They were texting each other, he could see by the way people surreptitiously stared at their laps, hands under the table. There were only two explanations for that behavior, and no one would masturbate in a meeting. Well, not as a group.
Normally everyone but the chair messaged everyone else, making jokes about the agenda, or how bored they were, or sniping about someone’s car or golf game or whatever. The chair knew it was happening—in every other meeting he or she was in and not chairing, they did the same thing.
This time, Tierney was not the chairperson. Yet he was being texted around, not texted to.
Which could only mean one thing. People are texting about me.
He swallowed the knowledge down, past his increasingly rapid heartbeat and indulged in a little creative visualization, imagining his butt glued to the chair. He absolutely would not get up and flee no matter how much of him wanted to. The old Tierney would’ve done that. Actually, the old Tierney would be texting about the new Tierney, saying vicious things. More vicious than anyone else’s jabs.
Homophobic things.
I’m not a homophobe, I’m a homo.
He and Marty had planned some sort of coping strategy for these situations, hadn’t they? For the life of him, he couldn’t remember what it was. His spine was so rigid, he trembled from the waist up, and he couldn’t relax no matter what he did—even meditative breathing didn’t help because he couldn’t settle into a rhythm. Mostly he kept his stare fixed on the wall behind Chief Brown’s head, enduring.
Jesus, this was the thing he’d been afraid of his whole life—ostracism. Being the lone wolf. His butt glue came close to failing, but then movement in his peripheral vision caught his attention. It was Jerry—Chief Brown—peeking at him, eyes skittering off when Tierney caught him.
Oh, did he know that look: guilt. Jerry felt badly for texting about him. Probably Aspell, that fucking hospital administrator, was leading the pack, and Jerry was too big a weenie not to follow along. Conformist. Tierney’s face muscles loosened up enough for him to scowl across the table, but the chief wouldn’t look at him again.
Well fuck that. He wasn’t leaving until Jerry had the balls to meet his eyes. Pansy ass.
Tierney’s anger kept him present. In the room with all the dickheads texting about him, staring people down—the few who weren’t avoiding his gaze.
Only Jerry showed any guilt, but eventually there was a lessening of busy hands under the table.
When the meeting was over, he walked out. Didn’t say anything to anyone, even ignored it when Jerry called his name. Instead he took the elevator to the fifth floor of the parking garage, found his car, and sat in it, forehead resting on the steering wheel for a half hour before calling Gina and telling her he wouldn’t be back until Monday.
He’d lived through that meeting, kept his butt in the seat, but there was no rush of accomplishment. Wasn’t he supposed to feel vindication or soul-deep truth or self-righteousness or something? Something good and positive, pushing him forward into this new life he’d begun to carve out for himself.
Instead he felt beat down. Not completely hopeless, but . . . dull. Scarred. That swirling in the pit of his stomach, he knew it well. His old enemy fear had come creeping back, saying “I told you so.”
Fuck, he didn’t want to deal with that asshole tonight.
On the way back to his condo, he bought a fifth of bourbon.
Hours later, sitting alone in his living room, mesmerized by the nearly full bottle and the untouched glass he’d poured a drink into, he wondered what the fuck he thought he was doing. Thinking about having a drink, but not because he craved it so much as the insulation it bought him from the pain of day-to-day life. The cutting slights and insults.
Until the effects of the booze wore off, and the sting of those little cuts became worse than they would have been if he’d never had the drink in the first place. He really only had two choices—take it on the chin now, or drink up and pay a steeper price later.
In spite of knowing what was best, he was having a hard time forgoing the booze.
He knew what he was supposed to do when tempted like this—call Marty, or the therapist he should have contacted now that he was back home. Even calling someone in the support network he should have set up would work, or finding an AA meeting.
But he wasn’t a real alcoholic, so why did he need to do all that shit?
So you don’t end up like this, dumbass.
Alone and friendless, desperate to be numb and dumb. Why had he decided to go down this road, if he was going to give up this easily? Wasn’t the point to face life rather than hide from it, even the painful shit?
How did people do this, though?
Friends.
I have a friend.
Carefully, like it might bite him if he startled it, Tierney leaned forward and set the glass down on the coffee table, next to the bottle. Then he picked up his phone, turned it back on, and reached out for help.
Slumped in his favorite (and only) stuffed chair, Dalton watched the lights of downtown through his windows. Well, what he could see of them. He should turn on a lamp, but darkness felt more contemplative.
It was one of the best things about having his own place—every space was his, and if he wanted to just sit a couple of hours and not do much of anything, no one would interrupt him.
Although he needed to wash some clothes. And it wouldn’t hurt to unpack the rest of his books. Since he’d started reading some of Sam’s suggestions on a new e-reader, the print copies seemed both more precious and more likely to be left stored in a box.
“What should we do tonight?” he asked his cat.
Blue blinked at him sleepily from the top of the empty bookshelf before he stretched, bowing his back and extending one paw and then the other in front of him, claws unsheathed as far as possible, yawning the entire time.
“Okay, what should I do tonight?” Dalton’s phone beeped before Blue could not answer and instead curl up for his tenth nap of the day.
Clearly, he could still be interrupted, even in his own place. He should ignore it, but his overdeveloped sense of obligation couldn’t stomach that, so he got up to find it and read the message.
Thank God he did. It was Tierney, wanting him to come over for an “intervention.”
Dalton’s pulse thumped a few times in his ears, because that particular word implied one thing—Tierney’d fallen off the wagon.
I’ll be there as soon as I can, he responded.
The ten-minute trip wasn’t as anxious a drive over as it had been the morning after Tierney came out, but Dalton’s adrenaline raced through his blood stream, revving to go at every stoplight.