*Dedicated to Dyllan S. So proud of how far you've come.*

{Kurt}

"Am I going to have to talk at this thing?" Cary's dark eyes were worried as he glanced at Kurt from the passenger seat of his truck.

Kurt shook his head. "This one's an open meeting. You can just say you're here to listen or that you're here with me. Uh, if you're comfortable with that."

"Why wouldn't I be comfortable with that?" Cary asked.

Kurt fingered his earring and touched the top button of his crisp pink dress shirt. He felt like Grandpa Visser in this outfit, a dapper man he knew mostly from his Grandma's photos and stories. It felt good to be dressed up again. "I don't know. I don't want to assume we're... you know, friends. In public."

Cary huffed a laugh. "We're friends, Visser. It's safe to assume. Pretty sure I've spent more time in public as your pretend boyfriend than I spent with my last actual girlfriend."

Kurt flicked him a smile, still worried. He was getting very attached to having Cary around and he didn't want the other man to get sick of him. "These are good people. I'll make sure it's clear we're not together."

Cary waved his shovel-sized hand dismissively. "Sure, sure. I know you like a more compact model. I'll try not to take it personal."

Kurt laughed, relaxing. "Have you been to a meeting before? AA? NA?"

Cary shook his head. After a moment, he said, "Sobered up from a painkiller habit in a hotel room with my mom when I was...twelve, I guess. We didn't believe in talking to people about our shit. Barely talked to each other."

Tucking his hair behind his ear, Kurt looked thoughtfully at the other man. "You keep surprising me, Douglas. Now you're one of the most 'in touch with your feelings' dudes I know."

"One thousand hours of talk therapy and counting," Cary said. "You should try it."

"Christ, can you imagine." Kurt laughed shortly. "I'd be there forever."

His AA group met in a classroom in the basement of the Strathcona library, papered with crayon drawings and posters of kitten memes, and lined with bins of toys and LEGO. Once after a meeting, he and Laurel had stayed back to dig into those LEGO bins, giggling like children.

People were milling around the urn of coffee already, and an elderly woman with wispy white hair caught sight of him, coming over with a smile on her face. "Mr. Visser, I've been thinking about you."

Kurt leaned down, clasping her frail shoulders to air-kiss her papery cheeks. "Can't get rid of me that easy, Phyllis." He turned to Cary, who was sticking close to his back. "This is my friend, Cary Douglas."

Phyllis' hand was tiny in Cary's as he shook it gently.

"Welcome Mr. Douglas, we're just about to get started."

A number of familiar faces gave Kurt a smile or a nod as he helped himself to coffee, and the last of Kurt's anxiety about leaving the house unknotted. This had been his safest place for months, before he'd had Jon's house to come home to.

People stepped out of the way for Laurel's imposing figure, as she sailed across the room, opening her arms. Her pregnant belly was more pronounced every time Kurt saw her, although he supposed someone who didn't know might just think it was one more generous curve. He hugged her like she was made of glass. "Honey, how are you?" he asked.

Laurel smacked his arm. "I was going to ask you the same question." She glared, putting her hands on her wide hips. Her eyeliner was on-point as usual, her brilliant red hair falling in artful waves around her high cheekbones and long neck. "You were amazing on Saturday--I followed it all on Insta, and then...poof. Nothing. I told you a hundred times: if you don't want to slip, stay away from slippery places."

Kurt laughed sheepishly, ducking his head. "Yeah I know. I'm sharing about that tonight."

"Good." She fluttered her fingers at Cary behind him, looking pointedly at Kurt. "Is this--?"

Kurt swivelled. "Laurel, this is my friend Cary Douglas--Douglas, this is my pain-in-the-ass AA buddy Laurel."

Laurel turned the full wattage of her smile on Cary. "So good to finally meet you."

Cary ducked his head and tucked his hands in his pockets, smiling back. Was it possible he wasn't aware of how adorable he looked when he was trying to fold his large body a little smaller? "Pleasure's mine," he said gruffly, and Laurel angled her body towards him, clearly intrigued.

Kurt's eyebrows flicked up. Well damn, Cary had more game than he'd given him credit for. "Thirteenth stepper," he muttered to Laurel. Vets who came to meetings to pick up newcomers were frowned upon, and she widened her eyes at him innocently.

At the front of the room, Phyllis had her cat-eye glasses on and was snapping her fingers in the air for their attention, every inch of her tiny frame looking like the teacher she had been for decades. "Let's get started people," she called, and they found seats at the rows of tables.

The opening of a meeting was the same every time: Phyllis passed out the pages with the now-familiar words of the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions of AA, and they went around the tables taking turns reading each one. Kurt could have recited the first three steps by heart, and hearing the words tonight in a chorus of voices around the room anchored him again to the person he was now and was still becoming.

Step 1: We admit we were powerless over alcohol-that our lives had become unmanageable.

Step 2: We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Step 3: We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

Step one had made complete sense to Kurt from day one.

