Exposed King (Boys of Brisley 2)

I stood slowly and tugged my shorts back to a normal position, then walked forward and rubbed the back of my burning neck. When I got to the front of the room, I stalled – gripping the wooden podium with the peeling dark blue paint and staring at the too-white walls. I counted chairs – six rows of twelve with probably only two dozen filled. I studied faces – some young, some old, some wrinkled before their time and some so youthful I wondered if they were even old enough to have a gambling problem.

Anything to stop myself from talking.

“What’s your name?” someone prompted. “Just start simple.”

Name. Right. “I’m Ollie. Oliver. Some people call me Neville, though ... it’s a ... thing.” I cleared my throat and fussed with the blank papers in front of me. “Okay. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” I joked, flicking my eyes up to see if anyone smiled. They didn’t. “It’s been seven hundred and eighteen days since my last ... slip up. I—” I paused as people clapped, then relaxed a little. “I almost slipped tonight. Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to put this place that close to a casino?”

Cori raised her hand. “Seems to have worked for you. You’re here instead of there, aren’t you? This certainly isn’t the only meeting spot if you’d rather steer clear, but this gives people somewhere else to land if they get a little too close to the sun.”

Her spiral blonde curls and dark eyes reminded me of a girl I’d known in high school, which wasn’t an association I needed to make. I focused instead on her long, red fingernails and the clunky-yet-tasteful gold necklace she was wearing. “Good point,” I conceded. “But I could’ve just as easily gone the other way. I nearly did go the other way, and I think there might be burnout marks on 8th Street to prove it. But anyway, uh ... yeah. I’m Oliver and I’ve been told I’m a gambling addict.”

“Well, are you?” Cori asked.

I blinked, taken aback by the question. “Huh?”

“People tell me I’m all sorts of things, but it doesn’t make it true,” she explained. “So are you? An addict?”

I thought about the struggles I’d heard in rooms like this. Not just in Domingo, but in Brisley, Austin, Miami, and every other town I’d visited in the last couple of years. Comparatively, I felt like someone with a light habit. Like the guy you couldn’t take to restaurants because after his second beer, he got a little crazy. I was that guy. I wasn’t the type of person to let my metaphorical kids go hungry because I needed gambling money or the type to hurt my hypothetical wife because she called me out on my shit.

But I was the type who didn’t know when to quit. The type who’d show up with ten grand and somehow end up in the hole for a lot more than that, begging to be cut in just one more time. I was the kind who flirted with anyone who moved and had a few spare dollars for me to keep going.

“Oliver?”

“Yeah? Yes, I mean. Yes, I’m an addict.”

“Hello, Oliver.”

That greeting was so delayed that I knew they’d been waiting for me to admit it. I cleared my throat, shifted my weight and grasped the blank pages like they somehow held the answers, then made a mental note to give my brother a swirly for this the next time I went home. “I have a dad and a brother, but neither of them rely on me. I don’t have kids or a partner or anything, and it’s been just me for a long time. So I wish I could stand up here and say that I haven’t hurt the people I love, but I have. My brother Sterling, he ... he’s been the one to bail me out all the fuckin’ time. Ever since I was a little kid. He’d climb trees to get me down, threaten the bigger kids when they picked on me. He copped the blame when I stole my dad’s GTO in high school. He taught me more than any college about our business and helped me get to where I am financially. And now, he’s still doing it. He’s the one who convinced me to start coming to Gam-Anon. See, I had this jet. Fucking gorgeous, and please don’t look at me like that. I worked hard for what I had and then I fucking squandered half of it, I was never handed anything. But I got myself into a pretty high-stakes poker game and ran out of cash, and I was drunk and stupid and desperate to win it all back. The only thing I had that they wanted at that point was my jet. I could’ve gotten them more money or a house or whatever, but they wanted him – my jet. I fucking lost and tried to back out of giving it up. It was stupid and reckless and my brother had to show up with a gun and talk to me like I was a toddler right in front of the guy’s muscle, but that was my rock bottom. It wasn’t even about losing the jet, it was that Sterling had finally had enough. He didn’t come that time to bail me out like he always did. He came to make me own my damn mistake and suffer the consequences for the first time, and it was a damn big wake-up call.”

I glanced up and saw understanding on at least a few faces, but most were rolling their eyes or yawning like they couldn’t care less about the problems of a spoiled rich kid. I couldn’t fucking blame them.

“So yeah. I’ve been good since then, but it’s hard. Every day, it’s hard. People don’t think gambling is a problem when you’ve got the money to back it up, but money runs out. Patience runs out. Your time runs out. I guess I’m just trying to make good and get back on track before mine does.”

This time, no one clapped. No one said anything at all as I awkwardly stepped down from the podium and headed back to my little metal seat in the back, but I was ready to leave. I’d at least toyed with the notion of getting to the first step – and after a victory like I’d had tonight, that was good enough for me.