“You talk it out last night?”
Darren hummed, pouring a glass of orange juice and watching the foreboding presence out of the corner of his eye.
“You know,” Mr. Phillips said lowly, “I never took you for a coward.”
Darren stilled.
“Took you for a lot of things, Peace, but not a coward. Thought you had some guts. Least, you did when you stuck up for my kid against his bullies at that bloody school. So what happened?”
Darren worked his jaw. What happened? There was a question and a half. “I guess you were wrong,” he said finally, because it seemed to be the truest thing that he could say. If he weren’t a coward, he supposed, he would have knocked the moods for six by now. So Mr. Phillips had to simply be wrong.
“I don’t like to think I was wrong about my kid’s boyfriend,” Mr. Phillips said darkly.
Darren stood his ground. “You must have been. Nothing’s changed.”
“You telling me this isn’t the first time?”
“First time since I met Jayden.”
“But not first ever.”
“No.”
Mr. Phillips snorted. “So what’s the fucking problem that you think offing yourself is the best fucking solution?”
Darren gritted his teeth, the muscles in his jaw clenching. Calm down¸ he told himself, but at the same time, Get mad! Getting mad was…good, kind of. He’d never been able to get angry in the middle of a bad day; he must be getting better, judging by the burn of fury in his gut. “It doesn’t work like…”
“Grow up, kid,” Mr. Phillips said sternly. “You got a family, you got a boyfriend, you got a job, you got money, and judging by my house the last few days, you got friends. Pull yourself together and be a man for once in your goddamn life, ‘cause it doesn’t get better than that, and if you’re going to go to pieces every time your boss doesn’t like your fucking haircut or you have a bust-up with my kid, then you’re better off not near my kid.”
“What?”
“I like you, Peace. When you’re not being a fucking idiot, you’re a good kid. But you’re not my kid. Jayden comes first, not you, and you don’t drag my kid into your mess, you got that? Sort yourself out, or get out.”
“DAD!”
The outraged shout made Darren jump, and his muscles twisted from hip to shoulder, their knotting tension broken by the shock of Jayden’s voice suddenly so close, and so loud. He hadn’t heard him coming, but there he was, damp-haired and furious-faced in the kitchen doorway, practically vibrating with anger. He backed up as Jayden advanced on his father, folding his arms over his chest, suddenly chilly.
Because, really, Mr. Phillips had a point.
“You don’t know anything about this, Dad, so butt out!” Jayden was shouting, and Mr. Phillips was inflating his barrel chest in red-faced anger.
“Don’t raise your voice at me, kid!” he roared, and Darren winced at the rising decibel level. He’d heard them argue once, and only once, and it hadn’t been pretty then either. He fought the urge to leave.
“I’ll fucking raise my voice if I fucking want!” Jayden bellowed back. “You don’t know shit about this, Dad, so leave Darren alone! If you had one fucking ounce of compassion…”
“LANGUAGE!” Mr. Phillips rock-concerted, and Darren caught at Jayden’s sleeve. He was shrugged off angrily and ignored.
“I’ll use whatever language I want to!” Jayden retorted, red in the face. Despite the lack of blood relation, they suddenly looked exactly like father and son. “You don’t understand! It’s an illness, Dad, he’s not being fucking stupid, he’s ill, and you need to…!”
“Jayden!” Darren interrupted, catching his sleeve again and pulling him back from the toe-to-toe shouting match. “Jayden, stop it.”
“I won’t stop it!” Jayden fumed. “He needs to…!”
“He’s right.”
Mr. Phillips raised his eyebrows; Jayden paused for a brief second, the colour leaking out of his face, before it returned, he puffed up furiously and said, “Darren, don’t you dare start blam…”
“I’m not blaming anyone,” Darren interrupted quietly, pitching his voice low in the futile hope of defusing the powder keg in the kitchen. “But he’s right. We’ve been…making excuses. For me. And I need to pull myself together more than I have been.”
Mr. Phillips was giving him an unreadable look, arms folded and stance closed; Jayden gaped, then his face shuttered and hardened, and he dragged Darren out of the kitchen by the hand, throwing a venomous look over his shoulder before slamming the door.
