“Okay.” Darren smoothed his hair in soft little prods and swipes, almost plucking at it and tucking the tufts back into place in a series of soothing little actions. “I’m going to guess it involved me?”
“You…you…I dreamed I came home, and you were…”
Jayden couldn’t say it. He couldn’t. Saying it would be…would make it…
“I’m going to guess I’d done something?”
“…Your pills, and…and your shoulder and…your wrist, too…” Where the scars were, and had been. Where the tattoo was now. The shoulder had been someone else, at least, but the wrist had been Darren. Years ago, most of them before Jayden really, and self-harm, not…not an actual, you know, attempt, but…scars. All the same.
“Okay, I get the idea,” Darren said soothingly and rubbed a hand firmly up and down Jayden’s back in heavy swipes. “I get it. You snapped out of it and realised I haven’t now?”
“I think so,” Jayden mumbled, but squeezed tightly all the same. “I just…for a moment, when I woke up, I thought it was real. I was convinced it was real.”
Darren kissed the side of his head, and Jayden inhaled the smell of him, wrapping his still-edgy mind around it. He was okay. He was. He’d come back from work, and he smelled like a police van, and he wasn’t hurt or sick, and he’d been taking his pills all week, because Jayden had seen him do it every day but today.
But today?
“You’re okay,” Darren murmured, and Jayden took a deep breath against his shoulder.
“So’re you,” he mumbled.
“You’re getting stupidly stressed, you know. Maybe you need to take some time off and chill out a bit?” Darren suggested gently.
“I’ll…it’s just…you know, the crash and everything.”
“Mm, no,” Darren disagreed gently. “It’s been building for a while. I think the wedding will be good for you. Little holiday, like.”
Jayden squeezed tightly for a minute, then let go and stepped back fractionally, scrubbing at his eyes. Darren watched him patiently, a hand still on his waist, warm and secure. Safe. He was calm and okay and alive and…and fine. Just fine.
“You took your pill this morning, right?” Jayden said hoarsely. He’d gone to work before Darren was up, and had put it on the stand with a glass of juice for him.
“’Course I did,” Darren said, sliding a hand through Jayden’s hair and using it like a guidance system to pull him in and kiss his cheek, high on the cheekbone and just under the eye. “I’m fine. Calm down.”
Jayden took a shuddering breath and wrapped his arms around himself. “It was a bad nightmare,” he insisted.
“Yeah, but you’re rattled because you’re so stressed and worried and I get it, I really do, but there’s no need right now,” Darren said. “You can’t live constantly worrying about me and right now, Jayden, I promise, there’s nothing to worry about. I’m fine.”
“You’re not cured.”
“I think you have to accept I will never be completely cured,” Darren said flatly. “This is going to be a lifelong illness for me. But right now, I’m better. Right now, I have every intention of making my dinner, maybe flick the telly on for half an hour while I eat, and then having a shower and going to bed. And tomorrow I’ll go to London for this stag do, watch Ethan make a twat of himself, and have a laugh. I’m fine.”
Jayden nodded jerkily and sighed. “I’ll get there,” he said lowly, and Darren smiled sympathetically.
“You will,” he agreed. “And hey, Thursday and Friday you can lay off worrying at all for a bit. Paul will be on loony-duty.”
“Stop it.”
“I’m kidding,” Darren said and offered a brief kiss that tasted, around the corners of his mouth, of dust.
“Um, what have you been doing?” Jayden asked when Darren returned to the oven and pouring the hot water from the kettle into a pan of dry pasta.
“Oh, it’ll be all over the papers in the morning,” Darren said cryptically. “The things people keep in their attics. Like bodies.”
Jayden laughed lowly, sidling up to slide an arm around Darren’s waist and rest his head on one broad shoulder. After a minute, an arm came around his hips and he sighed, the panic easing. “Can you come and watch telly in our room and eat there?” he bargained.
“And get pasta sauce on the sheets? You’d kill me.”
“I offer a pass to do it just once?”
Darren snorted and smiled. “Go to bed, Jayden, I’ll be up soon.”
