Page 121 of Slashed Bonds

I could have stayed. Could have been riding a pierced cock at five in the morning like a woman with priorities.

But no. Decided I’m in my athletic bitch era.

I’d roll my eyes at myself if the world would hold still long enough.

The route’s four kilometers. Out the back of Viper House, along the service road past the athletics complex with its black glass gone flat and blind in the dark, up through the pines on a gravel path the cross-country team uses, and around the lake.

I’ve run it every morning for a week. I know where the roots are. I know the place at the far end where the path comes out of the trees and the wind off the water hits you like a door, and I know that the oak is at kilometer three, on the way back, at the top of the only real hill.

That’s where the legs quit.

Not quit. Complain. The right calf sends up its electric flare on the climb, the one the surgeon’s voice warned about, and I run through it, because running through it is the whole point, and then the nausea arrives at the crest like it’s been waiting for me.

It’s the hill. The hill, the numbers, four men in Halbrook. Pick one.

I don’t pick one. I stand here with my hand on a tree and let all three have me at once, because that’s how it comes, that’s how it’s always come, and pretending it arrives in a tidy line is a thing I stopped doing in a ward.

It won’t. It’s doing a slow tilt to the left, nine degrees, the same nine it did on the bathroom floor two weeks ago, and I stay on the tree until it stops.

I’m going to have to see an Omega doctor about this.

Soon. Before it happens on the ice, because if it happens on the ice it happens in front of Roz, and Roz will pull me, and I’ve got a game this week with my name on it.

I take a supplement. Approved. I checked it twice against the list, because the last time somebody tested me they found a thing I’d never taken and it ended my life, and I’m not giving anybody the chance to do it with a thing I have. It’s a recovery compound for Omegas with bond damage, and it’s the only reason I can play five hours and get out of bed the next day.

Temporary. That’s what the doctor called it. A bridge.

She’s a Beta in an office two towns over with a poster of the endocrine system on the wall and a way of saying bond-trauma like it’s a weather condition. Roz found her. Roz sent me on Wednesday without asking whether I’d go, and I went, because it was that or explain to Roz why I wouldn’t.

Forty minutes. Bloodwork. A designation panel that she read off the screen with her face doing nothing, which I’ve learned to appreciate.

“You’re stable,” she said. “For a given value. The stabilizer’s holding. The regulator’s holding. But you’re running a body on medication that was built to keep a person alive in a bed, and you’re asking it to skate.”

“So what do I do?”

“Keep taking it. Eat. Sleep more than you’re sleeping.” She capped her pen. “And understand that there’s a ceiling. I can’t tell you where it is. I can tell you that you’ll find it before I do.”

Eat. Sleep. The two things every person in my life keeps telling me, like the whole world got a memo.

She gave me a card on the way out. Not a business card. An index card, handwritten, with a number on it that she said was hers and not the office’s.

“Two in the morning,” she said. “If it’s two in the morning and it’s bad, that’s the number. I’m awake. I’m always awake.”

I put it in my jacket. It’s in there now, next to a kickboxing card and a matte black one with a viper on it, and I haven’t used it, and I’m not going to use it this morning, and I’m aware that not using it is a decision.

Everything’s temporary. That’s the truth I’m standing on in the frost with my hand on a tree.

The bridge. The supplement. The men.

This routine I’ve fallen into, where a captain hands me a tablet at eleven and a goaltender puts a glass of water on a nightstand and a defenseman runs a give-and-go nine times without a word. The house. The second line calling me Malice to my face and putting their dishes in the right cupboard. The dog on the correct bed.

Entertainment. A season’s worth. That’s what it is, if I’m honest, and I’m always honest at five in the morning.

It’ll end. It always ends.

And deep down, I hate that.

Not the ending. The ending I’ve made peace with. I hate that there isn’t a single part of my soul left that can foolishly believe otherwise. That girl’s gone. The one who could sit on a dock and say forever to a boy with a notebook. Somebody took her out a window and what climbed back up doesn’t have the wiring for it anymore.