“Darren…” he started pleading, and Darren shook his head.
“Let’s…I don’t know. Go out?” he suggested weakly.
Jayden looked pained. He looked tired, tired and anxious, and Mr. Phillips words were ringing in Darren’s head. And they were true. Nobody had talked to him quite like that before about the black cloud, and it was like a slap in the face. He’d been so fucking stupid, and he’d taken Jayden down with him, and that had never been the idea. He’d decided he’d never take Jayden down with him the minute they got together, and now he had, and…it was time to stop. Stop this whole bloody, cyclical farce.
They went out. Jayden was still vibrating with tension, and Mr. Phillips was like the elephant in the room—or kitchen—and Darren pushed to go out and just…do something else for a little bit. It was tentatively warm in that weird too-cold-for-a-shirt, too-hot-for-a-jacket way, and a light breeze was ruffling the weedy flowers up and down Attlee Road, and Darren felt…freer, somehow, as Jayden locked the front door behind them.
“C’mere,” Jayden murmured, taking his hand at the gate, squeezing his fingers and saying, “Dad’s wrong, Darren.”
“He’s not,” Darren said flatly, because it was true. He let their hands be as they turned onto the main road. Screw it. “I’ve not been dealing with this. All of it, not just Cambridge. I’ve just let it run me instead of dealing with it.”
“It’s not like a cold, Darren.”
“You have to let that run its course,” Darren insisted. “But…you’ve got to do something about other illnesses, and I’ve never tried to do anything about this…this…”
“Depression,” Jayden said gently, supplying the word that Darren hated.
“That,” he muttered and hunched his shoulders. Jayden squeezed his hand again, watching anxiously. “I need to pull myself together.”
“You’re ill, Darren, it’s…”
“We can’t keep making that excuse, Jayden,” Darren said heavily. “I’m not insane. I know what I’m doing, even when it’s bad. I don’t have to do what the bad days make an obvious idea. I’m not mad.”
Jayden flinched; Darren suppressed the urge to backtrack. He had to deal with this. They both did, if they were going to carry on. And if they didn’t…if they didn’t, Darren was struck with the thought that there’d be nothing left of him to sort out in the first place. That eventually, he wouldn’t fail. He’d only failed this time because he’d been sick. What if next time, he didn’t throw up?
“You’ve always…” he started, then shrugged and began again. “You keep saying I’m ill, but…if I’m ill, we never tried to really treat it, did we? And if I’m not ill, then what’s my excuse?”
“Darren…”
“Your dad’s right, Jayden. We deal with this, or we go under. That’s all there is to it. We can’t just keep dancing around the issue.”
Jayden pulled them to a stop, halfway down the main road towards town, and slid his other hand down to Darren’s, warm and real, and squeezed his fingers, all ten at once. A spark of simple feeling pricked at the traces of the darkness still clouding Darren’s brain. “So what do we do?” Jayden asked lowly, his eyes flicking over Darren’s in little bursts.
Darren shrugged. “I don’t know. Deal? Somehow.”
“You could…try counselling?” Jayden suggested hesitantly.
“Maybe,” Darren said. “Talk to my doctor. Or Rachel, she’ll
have some ideas.” She coped better than him, anyway. “Work out some proper coping strategies.” He didn’t want to say it, because Jayden would blame himself and that wasn’t the idea of this, but music had always been the coping strategy when he was younger. Ish. All right, it made the moods more intense, but it also made them leave earlier. He’d always hashed out the blackness into the strings—violin, or piano wire, whichever—but the violin had been lost to him between Jayden and the mugging, and the piano…
The piano didn’t have the same power. It didn’t have the same furious anger behind it. He’d never hated the piano enough to give it that power. It had been the more fun of the two, the more light-hearted, the instrument that was for the better days too. The violin had never been for the good days.
“Whatever you do,” Jayden said finally, rubbing his thumb in circles on Darren’s skin. “Whatever it is, I’ll support you. Whatever, you know I will. Just, you know, talk to me? Call me and talk to me, and if you need me, don’t…I’ll pick up the phone, I promise, but you’ve got to try to get hold of me, you know, and…”
“I will.”