“Won’t be able to go back to sleep without you,” Jayden admitted. He could feel the nightmare—a twisted amalgamation of everything bad that had ever happened to them, with Ella’s sneer and Jonathon’s kiss and the car crash and the bloody airbag and every scar he’d ever found on Darren’s body and the pills (all of them) and…
He tensed. Darren’s arm tightened around his waist. “S’pose I can,” he said, and Jayden relaxed again. “You’re going to hug me to death, aren’t you?”
“Probably.”
“Can I bring an oxygen tank?”
“No, it’ll take up room.”
“Jesus, I’m gonna die,” Darren grumbled, and Jayden huffed, butting his head against Darren’s shoulder. “Hey, I said I would do it.”
“You’re still going tomorrow morning?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” Jayden said lowly. The half eight train. He was going to go and see him off from the station before work, he decided. If he was ten minutes late, Stephanie wouldn’t mind. “Ethan’s going to hate your face.”
Darren’s black eye had sort of faded—it wasn’t swollen anymore, and the little scratches from his smashed glasses had healed—but the cut on his forehead was still pink and scabby and was definitely going to scar, and the skin around his eye was still a deep and startling berry-purple.
“Ethan always hates my face.”
“You’ll have to see Lillian about getting some make-up.”
“Not a chance.”
Jayden let the easy talk heal his nerves, and lingered to let Darren eat downstairs, sitting beside him and rubbing his bare toes over Darren’s calf and ankle while Darren inhaled an inhumanly large portion of food. “Busy?”
“Uh-huh.”
Jayden dropped a hand to stroke his fingertips around Darren’s wrist. He wanted to put his head on Darren’s shoulder, but the motion of chewing made Darren’s jaw bump Jayden’s forehead when he tried. “Let’s go on holiday this summer,” he murmured. “Just get away. Somewhere cheap, I know you’re having to sort out the car repairs and insurance and everything, but…let’s just get away.”
“Bed and breakfast in Cornwall?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
Darren paused long enough to push his fingers between Jayden’s and shake their joined hands lightly. “We’re fine,” he said quietly, and Jayden smiled.
“I guess I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop,” he murmured. “It’s been so long since we’ve been just fine. We’ve been working at this so long…I don’t know. I feel a bit like it can’t last.”
“We’re fine now and we’ll be fine for a while yet,” Darren said and smirked. “Especially given that, as of yesterday, my sex drive did a Jesus and was resurrected.”
Jayden laughed, the sound harsh and unexpected, and squeezed Darren’s foot between his own on the carpet, tangling them up. “Yeah?”
“Yep. But you’d gone off to work, so I had to take care of the problem on my own.”
“What a hardship for you.”
“By definition, yes, yes it was.”
Jayden smiled fondly, propping his head on his fist. “We-ell,” he said. “I still have vouchers, and you said Ethan’s putting us up in that hotel they’re getting married in, so…”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Mm, maybe,” Jayden said and smiled wider. “I…I can’t say I’m not pleased, you know. I mean, it didn’t matter, not like it mattered that you’ve been so upset and irritab
le and distant, because it’s just sex, and…”
“Yeah, but it’s not, is it,” Darren said quietly. “It’s you and me.”
“Sometimes. You attacking me in the shower the other week, that was just sex.”
“That was a handjob, not proper sex, and it wasn’t just a handjob for me, even if it was for you, you whore.”
Jayden pinched his elbow; Darren retracted it, smirking. “You really are getting better,” Jayden said, then smiled. “Okay, sometimes it is more than just sex but…kind of pretty sure that you in a suit and playing the piano and all dressed up…that’s going to be just sex.”
“Good. I feel like a bit of just sex.”
Darren scraped the plate clean and dropped it into the sink to be washed in the morning—or rather, later that morning, at a human hour. He held out a hand to Jayden. “Come on,” he said. “TV in bed. Maybe a bit of just sex.”
“You’re tired, and I have work.”
“I did say maybe.”
Jayden took the offered hand, tracing every muscle and callus and familiar line, and kissed the knuckles before tugging Darren towards the stairs.
