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“Is that what you want?”
“Fuck no. I’m gonna marry that kid someday. Or die tryin’.”
“Then you don’t tell him,” TK stated matter-of-factly. “You’re making this way harder than it has to be, Ty Hayes.”
“Teek: I fuckin’ cheated on him.”
“No, you didn’t cheat on him. The drugs did.”
Hayes rolled onto his back and away from his friend. “I’ll take ‘things drug addicts say’ for 400, Alex.”
“We’re not drug addicts, baby. We can stop any time we want to,” TK repeated.
“So then, like, why don’t we?”
TK shrugged. “You wanna?”
“Teek, aren’t you tired? We’re playin’ like shit, we can’t even hang out with each other on the road, the fans are all talkin’ mad shit about us…”
“Then fuckin’ let ‘em!” TK yelled, sitting up. “Ty, people are gonna talk shit because that’s what people do. If you’re great, they’ll say you suck. If you’re hot, they’ll say you’re ugly. Fuck it, baby. Regardless of whether we party or not, people are gonna say what they wanna say about us. Let ‘em. We know who we are.”
Hayes nodded slowly.
Yeah, I know exactly who I am: a cheating drug addict who just thought about launching myself off a bridge.
“Teek? I’m tired. I wanna…I wanna stop. I have to.”
“You really wanna stop?”
“Yes.”
“Then we’ll stop,” TK said nonchalantly. “We’ll give it a rest for a bit, focus on our game, and get back on the coaches’ good sides.”
It all sounded good, but the growing pain in Hayes’s stomach had other plans, mainly getting another round of pills down his gullet as soon as possible. “How do you just…stop? What about the pain?”
“I mean, you don’t stop altogether. You just…take only what you have to, to manage your symptoms. Take just enough to keep you feeling normal, to level you, but that’s where we’ll stop. We won’t go beyond that.”
“That’s…that’s not stoppin’, man,” Hayes argued.
“Well, baby. It’s either that or you go to rehab. You ever been to rehab?”
Hayes shook his head. “You?”
“Yeah. And it was the worst month and a half of my life. I thought the detox week was going to kill me, honestly.”
“When did you go?” Hayes asked, watching TK reach into his pocket, pull out the baggie of coke, dip a finger inside, and bring it to his face.
“In juniors. When I was 18. Something…kinda happened, and I spiraled a bit.” TK dipped another finger inside and reached it over toward Hayes, who leaned down to sniff it without even so much as a slight hesitation. “Just to level you, baby.”
“We can stop any time we want to, you know that.”
It sure didn’t seem like it.
“What happened?” Hayes asked, then shook his head. “Forget it. That’s none of my business.”
“Nah, it’s fine. I trust you.” TK fidgeted a bit, returning the baggie to his pocket and crossing one ankle over his knee. “So, remember you asked me if I’d ever been with a guy and I said that I had, but it wasn’t consensual?”
“Yeah?”
