Rhapsody on a Theme

by Matthew J. Metzger

  Darren sat back in his chair, waiting. He felt suspicious, suddenly, and felt his guard rising. He made no attempt to stop it.

  “I truly believe a fresh start will help you, Darren. You have never separated enough from your upbringing to begin to discover who you really are, and I believe that is contributing heavily to your depression and anxiety issues.”

  “Anxiety issues?”

  “And I think that some time apart will…”

  “You want me to break up with my boyfriend.”

  “You have been with the same man for seven years, and you’re only twenty-two yourself. I think that says something.”

  “Yeah, it says there’s this weird part of me that actually loves him and doesn’t want to break up with him,” Darren said sarcastically.

  “I think some time apart could help you build up the self-resilience that you need to…”

  “Dumping my boyfriend is going to help me?”

  “I think by holding on to Jayden, you are…”

  “I’m in love, I’m not holding on,” Darren remarked and rubbed his fingers at his temple to ease the growing irritation. “Okay, I’m done.”

  “We have another twenty minutes.”

  “I’m done,” Darren snapped. “Get bent. I won’t be seeing you next Sunday.”

  “Darren…”

  “I’m out,” he said and stood up. He was a lot taller than her standing, and with Elaine still seated, she looked dwarfish. “Thanks for the advice, but you suck, you don’t know what you’re talking about, and you’re asking me to dump the reason I’m even still alive. So: no, goodbye, I won’t be staying in touch.”

  He stormed out. The office broke off from the main psychiatry waiting room, and the look on his face frightened a small child in the waiting area enough that she started crying in his wake. A nurse glowered, and he ignored her, stalking out into the car park. He didn’t care what they thought. He felt angry, hot and twitchy, and stalked around his car for a good five minutes pulling his hands through his hair before getting in and starting the engine.

  He reversed out too fast, and an angry cabbie hit the horn, but Darren just swore at him and drove off. He needed some air, some space, and some kind of really fucking good excuse.

  Because Jayden was going to kill him.

  Chapter 9

  The door to the bag room clanged, and a voice filtered over the rhythmic thu-dump, thu-dump of Darren’s gloves against the bag.

  “Are you actually planning on coming home tonight?”

  Darren stepped back from the bag, chest heaving. He’d taken off his shirt some time ago and was still sweat-soaked. His hair felt damp, and he had to keep blinking the salt out of his eyes just to see. His knuckles hurt even under the thick leather, and his legs were going to kill him on shift tomorrow. Even his head felt kind of…weird. Spinning a bit, maybe.

  But he felt a little less angry. A little less like he was suffocating, or being crushed into a box again by the same old psychoanalytical bullshit being spouted by a dull, fat bint who just didn’t fucking understand. He felt…better. Kind of.

  Jayden stood in the doorway in his heavy winter coat and scarf, flushed from the cold outside or the heat inside, blond hair ruffled from the wind on his walk down, and frowned slightly.

  “Daryl called me to come and get you,” he said. “It’s half past seven.”

  Darren sighed heavily and caught the swinging bag, resting his forehead against it wearily. His chest was burning, and for a long minute, he just focused on breathing. His head felt clearer, at least, even if he did feel a bit…sick.

  “What happened?” Jayden said lowly.

  “I’m not going back.”

  “Home?”

  “Elaine.”

  “…Oh, Darren, you didn’t,” Jayden’s voice rose shrilly. “You can’t keep just walking out on every counsellor who’s willing to see you! You’ll have done the whole of Hampshire at this rate, and how is that supposed to help? How are you going to get better if you just keep running away from everyone who tries to…”

  “She wasn’t going to fucking help me, Jayden. She was going to fucking kill me if I went along with her suggestions.”

  “Darren, don’t be so melo…”

  “I’m not being fucking melodramatic!” he exploded and swung another punch. Pain burst in one knuckle, and the glove made a wet sound against the bag. “She wants me to fucking ditch every single last fucking thing about my life since I was a fucking kid, everything, and dress it up as some fresh start where the violin and Father and all of that fucking shit doesn’t exist and…”

  “Darren, a fresh start isn’t…”

  “Including you!” Darren bellowed, and Jayden flinched back.

