“What happened?”
“Bloody murder,” he said shortly and yawned widely. Jayden kissed his cheek and pressed the hot bowl into his hands. “Thanks.”
“Go sit down.” Jayden shooed him out to the living room, and followed a moment later with his own bowl, tucking his toes under Darren’s thigh comfortably on the sofa. “Who got murdered?” he asked, mostly for something to ask at all.
“A woman,” Darren said. “Blatant domestic abuse case, but he’d made a right mess of the house and apparently coughed to the arresting bobby to having extreme porn, so we were told to seize his computers too.”
“So you carried them.”
“Some of them,” Darren admitted, practically inhaling his porridge. Jayden made a mental note to make extra lunch. The biggest downside to Darren’s job—okay, maybe second biggest, because having to go to bed alone when Darren worked late shifts sucked—was that his appetite became unpredictable. A busy shift meant he’d eat his own arm by the end of it; a dull one with nothing to do meant he wasn’t so much as interested in a slice of toast the next morning.
“No wonder it hurts, then,” Jayden sniped. “Is the painkiller helping?”
“Give it ten minutes,” Darren protested mildly, and eyed Jayden’s half-empty bowl.
“Go on, then,” Jayden passed it over. “You are off this evening, right?”
“Yeah. Why?”
Jayden shrugged. “Figured maybe we could go out or something.”
Darren pointedly looked to the living room window. It was slating it down, the glass on the outside as wet as the English Channel.
“We could see a film.”
“It’s New Year’s Day; nowhere’s going to be open.”
“Go to the pub then, they’ll be open. Or just go somewhere. I’ve missed you, that’s all, and I kind of want to kidnap you a bit today. Get you to myself.”
“That’s because you got spoiled over Christmas after my secondment,” Darren said and grinned.
“Maybe,” Jayden allowed and wiggled his toes to push up into Darren’s thigh. “I’m still stealing you, though.”
“We don’t have to go out for you to steal me.”
“No, but I want to,” Jayden argued. “At least for lunch. Let’s go out for lunch and laugh at shoppers in the rain or something.”
Rachel reappeared like a skinny ghost, planting an obnoxious and loud kiss on the top of Darren’s head before swanning into the kitchen and re-emerging with her bowl of porridge and curling up on the arm of the sofa on Darren’s other side. “You,” she prodded him with her foot. “You should teach me piano.”
“Why?” Darren asked, without missing a beat.
“Because then I can play hymns and lullabies and stuff at work.”
“…And?”
“And I’ll look stupid if I ask Tony.”
“He’s your boyfriend.”
“Yeah, and it’ll be embarrassing if I’m crap,” Rachel said and poked him again. “C’mon.”
“And you are aware a lot of hymns are very hard to play?”
“Fine, easy hymns. They’re seven-year-old kids, Darren, I just need to be passable.”
Darren eyed her, then shrugged. “Only if you make curry tomorrow night.”
“Deal.”
“Fine,” Darren said and shrugged at Jayden. “Okay, how about a quick lunch out, then I spend the afternoon teaching the dipshit—ow!—Jesus, woman—teaching Rachel how to whack out Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star?”
“Good enough,” Jayden said and took back the empty bowls.
* * * *
Jayden stayed out to do bit of needless shopping—January sales were the best¸ and he snapped up several new woolly hats for Darren, because being together seven years didn’t mean the effect of glasses and a hat had worn off yet—and so let himself back into the house at half past three to hear piano scales.
Which was weird, because Jayden hadn’t heard scales in…in a long, long time.
Darren was sitting on the sofa with a magazine whilst Rachel played scales. Painstaking, halting and slow scales, but scales. He grunted in Jayden’s general direction, ducked the bag of hats thrown at his head, and leaned into the offered hug once Jayden had shed his shoes and coat without much comment.
“How’s it going?” Jayden asked.
“Slow.”
“Cup of tea?” Jayden offered, and Darren snorted.
“No thanks,” he grumbled. “You replaced the teabags with decaf.”