Lying together in bed like spoons in a drawer with the news playing quietly in the background and Darren’s mouth pressing damp, barely-there patterns into his shoulders, the laxness in his body at Jayden’s back suggesting he would asleep within the next ten minutes, Jayden chased the last of the nightmare’s dregs away, and squeezed Darren’s hands on his stomach, wishing that this moment could be their forever.
Hoping that the pregabalin would work forever, even as he knew it wouldn’t.
* * * *
The wind was up, and Jayden huddled into his coat as it tore icy fingers through his hair. He felt jittery and miserable and wanted to go to London too or not let Darren go at all. Despite Darren’s best efforts, Jayden had slept badly, the nightmare half-returning a half-dozen times and waking him to wrap himself around Darren and check his arms for the thousandth time, and now he just felt…crap.
“Okay.” Darren plucked his tickets out of the machine and paced across the concourse towards the barriers. “You’re coming for eleven on Saturday?”
“Yeah.”
Darren stopped. “What’s up.” It wasn’t really a question.
“Nothing.”
“Pull the other one.”
Jayden shifted and sighed. “I’m just…on edge a little bit.”
“Stop worrying,” Darren said, unusually gently.
“I can’t,” Jayden said flatly. “You’ve been doing so much better that I…I guess I’m waiting for the drop too. And I’m worried this wedding is going to be the drop and I’m not going to be there.”
“It’s three days,” Darren said. “You get to relax and not have to triple-check every lock in the house, I get to pretend I’m normal for a while. We’ll both feel better for it.”
“I mean more…” Jayden worried at his bottom lip. “More maybe that…that you know, Ethan’s going to be married. It’s not going to be lads’ days out at the coast anymore, or…or the pub at Christmas, or camping trips for Paul’s birthday because he hates it…it’ll change. And I guess I’m worried that the change will…unsettle you. And break this good streak, or something.”
Darren simply watched him, those pale green eyes sharp and calculating behind his glasses. Every now and then, he still looked so brilliant that it took Jayden’s breath away, and his throat caught fractionally for a brief second.
“I want you to always be better, or at least nothing like as bad as you were, and I’m worried this wedding isn’t going to help,” he said finally.
Slowly, Darren cupped his face and kissed him. It was a chaste if lingering kiss, barely a clasp of the lips, and yet Jayden closed his eyes as though it were the most intense experience of his life, and hooked his fingers into Darren’s elbows, steadying the ever-present tremor in his left arm.
“Ethan and Paul can change,” Darren murmured very lowly, pressing his forehead to Jayden’s. Jayden kept his eyes closed, breathing in the smell of cheap aftershave, leather and apples, and feeling the faint tickle of curls around his temples. “They can change as much as they like. Maybe it’ll be a bit weird, first time we have a pub do and he brings his missus or has to go home early, but that’s all. They can change because they’re not what gets me through. That’s you. As long as you and I stay the same, then I’m beginning to think I can get through this, even if I have to take these Zen hippie pills for the rest of my life. It’s you that makes that life, and as long as you’re still here, I intend for it to be a long one.”
Jayden went red and clutched tightly at those pale forearms under heavy leather. He swallowed against the sudden, horrendous urge to cry, and whispered, “Longish. I don’t think I’ll fancy you any more when you’re like a hundred.”
“Lies. I’ll be the best-looking decrepit geezer you’ve ever seen.”
Jayden laughed shakily and kissed him back, a little firmer. “Maybe I’ll be blind by then,” he murmured and grudgingly stepped back. “You should go or you’ll miss your train.”
“Yeah,” Darren said, sticking his hands in his jacket pockets. He looked beautiful, with his sharp face and glasses and wild hair and old jacket, and Jayden didn’t care if beautiful sounded a bit girly, it was true. He was going to look even more beautiful on Saturday.
“Be good,” he said. “Don’t get too drunk.”
“I’m allowed to drink?”
“A little bit,” Jayden conceded. “But don’t get drunk. And if you feel bad, call me, no matter what time it is or anything. And take your medication. And…”
“And stop fussing,” Darren interrupted, crowding close with his hands on Jayden’s hips and kissing him again, mouthing gently at his bottom lip. “I’ll be fine. It’s only three days.”