Jayden bit his lip. The breeze tugging at his for-once-unstyled hair made him look younger, more like the shy Woodbourne kid who’d kissed Darren in the middle of the street nearly four years ago. He looked like himself again, away from Cambridge and Ella and all the history of the place that wasn’t Jayden’s history, and Darren wanted, fiercely, not to have to let go of him. Not to let him go back.
“I don’t want us to be over,” he said carefully, “but your dad is right. I won’t take you down with me.”
“Then we’ll just have to make sure you don’t go down, right?” Jayden said, equally carefully. “I know,” he added suddenly, chewing on his bottom lip. “I know it hasn’t looked like it the last few months, and it’s been hard, and I did things all wrong, but…I love you, Darren. I never stopped loving you, never, and whatever this takes, I’ll do it. Whatever.”
Darren took a breath, looking at their intertwined fingers, his rough and Jayden’s smooth, both pale after a long winter. Looking like they fit. Fitting, even. Like they had been for years, and if he could only pull himself together, try and actually fix this instead of just bearing it the way he had been all these years…
“Let’s get coffee,” he said finally, wrapping his brain around the idea of actually defeating this depression instead of waiting for it to go away on its own.
Jayden squeezed his hand and fell into step.
It was time—beyond time—to get better.
Chapter 34
It was an hour’s journey by train from home to Southampton, a hour of flat views over flat fields, long grass rippling in the wake of the train, swallows diving from Hawaiian-blue skies and beginning to cluster, ready for the inevitable flocking south. Autumn was coming, but it hadn’t arrived yet.
That summer broke all the records. Heat, humidity, hours of sunshine, the lot. It had been a roasting hot summer, and Jayden had hated every last minute of it. He didn’t want freckles, and he didn’t want to be stuck in an office while it was so gorgeous outside, and he didn’t want to be missing the streaks of copper forming in Darren’s dark curls. Or Darren’s freckles in weird places.
Jayden had made the best of the aborted year. He’d secured himself a volunteer placement on the phone lines at a hotline for LGBT youth, and on the back of it, an internship stuffing envelopes and taking meeting minutes in the office of his local MP. It had meant moving back in with Mum and Dad (and Rosie) for the rest of the spring and the whole of the summer, but that had been okay, even if Rosie still wasn’t sleeping through the night properly. And he’d managed to…sort things.
Darren had gone back to work more or less as soon as he could prise Jayden off his arm, and every other week, Jayden had come down to spend the day in Southampton with him, or Darren had come back up to sit on Mum’s sofa and pull faces at the baby while Jayden pulled faces at that increasingly mad mop of hair. It had been hard—more than hard, and more than once Jayden was convinced Darren was going to give up—but…
But it had worked. And the letter in Jayden’s bag said the rest of it was going to work, and…and Darren had been better. It was only early days, but…he’d stabilised, a little. The doctor was talking about antidepressants, and he was going to a counsellor. He didn’t really like her, but he went anyway. And he was going to boxing four times a week instead of two, and…
He was doing better. For now.
Station shadows fell over the train, and Jayden shifted impatiently on his feet waiting for the door to open. He hadn’t seen Darren in four weeks, because Darren had finished his training course and been promptly hit with masses of overtime. (Jayden had no idea why a crime scene took so freaking long to dust for prints or whatever, but apparently they did.) And the absence of Darren and his hair and the lingering, itching worry Jayden got whenever Darren didn’t text back within an hour or he seemed a little off on the phone…
He jumped down from the train the minute the door was half-open, and beelined straight through the ticket barriers. Darren was waiting where he was always waiting, hands in pockets and earphones in, lounging against the wall by the ticket machines, and Jayden launched, throwing himself into a hug that smacked Darren’s back loudly into the peeling paintwork and crushed a breathless laugh out of him.
“Missed you,” Jayden whispered, too low to be heard, and squeezed until Darren had to smack his shoulder in warning. “Sorry,” he said, easing his grip, and pulled an earpiece out to whisper, “Love you,” dead close and kiss the lobe.
