Riven (Riven 1)

“I want to do the album.”

The storm on his face broke, sun beaming down on me like a benediction.

“Yeah? You sure? Oh, shit, babe, that’s great! Fuck, sorry, habit.” He cast a quick guilty look toward the bedroom. We both knew it didn’t mean anything when he slipped and called me babe, like he had so long ago, but it set Matt’s nerves jangling, so he tried not to.

“I’m sure. I’ve already been writing some stuff. For me, mostly, but a little for you. I’m…I think it would be good to have a distraction.” The second the words were out of my mouth I cringed. “Fuck, that’s not—I don’t mean it like that. I want to work on this. With you. If you’ll still have me.”

“No worries, man, I know. Nothing wrong with something being awesome and also a distraction. Okay, then.” He flipped into business mode. “What about you show me a song in…two weeks? That work?”

“Great.”

I grabbed my keys and walked to the front door.

“Tell Matty I’m sorry?” Rhys nodded. “And…Rhys, I won’t let you down. I won’t.”

“I know you won’t,” he said, waving me off.

“No.” I caught his hand. “But I have. I have, and I won’t this time.”

I did call Huey, though a familiar streak of perversity made me wait until after midnight. I told myself it was because he’d certainly be at the bar, but I knew it was asshole brain skirting the edges of the promise I’d made Rhys, keeping it, but stepping just far enough over the line that it satisfied the urge to rebel.

He listened as I rambled about nonsense at first. Then, finally, I worked my way around to telling him that breaking up with Theo felt like trying to get clean all over again. Then I backpedaled, telling him it wasn’t exactly a breakup because I wasn’t even sure we’d really been together. And that I didn’t know what I had been thinking in the first place, getting together with someone who lived smack dab in the middle of everything I’d run away from, so maybe the whole thing had been about my addiction in the first place and not about Theo at all.

In the silence that followed me running out of steam, I could hear the buzz of the bar in the background, and I had the strange feeling of dislocation, because now it was me on the other end of the phone, when so often I had sat in the bar and watched as it was someone else, the particulars of what they said drowned out by toasts and laughter and conversation.

Huey’s voice was as steady as ever when he said, “It doesn’t matter, Whitman. Right now, it doesn’t matter what you were, or why. If you wait until you figure it out to deal with it, you’re gonna be right back on the floor where you started.”

And that, I reminded myself, was why I needed Huey. Because nothing I said could shock him, and he reacted to everything with the sangfroid of a man who’d heard it all before, and could strip the nastiest tangle of thorns down to dirt. He told me to stop being a fucking diva who thought he could do everything himself, and start coming to meetings again.

So I did. For the first few weeks, it felt like regression because I’d somehow convinced myself I was done with that part of things. Huey just snorted at me when I told him that, reminding me that he’d been clean for fifteen years and still went to meetings four days a week.

“Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. I go to the gym, I go to meetings, I go to the grocery store. Those are the things I do. If I stop doing one of them, I stop doing the others. So I don’t stop,” he said. “Some things you take medication for a week and they go away. Some conditions you take medication for your whole life because that’s how you manage it. Only you can say which you’ve got and which you need.”

Now, after a month of meetings, working on songs for Rhys’s album, and—at a suggestion from Huey—running every morning, I felt…better. I still felt like I was walking a tightrope, but now it seemed like I could see the open air around me, see that if I stepped to the side, I’d fall off, where before I was stomping in the dark, fingers crossed that the rope would even be there.

It was around midnight on a Wednesday night, and rain was lashing the windows of Huey’s bar, turning the lights outside smeary and distant. Inside, the bar was dim and desolate, only a few devotees who’d come out for dollar well drink night despite the weather. I was perched on the last stool, next to where Huey leaned, one foot against the wall, arms crossed, looking like the bouncer he’d once been, in another life.