“Of course I did.”
“It tastes like crap.”
Jayden rolled his eyes and sat down on the sofa beside him. “Are you grumpy because your shoulder hurts, your ears hurt, or you’re caffeine-deprived?”
“All of the above,” Darren retorted, and Jayden smiled.
“You can have one cup of coffee tomorrow morning,” he bargained. “We’ll start cutting you down by a nothing after noon rule, okay?”
Darren grunted again, flicking a page of the magazine over. It was his monthly science one. He’d never stopped being a maths-and-physics nerd either. Jayden shook his head fondly, beyond used to Darren’s sulks when he’d not had a coffee in a while, and changed the subject easily. “Hear anything from Ethan?”
“No, but Paul texted,” he said. “Apparently we have to wear matching penguin suits. Me and Paul, that is.”
“…Why?”
“Apparently you totally can have two best men doing two different jobs at a wedding. He wants a pianist, and apparently that means I have to match.”
“Oh, I see,” Jayden said and paused. “So…you have to go down for a suit fitting or something?”
“Mm.”
“When?”
“Dunno yet. Apparently that has to wait until Lily…”
“Lillian.”
“…picks her dress.”
“Okay,” Jayden said and bit his lip. In the end, though, he decided against voicing his concern—that if the new doctor decided medication was the best option, and Darren reacted badly to the new medication as well, how would he then react to the wedding? Because the wedding was…big. Huge, even. Because it had always been Paul-and-Ethan-and-Darren, from school until now, even longer than there’d been a Jayden-and-Darren, and Ethan getting married was going to change that forever.
But he held his tongue, and decided instead to mock the diplomacy that was organising a wedding, and when Darren got up to begin the painstaking work of attempting to teach Rachel to play with both hands at once, sat back and admired him in his sulky, sardonic setting. And hoped that drugs wouldn’t be coming from the doctor. Really, really hoped.
Because Darren and drugs did not mix well.
Chapter 8
Jayden stirred, suddenly awake and not sure why. For a moment, he blinked up at the ceiling, and then the heavy whirr of a police helicopter passed by, a searchlight briefly hitting the near skylight and flooding the room with a brilliant white light, and disappeared.
“Urgh,” he mumbled, pressing a hand over his eyes. The helicopter buzzed onwards, circling back towards the town centre, looking for something. Jayden squinted at the clock. Four-fifteen. Why couldn’t people be criminals at social hours?
He turned over, blindly seeking out the heat on the other side of the bed, and frowned when he couldn’t find it. Sitting up, he flicked the bedside lamp on to find Darren’s side of the bed empty—and more tellingly, no note.
Darren occasionally—very occasionally—got called out in the middle of the night. He was being considered for promotion in his team, and so his boss was on at him to take as much of the on-call work as possible, but he managed to get out of most of it due to his mental health issues. Still, sometimes he had to go—but he always left a note on the side table.
There was no note, so Jayden slid out of bed.
When he opened the bedroom door at the bottom of the attic stairs, the house was dark and silent. Rachel’s room was closed; the bathroom door was open, and the bathroom itself dev
oid of life. Jayden padded down the main stairs, following a faint glow of light into the living room, where he found the lamp by the piano on, and the missing radiator himself seated on the bench.
“Darren?”
Darren was wearing his boxers and a baggy T-shirt, hair rumpled from having been recently in bed. He was sitting at the piano, but not quite entirely facing it; his chest was turned slightly towards the rest of the room, and only his right hand traced the ivory keys gently. He didn’t press, and the piano made no sound.
“Darren?” Jayden repeated gently, a niggle of worry starting up in the back of his mind. He crossed the room to sit on the bench and slide an arm around Darren’s waist carefully, unsure of what was going on. “You okay?”
Darren hummed, shifting into Jayden a little, but not seeming to register him properly. His face was blank, but more as though his thoughts were elsewhere than…than depression-blank. Like he was just elsewhere, as opposed to…withdrawing.