Jayden hummed against his mouth and pushed him away reluctantly. “You need to go.”
“Jesus, fine,” Darren grumbled and smirked. “You’re going to go mental when you see the alteration Lillian made to our suits.”
“What, hot pants?” Jayden asked sarcastically.
“You’ll see,” Darren said, and then the tannoy announced that the London train was the next to arrive at platform two, and he mock-saluted with two fingers to the forehead. “See you Saturday morning.”
“Text me when you get there,” Jayden said, and fidgeted uselessly on the wrong side of the barriers as Darren passed through them and disappeared into the rush-hour throng on the other side.
Jayden felt quite suddenly, in the midst of a crowd of people, very alone.
Chapter 27
Paul and Ethan both met him at the station.
There was a history here, and Darren felt it when he was pounced on by two full-grown men the minute he passed through the ticket barriers, had his hair pulled, and was instantly told he was late (Paul) and a massive ugly bitch (Ethan).
“Get off me, you fucking lepers. I have a boyfriend already,” he said, shrugging them off, and Paul crowed with exuberant laughter, probably a pint or two down already.
This was their deference to their history: Darren’s early arrival, and the early afternoon being just for them. There was the odd chore to do—final fittings at the tailor’s, getting Darren to the church for the one and only piano rehearsal in the cavernous space (and Paul hounding Ethan out of the church again so that the music would be a surprise to the bewildered groom) but by three o’clock, they would begin their celebration (or mourning) of the loss of Ethan’s bachelorhood, and for a few scant hours, it would just be the three of them.
The way they’d begun. Paul-and-Ethan, since forever, and Darren since slightly less than that. He had Paul’s arm slung over his shoulders, and Ethan still ranting about ‘the fucking state of your plate, and you’ve always been an ugly pleb, Fuzzy, but come on, it’s my wedding, you selfish git!’ and it felt as easy and natural as walking down the promenade with Jayden and a bag of chips in a howling gale. He felt—not happy, exactl
y, but careless, as though sandwiched between these two living pieces of the better part of his history, he was untouchable. He felt at home, in a place he rarely saw, with two people he still saw as the boys they’d all been and not the suited, well-to-do men they’d become.
Darren felt fine.
“On the one and only note of seriousness for the day,” he announced as they reached the station entrance. He stopped, dislodging them both, and turned to Ethan, hand out. “Congratulations, Ethan.”
Ethan paused and something in his face shifted. He smiled and shook Darren’s hand. “Thanks, man.” He paused, then squeezed Darren’s caught hand before letting it go. “Thanks for being here as well, mate. Wouldn’t be right without you.”
Darren twitched his mouth in a smile, feeling oddly good but oddly embarrassed too, and Paul slung his arms around both of them. “Wouldn’t be right,” Paul announced, “if any of us were missing. So let’s get dolled up, get that music played, and get wasted.”
Ethan hailed a taxi, and Paul caught at Darren’s elbow.
“I meant it,” he said lowly. “I’ll match your drinking tonight. You look out for the groom there, and I’ll look out for you. Deal?”
Darren nodded. “Deal.”
“And I can send awful photos to your boyfriend!”
“Not a deal!”
* * * *
Rachel decided it was going to be a girls’ night in. Jayden wasn’t sure he appreciated the presumption that he was, therefore, a girl, but he did appreciate the Thai takeaway she ordered in bulk, the stack of DVDs that would have had Darren running out of the house screaming, and the insistence, the moment he got back from work, that he changed into his pyjamas, crack open a lager, and put his feet up.
“There’s no serious shite tonight!” Rachel sang up the stairs when he was chased away to change, and Jayden had actually laughed.
So here they were, feet up on the coffee table, watching Dogma (Rachel had a weird asexual crush thing—she called it a ‘squish’, God knew why—on Matt Damon, which Jayden personally found to be utterly unfathomable) and gnawing their way through generous helpings of panaeng curry, Pog curled up between their hips and purring contentedly.
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