Step two had been a sticking point, until a conversation with Laurel made him realize this wasn't church--no one was going to tell him what that Higher Power should look like. Since that time, Kurt imagined a Higher Power like his Grandma Visser, benevolent and female, her keen eyes seeing everything and her soft arms ready to hug him when he cried. Even if it was just a made-up picture, he felt it originated from a better version of himself, and that was the person he was working to fully become.

Step 4: We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

Step 5: We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Step 6: We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

Step 7: We humbly asked Him (Her) to remove our shortcomings.

Step 8: We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

Step 9: We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Kurt was still chewing on steps four through seven with his sponsor, Brian. He felt like he saw his shit more clearly with every month of sobriety--what he needed to own, and what he needed to drop like dead weight and leave behind. He hadn't started working on step eight yet--no one in his family wanted to hear from him, and the feeling was mutual. Last time he'd had coffee with Brian, a long-time AA vet, the older man had suggested that Kurt write a series of letters to his family members that he didn't need to send, just to see how it felt to make the words.

Kurt had folded his arms over his body, glaring at him. "What about the shit they did to me?" he shot back. "Are they 'making amends'?"

Brian had been immovable. "You can't change them. You can only change yourself. Holding onto resentment is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies."

Kurt had rolled his eyes and changed the subject, but the slogan kept coming back to his mind, bugging him. That was the thing about the folksy AA sayings that peppered the vets' conversations. The simple words got under your skin and wouldn't leave you alone. Which was a good thing, it turned out, when you were trying to unhook from the pull of a substance addiction, and your brain stupidly slid into the same old rut.

Step 10: We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

Step 11: We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him (Her), praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out.

Step 12: Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Rinse and repeat. As the slogan said: it works when you work it, and Kurt had seen that happening in many of the people in this room.

There were two newcomers in the meeting tonight: a middle-aged woman in the back with the haggard face of a hang-over, and a young dude with his ball cap pulled down low, his arms crossed and a sneer on his face. Here on a court-order, Kurt guessed. Those kids were the toughest to crack.

As they started to share around the room, the older vets in the front went to work, pulling out their war stories for the new listeners. They had one mission: anyone they could reach and get to come back was someone who maybe didn't get behind the wheel drunk, didn't end up on the street, or didn't leave their kids without a sober adult to care for them. In other words, who didn't do any of the shit they'd done themselves. This was the mission that they all agreed on: reach as many as possible to rescue even one.

By the third share, people were already crying, and Kurt settled in for a good soul-cleansing meeting, brushing tears off his cheeks. When it was his turn, he sniffed and shook his hair off his face, opening with the familiar words: "My name is Kurt Visser and I'm an alcoholic. It's been--two days since my last drink." The sounds of people acknowledging him around the room steadied him. No one batted an eye at his admission--most of them had heard it all.

"Saturday was our concert and--that's a slippery place for me, you know?" Heads nodded and Kurt picked his way through the story, careful not to give many details about the bar or what he'd been drinking. Everyone here had the same triggers as he did and they looked out for each other, their collective well-being more important than any one individual personality.

"I slipped a couple weeks ago at our last gig and I didn't share. I know I need to come clean to stay clean." He wiped his nose on the back of his wrist, seeing Jon in his memory, the vulnerable back of his boyfriend's neck and his freckled shoulders bunched with tension. 'Clean' looked like becoming a person who actually had a chance with a keeper like Jon. It was almost beyond his belief he'd gotten this far.

Kurt sighed, dredging up the rest of the story. "I stayed after the show with the same old friends doing the same old shit and I had a drink. I thought I could stop before it got out of hand, but...one's too many, a thousand's never enough." He cleared his throat. "That led to me putting myself in a situation I didn't have control of. And it still scares me, how much worse it could've been." He stretched back, pushing his hands through his hair. "So...I'm done, bishes." He flashed a grin through his tears. "I'm back on the gay and narrow. You're stuck with all my drama, just the sober version." Kurt chuckled at himself and there was some quiet laughter joining him around the room.

When he was done, there was a warm avalanche of recognition, smiles, encouragement, understanding. No one loved like a room full of recovering addicts doing their work and Kurt beamed, crying a little more as all that love went in.

"Thank you, Mr. Visser," Phyllis said. Laurel passed him a wad of napkins from the coffee table. "Next?"

Blowing his nose, Kurt checked Cary beside him, who had been listening with his head down and his arms crossed. Kurt noticed his fingers were tapping his chest and his legs were spread, his feet pushed firmly into the floor. Cary gave a brief smile, his dark eyes glancing up at Phyllis. "Name's Cary Douglas. I'm just here with Kurt."

Phyllis nodded, the pearl string on her glasses clicking softly, and the others in the room welcomed him.

Exhaling, Kurt closed his eyes, feeling emptied out and clean and absurdly fond of every person in the room tonight, from the weathered old vets to the kid furtively swiping his face, covering the motion by adjusting his ball cap.

When the sharing time was done, chairs scraped back and they all stood, reaching out to grasp the hands of the people beside them. Cary's palm was sweaty and Kurt squeezed his hand, concerned. He guessed he was going to need to bow out without lingering over a second cup of coffee to get Cary someplace safer.