“What’s up?” Jayden whispered.
“Just thinking,” Darren murmured lowly, beginning to move his right hand as though playing, dancing nimbly over the keys but still not actually pressing down and creating anything.
“What about?”
Darren shrugged, then shifted to place both hands on the keys. “I don’t know,” he said quietly.
“Darren,” Jayden pressed, squeezing his side. The niggle of worry was getting bigger. “Are you feeling okay?”
Darren paused and blinked, some of the drifting batted away with that sweep of his eyelids. “Yes,” he said, sounding clearer. “I think so,” he amended. “I just feel a bit…odd.”
“…What kind of odd?”
“Not bad,” he said, and some of Jayden’s anxiety loosened. They’d made progress with this, with Darren’s tendency to lie about how he felt. It had been a horrible knock-on from Cambridge, and one that finally seemed to be lifting. Jayden was trusting him with those little statements again—warily, perhaps, but trusting all the same. “Just odd.”
“Odd how?”
“I don’t know,” Darren said honestly. The vagueness was leeching out of his tone, and Jayden rubbed his bare foot against Darren’s ankle encouragingly. “I just feel odd. Like I have muscle memory or something. My brain keeps playing over random notes in my head and I got up to write some down. Like I used to.”
“I don’t think you ever really stopped being a musician, you know,” Jayden said lowly.
“It’s been a long time since I did anything, though.”
“Yeah but…maybe if you let it out, it’ll help the odd feeling go away?” Jayden suggested, squeezing one wrist above the keys. “What were you going to play?”
“I don’t know. Paganini, perhaps. Paganini was my favourite on piano,” Darren said eventually, and withdrew his hands from the keys decidedly, placing them in his lap. “I don’t think it’s a good idea right now,” he said, with a flash of truthfulness that warmed Jayden to his toes.
“Then come back to bed,” he said, and Darren nodded, dropping the lid and rising as though the strange mood had completely passed. “Do you feel…dark at all? Or like something’s coming on?”
“Not yet,” Darren said and shrugged. “I don’t know. It might be nothing.”
It might be something hovered in the air for a brief second. Jayden licked his lips and nodded.
“All right,” he said lowly. “But no piano lessons tomorrow, okay?”
“Yeah, all right,” Darren said.
Jayden took him back up to bed and kept a wary watch. But Darren simply curled around his pillow and drifted off—no mutterings, no outbursts, no hunching in on himself—and once he’d eased into a deeper sleep, shifting onto his back in his usual inelegant sprawl, Jayden burrowed into his shoulder and experimentally squeezed an arm around his chest, as if trying to hold him in or keep him together. Darren’s moods, he’d learned, could be felt in the way he clung when he slept—or didn’t. When he felt bad, his body gave him away. He cuddled up properly, and hung on like he was drowning. When he didn’t, he…well, he didn’t.
Jayden squeezed again, and Darren mumbled something, but didn’t move.
Reassured, Jayden let him be, and the next morning ‘accidentally’ piled some books on the piano lid.
They were still there when he came home from the shopping centre.
* * * *
“Darren Peace.”
Darren reluctantly returned the outdated magazine to the rack and walked into Elaine Swift’s office.
Darren saw a counsellor every Sunday. After his last suicide attempt, he’d finally decided that either he dealt with this, or he went under. It was becoming more and more obvious that he couldn’t cope anymore, and he had been willing to try anything to get rid of the bad days.
Anything, unfortunately, included Elaine.
His first doctor in Southampton had pointed him towards a counsellor he would have had to pay for. The second had found an NHS service, and he had been bounced around the psychiatric team at Portsmouth hospital ever since, going to one of their ‘outreach’ counsellors once a week for the past couple of years. He had dumped three already; Elaine had only lasted thus far because Jayden had had a massive go at him for the last one, and basically guilt-tripped Darren into sticking with Elaine longer.
But frankly, Darren wanted to punch her in most of their sessions.