“Yeah, yeah,” Darren said, but he was smiling—not grinning or smirking, but smiling—when Jayden let go of him. “Rachel’s visiting her folks today, all day, she promised. Ergo, I figured day in, film, food. Sex.”
“Always with the sex.”
Darren shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a man of simple pleasures.”
“Yeah, right,” Jayden said, shrugging his bag off his shoulder and retrieving the letter. “Look. First, just look at that, and, um, tell me what you think.”
Darren raised his eyebrows and unfolded the letter. He was quicker than Mum, and the letterhead design instantly had him going, “What are you playing at?” in that absent, slightly suspicious voice of his. He skimmed it, held it out, and said, “Why are Bristol Uni offering you a place?”
“Because I applied for one,” Jayden said, and bit his lip.
“…Why?” Darren said slowly.
“I’m not going back to Cambridge,” Jayden said. “I didn’t like what I was becoming there, and I wouldn’t have been able to change colleges to get away from Ella and Jonathon, and I didn’t want to have it all over again anyway, and it’s too far from you, and…”
“Jayden,” Darren interrupted. “You’ve always wanted to go to Cambridge.”
Jayden sighed. “It was…it was the Devil’s Trill Sonata,” he whispered.
Darren cocked his head.
“I had this dream of going, but when I actually got there, it wasn’t anything like what I’d imagined,” he explained, tangling their fingers loosely at the first knuckles, plucking lightly at the ragged ends of Darren’s nails and staring at them as he talked. “It never lived up to it, and then…when you, you know, I realised even the dream wasn’t worth losing you over, never mind the reality. So…I dropped out. And applied to Bristol. The course is good, and it’s much closer, and…”
Darren squeezed his hand. “I get it,” he said quietly.
Jayden stared into those sea-green eyes and said, “I’ve been dreaming about Cambridge so long, I forgot how to change my plans. I didn’t expect to have you, and being without you…it wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t even close to worth it.”
Darren dropped his hands and stepped closer, cupping Jayden’s face in both palms and kissing him, slow and sweet, ignoring the bustling station around them and the stares from midday tourists and travellers. His mouth was smooth against Jayden’s lips, but his p
alms were rough; his nose brushed against cooler skin and felt like a branding iron without the pain. He was firm under Jayden’s touch, hot to the fingertips and warm to the heels of his hands, and he was real. Darren wasn’t—hadn’t ever been—a dream.
“See,” Darren whispered closely, forehead pressing into Jayden’s. When Jayden peeked, those pale green eyes were closed, Darren’s voice so faint as to be a series of breaths rather than any true sound. “This is you. This. And I love you.”
Jayden swallowed, pressed a soft kiss back to the corner of Darren’s mouth, and whispered, “I think you said something about going home for the day?”
“Mm,” Darren said and finally stepped back. Jayden kept one of those large hands for himself. “Taxi? Car’s in for servicing. I kind of popped the clutch yesterday. So, rental chariot back to the tiny palace?”
Jayden smiled and bumped their shoulders on the way out. “Romantic,” he teased.
“Yep,” Darren said, flagging down the closest taxi and holding the door for Jayden. “See? Chivalry and all that.”
“You have ulterior motives.”
“Uh, yes. Well done.”
Jayden pinched him, but the moment Darren had his seatbelt on and the taxi moved off, he leaned over to kiss a cheek and tug on a handful of curls. “Darren?” he murmured. “You’re everything.”
Darren eyed him for a moment, something unreadable in his face, then he smiled, squeezed Jayden’s hand on the seats between them, and said, “I know.” For the first time, it sounded like just maybe he meant it.
Jayden smiled and watched the sunlit city flash past the windows, a glittering mess of glass, concrete, and bad graffiti. The sun was soaring in the sky, the hot August fading out into September, and Darren’s hand was rough and warm in his. They had survived—survived the worst that Jayden could imagine—and in the air-conditioned taxi in a relaxed silence, he felt the solid weight of conviction in the middle of his chest.
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