Phyllis said quietly, "As is our practice, I invite us to have a moment of silence for the alcoholic or addict who still suffers." Silence fell, broken by feet shuffling and someone trying to muffle a cough. Then Phyllis said the opening word of the prayer they all knew, "God--"

And everyone joined: "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference."

The sound of chatting and laughter rose, and Cary tapped his fingers on the back of Kurt's wrist.

"I'll be waiting in the truck," Cary said. "Take the time you need, Kurt."

Kurt knew better than to ask about the shadows in the other man's eyes, in a room full of strangers. "I'll just be a minute," he said.

He made his excuses to Laurel. "I have to run--coffee this week?"

She flipped her flame-red hair over her shoulder. "Obviously yes. Tomorrow before meeting?"

Kurt's lips curled in a smile. "Yeah, you got it."

"Think you'll bring your friend?" She scanned the room for Cary.

"You better hope I won't," Kurt said. "Phyllis will rip your heart out if she catches you thirteenth stepping."

Laurel laid her hand across her ample chest, her eyes wide and innocent. "Me?"

His sponsor, Brian tapped his shoulder and Kurt automatically stood up straighter, tucking his hair behind his ears. If Phyllis reminded him of a teacher, Brian was a principal, a stocky, no bull-shit man with a bald, shiny head. Brian's normally stoic face was smiling.

"Good share, Visser. I was thinking back to your first night here, sitting in the back wearing your aviators and fooling no one."

Kurt chuckled a little uncomfortably. The only pleasant thing about that memory was that it was the start of where he was now. If that version of Kurt had known today was possible, he wouldn't have waited two months and who knows how many more blackouts before coming back.

"That took courage," Brian said, "And it took courage to come back. And it took courage to share today. I'm proud of you. Change is a process, not an event. You're doing the work."

Kurt's face warmed and he smiled. "Well, thanks for putting up with me."

Brian patted his shoulder. "God doesn't make junk, Kurt. It's the best use of my time I can think of. See you tomorrow?"

"For sure," Kurt said. He caught Laurel rolling her eyes, and flashed her a cheeky grin, holding up three fingers for every slogan Brian had used. They loved to mock the slogans, but secretly Kurt knew she needed them as much as he did. If he could've chosen a sponsor, he would have picked her, but AA had some old-fashioned ideas about mixed-gender pairs.

Jogging across the parking lot to the truck, he noted Cary sitting in the passenger seat, one arm dangling out the window with a lit cigarette between his fingers. He hoped it was a cigarette, since they were well within 'smell-shot' of his addict friends as they exited the library.

Kurt hefted himself into the driver's seat, feeling the tender ache of his bruises, and checking Cary briefly as he started the truck. "Maybe I should've warned you, sorry Douglas. Some of the guys' stories can be a little rough."

Something Phyllis said, and this was Kurt's paraphrase, was that some people had shit done to them when they were under the influence--and other people did shitty things. Kurt knew how true that was; he'd been on both sides of the equation. Tonight one of the vets had shared about shitty things he'd done to his wife and kids, and even the vague references had recalled some vivid memories for Kurt the first time he'd heard the man share. He was used to the story by now, after a couple hearings over the past half-year.

Cary lifted his shoulders, taking a drag. "Nothin' I haven't seen before. I'll live." The words came out smoky. "Mind if I--?" He held up the cigarette.

"If it's just tobacco--knock yourself out," Kurt said. "It's your upholstery." He personally felt happy and light, like he'd just unloaded a burden he hadn't realized was so heavy. "That was a good meeting--when everyone's crying? Those are the gooders."

Cary made a huffing sound. "I can see why you like it."

There was a long quiet as they drove and Cary smoked the cigarette to the filter, tapping a second cigarette out of a crumpled package and lighting it from the first, before flicking the butt out the window. "You should bring Jon sometime," Cary said.

"You think so?" Kurt asked slowly. It was hard for him to picture his highly private, self-contained boyfriend in that room.

"Mm," Cary rumbled the affirmation. "Do him good to cry."

Kurt made a scoffing noise. "Bish, as if my boyfriend would cry in front of all those people."

"He's no different than anyone else there," Cary pointed out. "Doesn't hurt to remind him of that once in a while."

*I know, I know, you want to know what's happening with Jon and Nicky. That's tomorrow, lovelies! Today we needed to spend a little time exploring Kurt's recovery journey.

About a decade ago I became acquainted with the AA Twelve Steps through a friend of mine who's a grown-up child of an alcoholic. I was fascinated to realize they were actually steps (duh) that people work through to re-make their lives as sober people. AA is not sexy or trendy, but it still works. If you or someone you love has battled addiction, you know the only way out is to do the work. There's no shortcuts.

I wasn't sure about including this scene until I had it all written. It does slow down the main driving plot line. However, it feels like it deepens Kurt's character, gives him legs. We realize he's not completely alone in the world, and also that he's reached out for help and done a significant amount of work before he bumped back into Jon.

It also makes the possibility that Kurt and Jon could break up and Kurt would carry on and be okay a real option. Um... I'm just saying. Hypothetically.

Oop I've said to much lol. See you tomorrow lovelies!*

3268 words.