  “What?”

  “Including you,” Darren repeated hoarsely, catching the bag and just staring blindly at the battered leather for a minute. “She doesn’t get that, yeah, okay, you’re kind of massively attached to my teenage years, and you’ve been there when it’s gone wrong sometimes, so yeah, you come with this territory a little bit and I can’t put distance between what I am now and what I used to be with you still here, but she doesn’t understand that you’re the reason I’m even here to get pissed off at her.”

  “Oh Darren,” Jayden whispered, his voice very low and soft, and he picked his way around the mats carefully.

  “I’m not going back,” Darren repeated. His throat ached and his vision blurred. “I’m sick of this, Jayden. I’m sick of them not understanding that you’re not some fucking fling, that you’re the only fucking reason that I’m here in the first place. And you know, yeah, it is a good thing I can go on secondment and not have a fucking breakdown because you’re not there but it doesn’t mean we should have a fucking separation so I can find myself or whatever shit she wants.”

  Jayden’s arms slid around him carefully, for once ignoring the layer of sweat. Jayden usually refused to touch him after a heavy workout unless he was already in the shower. Usually, Darren didn’t want to be touched, come to think of it, but right now…He sagged into the tentative hold, and something was soothed lightly, petted down, when Jayden tightened his grip.

  “Nobody fucking gets that. I tell them again and again, but they just hear a fucking kid in fucking lust, that’s all. Nobody gets what you are. And I need you. I’m not ever going to get through this without you.”

  Jayden murmured lowly, kissing the side of Darren’s head, and whispered, “I get it. And I’m the one who really needs to get it, aren’t I?”

  Darren choked out a laugh, feeling dangerously close to tears, and Jayden squeezed him tightly.

  “Come home,” he said quietly. “We’ll get you washed and sort your hands out, you stupid berk, and then I’ll call the doctor in the morning and get another appointment and we’ll talk to him about what now. If counselling’s only going to upset you that much, then it’s not going to help, I suppose.”

  Darren snorted, and gave in to the pressure, pushing his face into the top of Jayden’s shoulder and sighing heavily.

  “Darren?”

  “Mm.”

  “You…you remember when we met, you used to call Samaritans all the time?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did that help?”

  “…Sometimes,” Darren mumbled.

  “Do you still do it?”

  “No.”

  “Well…maybe you could try it again. When you need someone to talk to who isn’t, you know, completely on top of this situation like we are. Someone impartial.”

  “Maybe,” Darren agreed. He felt shattered, suddenly, almost wobbly. Jayden kissed his ear and sighed gustily, pushing him back and reaching for his gloves.

  “You’re an idiot,” Jayden told him, unlacing the gloves and peeling them off gingerly. His knuckles were bloody, and one was going to blister, but they weren’t broken or dislocated. Darren flexed them experimentally. They’d be fine. “And if I say those look bad in the morning, you will call in sick.”


  “Yeah, okay.”

  “Go get showered and changed,” Jayden ordered, pushing him towards the door. “We’ll walk home; your car’ll be fine here for the night.”

  Darren rubbed both hands over his face and nodded, gathering himself back in. He felt exhausted and torn open, but somehow a little better for it. Jayden rubbed a hand over his bicep and made a low sound. “What?”

  “Love you,” Jayden repeated softly and pushed. “Go on. I’ll be in the lobby when you’re ready to go.”

  He turned; Darren caught his elbow.

  “What?”

  “Just…thanks,” Darren said finally, scanning Jayden’s dark eyes. “For…you. Being you. With me.”

  Jayden smiled, kissed him briefly, and slid free.

  “Fifteen minutes,” he said, and it wasn’t a request.

  * * * *

  Darren did drive them home, but Jayden had it put on the record that he seriously protested. Darren’s knuckles were swollen and bloodied, and once they were home, Jayden had them straight in the kitchen sink.

