“Positive drug test. TCP. Lionel Collier just notified me.” The Rules & Discipline Judge from the ASP.
Dylan could only stare blankly at Holden. “No. That’s not right.”
“They’re not usually wrong, Dylan. Come on.”
“I swear to you Holden, I wasn’t smoking. I haven’t touched the stuff in…well months actually. Since before Tahiti. There’s no way it would stay in my body that long.”
Holden gave him a long, hard look then nodded. “Okay. We have to figure out what we’re going to do about this.”
Dylan’s blood ran cold. “I’m gonna lose my title, aren’t I?”
“Yeah. And probably be suspended for a year. Unless we prove it’s a mistake.”
“Shit.” Dylan’s body went numb.
Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ. Could things get any worse, for fuck’s sake?
He bowed his head and stared at the carpet. It was too much. He lifted his head and looked at Holden. “Just forget it. I give up. Just take a gun and shoot me.”
Holden’s lips twitched. “A little while ago I would have, if I’d had a gun.”
“I know. I promise you, Holden, I didn’t do it. But fuck, man. I’m losing my title. I’ve lost my biggest sponsor.”
“You didn’t lose them. You dumped them. Your choice.”
“Whatever. I figured I’d lost my agent. I’ve lost my friends. And I’ve lost…the woman I love. Fuck, that sounds sappy.”
Holden’s eyebrows lifted. “You? In love?”
Dylan’s lips twisted. “Hard to believe, huh?”
“Brooke Lowry.”
“Yeah.”
“Nice gesture for her today. Stupid, but nice.”
“Thanks. I’m trying to reform so I’m not just stupid, but both stupid
and
nice.”
“Shit, Dylan.” Their eyes met and they both gave rueful smiles.
“I know.” Dylan rubbed his forehead. “What happens now?”
“They do an investigation. You have the opportunity to have Sample B tested. That’s the second sample they take.”
Dylan nodded. He was well familiar with the testing protocol.
“You can also present a defense in writing to the Rules & Discipline Judge with an explanation of any mitigating circumstances, any physical or medical reasons for the positive drug test, and any supporting evidence.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Witnesses, doctors’ notes.”
“As if I’m going to have a witness who
didn’t
see me smoke dope. That would be….oh, everybody.”
Holden paced back and forth across the carpet. “You don’t seriously just want to accept this, do you?”
Dylan thought about that. “I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. Right now, it doesn’t matter. I’ll probably regret saying that at some point.”
“Yeah. You will. Come on, buddy. This is your life. Don’t throw it away.”
Another knock on the door startled him. Dylan glanced at Holden but rose to his feet and crossed to the door. When he opened it, Corey and Matt stood there.
“Whoa,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“We heard the news,” Matt said. “Is it true?”
“No, it’s not fucking true.”
“So there wasn’t a positive drug test? They said on the news it was unconfirmed.”
Dylan sighed. “Yeah, there was a positive drug test. Apparently. Come in.”
He stepped aside so they could enter the room. They both wore identical expressions of concern. “Why are you here?” he asked again.
“Because we’re your friends and we came to support you, asshole,” Matt said.
Dylan nodded. “I
was
an asshole to you guys the other day.”
“Yeah. You were. But it wasn’t the first time and probably won’t be the last. Christ only knows why we still care.”
Dylan’s heart clenched and he swallowed. “What if it’s true? What if I did do drugs?”
“Did you?”
“No.”
Matt nodded. “Okay. I believe you. What are we going to do about it?”
We? Dylan stared at him. His gaze shifted to Corey, standing there with her arm linked through Matt’s, and she nodded.
“What can we do?” she asked.
The silence stretched out. Dylan’s heart bumped and his muscles jumped and twitched. His throat felt raw when he swallowed. “I don’t know,” he finally said, his voice hoarse. “We were just talking about options.”
Matt nodded and grabbed a chair. He held it for Corey then pulled another one out from the small table. “Okay. Let’s hear ’em.”
Holden repeated what he’d told Dylan and told them more about the rules and appeal procedures. Dylan knew about this, although he’d never been involved in this kind of situation before. But it happened. To other people. Not to him.
