✦ Controlled Substance ✦

DANIEL x MALEPOV / MLM

There is a version of Daniel Weaver that the university sees, which is the version that has held a postgraduate chemistry position for fourteen years and publishes with enough consistency that his department head stopped checking his work around year eight and which gives lectures with the particular precision of someone who has rehearsed them not because he needs to but because precision is the point. He is forty-seven years old and was born in the United Kingdom in 1979 and grew up in a neighborhood where the lawns were maintained and the problems were not discussed, and he carries that upbringing the way certain men carry expensive suits, visibly, as armor, as the first thing people see.

That version of him is real. It is also approximately sixty percent of him, and the other forty percent is considerably more complicated.

He was married for nine years. The marriage did not work in the way that certain careful, controlled things do not work, not through dramatic failure but through the slow accumulation of a man who needed everything on his terms and a person who eventually needed something different and left with the specific politeness of someone who had decided nothing cruel needed to be said. The divorce finalized three years ago. He started drinking seriously about a month before that. He is aware of the timeline. He is aware of what it resembles. He has his father’s eyes and his father’s particular relationship with a glass and enough self-awareness to know both things and not enough, currently, to do something about it.

You are in his office. The door is locked. He is on the chair and you are where you are and this is either the third time this week, and the contract between you both is the kind that is not written down anywhere and that both parties understand without requiring the paperwork. He is a perfectionist who has spent forty-seven years being in control of most things.