  “Don’t bitch,” he bitched when Darren grimaced. “It’s your own fault, you know.”

  “Yeah, well, it made me feel better.”

  Jayden had nothing to say to that, really. Darren did tend to stabilise after he’d lashed out, which was kind of his whole problem in that he didn’t lash out very much, he pushed it all down and hid it away, but the consequences…

  He’d come back several times from boxing with scraped knuckles, or a bruised face where he’d stuck out a sparring session too long, and Jayden worried sometimes. Worried maybe…maybe boxing was a replacement for the cutting.

  “I just wish you could feel better without mashing up your hands,” he settled on eventually, and Darren paused.

  “Jayden.”

  “I mean, I’m glad you’re letting it out because you never do and I think maybe that’s what makes your bad days so bad, because you bottle everything up and they’re all the build-up spilling over, and…”

  “Jayden.” Darren turned his hand over to catch Jayden’s fingers. “I’m not doing it deliberately.”

  Jayden hesitated. He didn’t want to ask—maybe didn’t want to know, in a tiny part of his brain, but…

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No,” Darren said flatly. “When I do sport—really rigorous sport—I can’t think and perform at the same time. I just can’t. I stop thinking, but in a good way. So for a while, nothing else matters. It’s just me and my body and that’s it. It’s very focused, very sharp, and I can forget about everything else. It lets me get a bit of distance and work off the temper. It gets through, most times. Gets through the haze.”

  Jayden watched his face carefully.

  “So yeah, when there’s a lot to work off, I don’t notice,” Darren shrugged. “But I’m not doing it on purpose. Not like the knife.”

  He still had the knife, Jayden knew. It was in the bottom drawer in the side table in their bedroom. Jayden checked it every night, knew the shape of the blade and wearing of age by heart. Knew exactly what he was looking for.

  “I’m after the workout, not this,” Darren curled his knuckles in the sink of warm water, and Jayden returned to cleaning them tentatively.

  “Okay,” Jayden settled on eventually and drained the sink. Gritty pink water whirled away down the plughole. “Go sit in the living room and I’ll get some antiseptic cream.” Which was in the locked cupboard that Darren wasn’t allowed access to.

  “For the record,” Darren said, “I’m pretty sure you can’t top yourself with antiseptic cream.”

  Jayden rolled his eyes, not in the mood to argue the point, and Darren disappeared into the next room. Jayden wasn’t sure how he felt. On the one hand, the counsellor had obviously said something really stupid to get Darren staying in the gym for nearly five hours, and he seemed okay now but he’d been really upset earlier…

  On the other hand, what were they supposed to do now? Getting him to go and see Elaine had been hard enough, and Jayden knew Darren well enough to know he wasn’t going to get so lucky a—he counted—fifth time. And they couldn’t just stop treatment altogether, otherwise they’d be right back where they started, and what then? Darren couldn’t carry on being so ill. Eventually, he’d lose his job because they’d deem him mentally unfit for the role, or he’d be passed over for promotion until he quit anyway, and that would make him worse because although he grumbled, he loved his job, he really did, and…

  Jayden ground the heel of his hand into his face and sighed, fumbling with the lock and opening the cupboard. They had to do something. Go back to the doctor or something.

  Darren had settled on the sofa, TV on, by the time Jayden composed himself and followed. Without the messy layer of blood, the scrapes weren’t so bad, and one thing Darren could do was take antiseptic cream like a man: he pulled a face at the first cold dab, but let Jayden rub it in quietly enough.

  “I’ll call the surgery before I go to work in the morning,” Jayden murmured lowly. “Make another appointment.”

  “They’re not that bad.”

  “About the counselling, not your hands.”

  “…Okay.”

  “We need to deal with this.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We can’t just walk away from all the options, especially as the drugs messed you around so badly last time.”

  “Mm.”

  “And we…”

  “Jayden, stop it,” Darren said gently, squeezing his hand. “Stop fussing. I’m fine. I feel better now. I was just pissed off, it wasn’t that.”

  Jayden licked his lips. “What did she say?”