Corey and Matt were there for him. That thought kept going around and around in his head. He didn’t deserve it. He didn’t deserve them. But fuck, he was glad they were there and he wasn’t all alone in this mess.
The next knock at the door was so quiet he almost didn’t hear it over their voices as they talked. He listened and didn’t hear anything, but curious, he got up and moved to the door even as he still listened to Holden. He cracked open the door, almost expecting to see nothing, but he froze at seeing Brooke.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Brooke stood there with nerves fluttering in her stomach as Dylan opened the door and stared at her.
“Brooke.”
She nodded.
“What are
you
doing here?”
“I heard on the radio. About the drug test.”
He rubbed the back of his head. “You and the whole world, apparently.”
“Are you okay?”
He looked at her for a long moment. She felt as if a magnetic force was tugging her nearer to him and her body moved toward him. She tried to read the expression on his face, the emotions playing over his features as his eyes darkened and his mouth softened. “Yeah,” he finally said softly. “I’m okay.” He reached out a hand and touched her hair.
Again her body shifted closer to his, close enough to feel his body heat, to breathe in his scent. The door swung shut behind her with a click as she moved into the hotel room.
“What happened?” she asked, her voice husky.
“One of my samples tested positive for TCP.”
“Marijuana?”
He nodded. And waited.
“You haven’t been smoking it,” she said firmly. “Unless…that night…” She looked into his eyes.
He met her gaze steadily. “Do you think I would do that? When I’m in a competition and I know I could be tested at any time?”
She didn’t even hesitate. “No.”
He closed his eyes briefly and slid his hand around the nape of her neck. He drew her to him, against his chest, and she moved there effortlessly. He felt so good. His other arm slid around her and she wrapped her arms around his waist and held on.
“Nothing happened that night,” he murmured, his cheek against her hair. “I swear to you, Brooke. Yes, I went back to the party. I was pissed at you. I was tempted to get wasted and there were hot girls everywhere.” She smiled against his chest. “But I did nothing with any of them except get my picture taken, which I didn’t even know about until the next day, and I left alone.”
She nodded. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why were you pissed at me?”
She felt his sigh against her hair. “Because you were pushing me away. Because you were insisting it was just business between us. And I…” He paused. “I thought there was more than that.”
She squeezed her eyes closed. “How can we have more than that?” she whispered. “You’re leaving tomorrow.”
He drew back and held her upper arms. He looked into her eyes. “We need to talk.”
She gave him a hesitant nod then glanced over his shoulder and saw the hotel room full of people. “Oh, shnippits. I didn’t know you had people here…”
His lips twitched at her curse. “Yeah. Come on in.”
Brooke looked again and saw it was really just three other people. Corey, Matt and Holden. “Hi,” she said with a weak smile.
Corey smiled back. “Hi Brooke. Glad you came. We showed up to support Dylan and find out what we can do about this.”
Brooke nodded. Holden was sitting at the desk with a laptop, clicking away at it. “What do we know?” she asked, sitting on the edge of the bed.
They told her about the positive test and how he could have a second sample tested.
“But that would only help if there really was a mistake,” she said, frowning.
Dylan gave her a look. “Oh, there
was
a mistake,” he said.
“I’m just saying. If there’s something in your urine that resulted in a positive test, it would probably also be there in the second sample.”
“I didn’t smoke anything though,” Dylan objected. “So it can’t be positive.”
“What are the banned substances?” Brooke asked.
They read her the list.
“So there are some things it’s okay to take,” she said.
“I guess basically anything legal and that’s not considered performance enhancing.”
“I’m just researching the rules in the rule book,” Holden said. “Because there are exemptions.”
“Like what?” Matt asked.
“There are situations where a surfer can have an exemption if they have a physical or mental medical condition that requires prescription medication. Here it is.”
Brooke stared at Holden. Her vision blurred and she saw herself standing in the bathroom at L’Auberge Pacifique in Papeete, poking into Dylan’s toiletry bag, checking out his medications. She’d been concerned about him taking drugs and so she’d snooped. What had she seen? There’d been two bottles and she’d meant to Google the names of the drugs, but then she’d completely forgotten about it in the days following when they’d had no Internet access.
