Eventually I really was gone all the time, it wasn't just what it felt like. I was living somewhere else, leading a different life, making love, or more honestly, having sex, with another man.
We went on with our routine, fell back into our rhythms when we were both home. But as I became burned out and couldn't admit it, having a long leisurely breakfast at a pancake house made me want to scream. And if Mark was across the breakfast table from me, at home in our apartment, he was reading out a medical book, not reading me snippets of the Washington Post.
Now that I was back, not even of my own accord, but sent back, I had no idea what that would mean for us. Add to that, sometimes I thought I was clean and the craving was psychological, other times it felt like I was going through the longest withdrawal ever.
Into that mix Mark decided to throw a long, slow Sunday morning.
"Would you like coffee?" The waitress wanted to give somebody at the table coffee. Mark's a diet coke kind of guy. I figured they didn’t run to liquid morphine so I ordered tea. Because coffee sometimes was worse than nothing.
"Let me tell you the specials," the waitress went on. She was a bottle redhead, with varicose veins, a walking cliché and she wanted to talk, though it seemed to be on autopilot.
"We know what we want," Mark said. His voice was edgy. The instant we sat down I'd gone through the menu, picked out what I wanted, put it back down, and stared out the window.
That made Mark mad. Now he was mad at everybody.
"We have a Spanish omelet that – "
Mark actually reached out and took the laminated card out of her hands. She stopped and stared at him. So did I.
"I said, we know what we want. I realize this job is mind-numbing, but try not to include us in that."
"Mark!" It takes a lot to shake me but he'd just done it. "I'm sorry," I told the waitress, who made her next mistake.
"Honey, you don't have to apologize for him." She said, sounding like a waitress from some sitcom rather than a real person.
At the same time Mark said, "I do not need you to apologize for me."
Great, now he'd embarrassed me twice. "Go fuck yourself," I told him to his face.
Mark didn't even blink. "I might as well. It's not like you're doing it since you got back. I wish you hadn't even come back."
"You and me both," I shot back, hurt for no reason I could think of. I wished the same thing on an hourly basis.
"Oh, that's just perfect," Mark said, at the same time the waitress said, "I'm going to have to ask you both to leave."
Across from us, the mother of a toddler who was clearly screaming about his sippy cup or some other appalling incident and couldn't possibly hear us over his racket even if we shouted, was glaring at us with the affronted fury of a protective mother who has nothing to protect her gruesome offspring from other than someone's use of profanity.
"Great," I said to the waitress, and shot my own look at the mother. "At least I'll be able to hear myself think again."
Of course he apologized on the drive home. And of course I was there, in the car, though my first thought had been to run like hell.
We'd driven halfway home before he ran a hand through his hair, which was longer and shaggier than I remembered. He didn't look like a medical resident as much as he looked like somebody who’d stumbled in from the street and was given a job in a hospital. Mark has always been a filtered water, farmer's market, fresh-caught salmon and organic turkey breast kind of guy, when he's not doing the whole Sunday morning short stack with a side of bacon to go with his side of bacon. But when I thought about it, the refrigerator had been filled with takeout packets of ketchup, several items past expiration date and actively turning color, and takeout boxes containing what seemed to be science experiments. I thought he'd been surviving on popcorn, spaghetti, toast and Cheerios like some undergrad.
"It's not easy," he said, glancing over at me and then back at the road.
"Nothing that matters is."
He made a sound in his throat. "That's glib, and it sounds like your father."
I swallowed my automatic reply. This time it might have been, Yeah? Well my dad doesn't like you, either. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "What isn't easy?"
"Being in love with you."
That hurt so bad I didn't know how to answer it. My first reaction was to ask if he even still was. My next would have been to question the crack about sex he'd made back at the pancake place. Because we'd been doing it every damn night.
Which was exactly how that would have come out of my mouth, so I was glad I had the sense not to start it. "What do you want from me, Mark?" I asked, but it didn't come out as an accusation or in anger. "You knew who and what I was when you met me."
He nodded slowly at that, not looking at me while he waited for a traffic light to change. As he started up he said, "Maybe I thought sometimes you would be something more."
Not something else. Something more.
"Maybe I thought I'd be more important than the job."
"Am I more important than your job?" I asked.
He didn't answer that.
We both apologized.
Neither of us backed down.
When Mark went to work Monday morning, I went to work trying to find Cole. That was crazy, and not something I would have ever thought I'd do. But the craving was back and hotter than ever and I needed him. He hadn't sent me away with the magic opiate cure. If I thought I was ready to be in the real world, he said, then I should be in the real world. That didn't make sense, because other people would get the cures while continuing on with their lives. Unless he meant to only cure people he found interesting or attractive enough to beat on.
But the stuff wasn't yet cleared by the FDA, not that I cared. Fentanyl isn't either. Maybe that was his concern. Whatever.
Sunday night,Mark offered to take me to dinner and I offered to cook and somehow both offers turned into sex that started in the living room and continued into the bedroom, and out again so we could order in pizza, more pizza than we could eat because at that moment we were so fucking hungry and couldn't seem to focus on which of our appetites most needed assuaging.
Our coupling was fast and hot and repeated. It started in one room and went into another. It featured mouths and hands and everything else. And still it maintained a sweetness.
It never rose above love. Or below it.
There was no biting. There was no restraining. There was no hitting. There were no implements.
Mark hadn't been wearing a belt.
Now on Monday I was searching for a man who might be lying about the rainforest cure. Maybe I had started to recover only because I wasn't in that deep and because I didn't have access to anything else and because I had been taken well in hand.
Maybe I was searching for him because of both addictions. To the drug. And to the way he made me feel when he just took me and did what he wanted to me.
It hurt. It fucking hurt and while it was happening I was humiliated and furious and promised myself that never again would I let him do what he was doing to me.
But I didn't leave.
There was the fact that I wanted my job back. And now there was the fact that Samuels was gone and I didn't know what that meant for my job. Obviously I fit into the whole chain of command, just like any other police officer. But Samuels had been my handler and undercover narcs weren't the same as rank and file officers.