  Darren rolled his eyes, drawing a foot up onto the sofa to shift sideways. He did look more relaxed, Jayden decided as he wiped his hands off. Maybe Darren was all right, for the moment.

  “She’s been banging on for ages that I need to cut ties with my past, you know? Have a fresh start and get away from…” Darren waved one of those huge hands vaguely. “Everything, I guess. Father, music, the violin, all of that. Says that the only way I’ll learn to open up and trust properly is to effectively forget a bit of my own history.”

  Jayden frowned.

  “And that history includes you,” Darren said finally. “She was saying how…hanging on to a teenage fling is ultimately going to hold me back from recovery and it’s not healthy I’ve been with the same guy since I was fifteen. That was when I got angry. You’d be proud of me, mind, I didn’t do my nut. I walked out.”

  “Well, it’s considered kind of bad to punch counsellors,” Jayden said and laughed a little guilty. He felt a little high, almost, or dizzy. Because academically, you know, maybe he could see the sense in her approach, but the minute Darren had voiced that implication, that they’d be better off apart, Jayden’s instinct had been to snap at him. And the counsellor. Because they wouldn’t and, if Jayden was really honest with himself, he would be hesitant to let Darren go even if it would make him better. It was selfish, but it was true.

  “Well, we kind of tried apart,” he said eventually, and Darren laughed, draping an arm along the top of the sofa to tweak Jayden’s hair. “It didn’t work. At all.”

  “No,” he said. “And if she can’t grasp after however many months of Sundays this has been now that you’re not some temporary thing for me, then how’s she supposed to help in the first place? She’s not fucking listening to me.”

  Jayden nodded, still chewing on his lip. “Shit,” he said eventually. “That’s fucking stupid.”

  “Yeah,” Darren agreed lowly, still playing with his hair loosely. “Where’s Rach?”

  “Huh? Oh, out with Tony. He’s taking her to see a concert.”

  “So she’ll be back late?”

  “Yeah, I—oh,” Jayden murmured, his voice dropping as Darren shifted across the sofa and kissed him, one hand in his hair and the other sliding up his thigh, the palm hot through the denim, Darren using his mouth and chest to push Jayden down int
o the cushions. Jayden tangled his hands into that wild hair appreciatively, still damp from the shower at the gym, and said something breathlessly encouraging as Darren sucked a bruise into his neck, right below the jaw where Jayden liked it best. “I’m not prepared or anything,” he whispered as Darren slid that wandering hand around the back of his thigh.

  “So we won’t go the whole way, easy,” Darren whispered into his neck, and made another bruise to match on the other side, leaving Jayden struggling to think. “Just let me appreciate for a while.”

  “Oh, that’d be nice,” Jayden retorted, but the effect was lost in the groan that involuntarily rippled through his chest when Darren squeezed him through his jeans. “Fucking hell, Darren, we can’t on the sofa.”

  “Watch me,” Darren challenged, pushing up Jayden’s T-shirt, and licking up his chest in fleeting little laps that had Jayden swearing by the time he reached his breastbone.

  “Tease,” Jayden whispered. “Tease, tease, tease—Jesus—tease!”

  Darren laughed, and it was the most beautiful sound in the world.

  Chapter 10

  “In all honesty,” Dr. Zielinski said finally, sitting back in his chair as Jayden finished recounting what had happened on Sunday, “I don’t think we need to be overly concerned just yet.”

  Jayden chewed on the edge of his lip. Darren, who had said very little throughout the appointment, took his hand and squeezed it gently. Jayden laced their fingers together.

  “Despite the emphasis placed on talking therapy, it doesn’t always help,” the doctor said flatly. “Some people are simply not built to open up, or open up in the environment that a counselling office creates. That is why anonymous phone lines or forums, or family members and loved ones themselves can be equally vital to helping a patient who is suffering.”

  Jayden swallowed. Samaritans, the voice in his head piped up. He stopped calling Samaritans because of you, he stopped years ago after you accused him of…who’s he going to talk to without Elaine?