She rose to her feet and walked into the bathroom of Dylan’s hotel room. There was the same black toiletry bag sitting on the marble counter. She unzipped it and peered inside, but then had to dig around under a few things to find the two small, white-capped bottles. She pulled them out. Pantoloc and Effexor.
She dropped the bag and carried the bottles into the room. She stopped in front of Dylan, who sat in an armchair, and held them out. He looked at them, then back at her. His mouth twisted as he took them from her. “I told you about the Pantoloc,” he said quietly. “But not the Effexor.”
“What is it?”
His lips pursed. “It’s an anti-depressant medication.”
Her heart squeezed. “Oh.” She remembered what Corey had told her. Frack. He really had had a rough time. She went to her knees on the carpet in front of him and set her hands on his hard thighs. “It’s okay, Dylan. It’s okay to need that.”
“I don’t need it. Not anymore. I haven’t taken that stuff for a long time.”
“We’re going to talk about that too,” she said softly. “Okay, what about the Pantoloc?”
“I take it every day.”
She shifted and looked at Holden. “Can I use the laptop?”
“Sure.” He stood so she could have the chair. Dylan helped her to her feet and she sat in front of the desk and started Googling. She clicked in and out of various medical sites, not finding what she wanted. She typed in another search using different terms. She tapped her fingers on the desk…waiting…and…there! There it was. She clicked to the site. “Oh. My. God,” she breathed.
“What?” everyone in the room asked.
“Pantoloc—or pantoprazole—can result in a false positive for TCP.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Holden said, leaping to his feet. “Seriously?”
She slanted him an amused glance and looked at Dylan. “Seriously. Read for yourself.” She turned the laptop so he could see the screen. He read. He looked at her. He read again.
“Jesus Christ.”
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell the ASP about that?” Holden shouted. “They make exceptions, but you’re supposed to tell them ahead of time!”
“I never thought,” Dylan said, looking as if someone had just punched him in the gut. “I never even thought. A doctor prescribed it and it’s not performance enhancing. In fact, it’s kind of embarrassing. But I had this stomach acid problem and I was tired of having heartburn all the time.”
“Goddamn,” Matt said. Corey blew out a long breath.
“What do we do now?” Brooke asked. “Can you tell them? Surely an appeal on that basis would work.”
“We have to try,” Holden said. “We need a good lawyer. I know a few.”
“My sister,” Brooke said. “She’s an attorney.” She looked questioningly at Dylan. “Want me to call her?”
He gave her a crooked smile. “I don’t know if she’ll want to help me.”
Brooke smiled back at him. “I’ll convince her.”
“Go for it, babe,” he said. He sat there, still looking a bit stunned.
Brooke called her sister. Fraya came to the hotel right away. When they told her what was going on, she leveled Dylan with a long, hard stare. Brooke watched Dylan hold her gaze steadily and then Fraya nodded. “Have you two talked yet?”
“No.”
Brooke frowned. “What—?”
“But you’re going to,” Fraya said. “Right?”
“Right.”
And Brooke’s mouth fell open a little when Fraya smiled at him. With frightening efficiency and impressive skill, she obtained all the details, including the name of the doctor who had prescribed the medication for Dylan, then left to go back to her office to begin the appeal process. “I’ll keep you in the loop,” she told Dylan and Holden, having programmed their cell phone numbers into her BlackBerry.
When she’d gone, everyone looked at each other.
“What do you think?” Corey asked. “Will it work? Will he get to keep his title?”
“And not get suspended for a year,” Dylan muttered.
Brooke was afraid to feel hopeful, but she had utmost faith in her sister’s abilities. “Fraya’s good,” she said. “I know that doesn’t guarantee anything. Rules have been broken.”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of,” she agreed with a nod. “I don’t have any idea how the organization will look at this. They could say you should have told them before and it’s too late now. Or maybe they’ll agree that the drug didn’t make any difference in the outcome of the competition.”
She looked at Dylan, the lines of strain around his mouth and eyes, the way the corners of his mouth dipped down, and her heart turned over in her chest. God. He’d worked so hard for this, his whole life, and when he finally won, a stupid, innocent screw up could rob him of his title. He’d been so happy and she’d been so happy for him, and she did
not
want this taken away from him. She knew what it meant to him.