It had taken some work to get a weekend counsellor, never mind a Sunday one, and people were lined up around the block to get a seat in Elaine’s office. Darren had been told by countless professionals that he was lucky to have her. She had a wall lined with certificates, ridiculously qualified—and yet Darren hated going.
He’d gotten out of it for months with the secondment, and if not for Jayden he would have jacked it in already. He hadn’t had a breakdown in London. He’d been too fucking busy, for a start, and anyway, there was the proof he didn’t need Elaine. And yet here he was, taking a seat yet again in the too-squishy armchair in the slightly claustrophobic office, and Elaine was already smiling at him.
God, but she got on his nerves.
Elaine was just irritating, at least to him. She had a perpetual smile squeezing its way out of a plump face under a greying blonde bowl cut. She was little and stodgy, like a slightly undercooked dumpling, and probably would have made an okay grandma type. Especially as she favoured a patronising tone and several condescending pet names like ‘dear’ and ‘sweetie.’ In all honesty, Darren was more than a little uncomfortable baring his soul to the woman, and for all her qualifications, found her apt to focus in all the wrong places. He had only just managed to convince her that he didn’t suffer from stress related to his sexuality. Hell, he hadn’t even been bullied for his sexuality.
“Hello, dear.”
And she called him dear. Constantly. He didn’t even especially like it when Jayden’s mother called him darling.
“Elaine.”
“How are you today?”
“Fine.”
“How was Christmas?”
“Fine.”
“Can you elaborate on that? What did you do?”
He shrugged. “Family stuff.” Jayden’s were his too, really. “The usual.” And it was starting to be that as well.
She hummed and made a note. He hated that, the bloody hum. “Did you enjoy your secondment, then, dear?”
“Mm.”
“Did you experience any problems?”
“Nope.”
“Darren.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t. Was busy.”
“Too busy to miss home?”
“Not always.”
She leaned forward, and he wanted to frown, but kept his expression purposefully impassive. “What did you miss?” Elaine asked.
“Jayden. My house. Rachel. Rachel’s cat.” She smiled a little wider at the mention of the cat. “Being able to drive.”
“Is this the first time you’ve been apart from Jayden since your last suicide attempt?”
“Well, no, we tend to go to the bathroom separately. And we have jobs.”
“In the prolonged sense,” she said patiently.
“Guess so,” he said flatly.
“How did you find that?”
Darren shrugged. “Missed him.”
“Did you suffer any relapse?”
“No, I was sleeping or working. Sometimes I ate.”
“Which is not a good sign, you must know that?”
“It wasn’t by choice. The secondment happened because the Met were under severe pressure and we weren’t. A few of us agreed to a temporary transfer to help out and boost our CVs. It was busy. By default, it was busy.” And then he clenched his jaw, keeping any further commentary behind his lips. He couldn’t lose his temper. She got worse if he did.
“That does demonstrate that taking your mind off things helps,” she said, and Darren raised his eyebrows.
“If you say so.”
“Darren, we’ve discussed this before. A lot of your emotional problems are rooted in your upbringing. It is difficult to alter the way we think and feel and react as a result of our childhoods, but it is wholly possible, and shedding the things that remind us of those histories is an excellent first step. I truly believe when you ceased to play the violin, you took a valuable first step.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I think the more steps you can take to separate your current life from your childhood, the easier you are going to make things on yourself.”
Darren narrowed his eyes. “So, what, change my name? Father had this way of saying it so it was like a whole sentence on its own. Darren. Just like that.”
She chuckled and shook her head. “Perhaps not that extreme.”
“My best friend has asked me to play the piano at his wedding.”
“Now that I suspect might be a bad idea, don’t you?”
“I don’t know, you’re the psychiatrist.”
“Counsellor, Darren. I’m not a psychiatrist.”
“And yet we’re in the psychiatry clinic.”
“Not every medic in the hospital is a doctor either,” she said gently. “My point is, Darren, that your secondment has demonstrated that you are in a different place—a better place—than you were four years ago when you and Jayden separated to begin working.”
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