asked him to do it. Just pull the trigger and get it over with.”
“What did he say?”
“That he has no idea what his life is going to be now that he’s clean. And that he doesn’t want me to watch him turn into a bitter rock and roll has-been. Also that his brain is irreparably broken and wasn’t that great even before he started using drugs.”
Meg sighs long and hard. “He’s not wrong, Daniel.”
“I know. That’s what makes it so much worse.”