Jayden pushed his trapped arm out until he could fold it up over Darren’s back in a half-hug. “You know I do,” he murmured, for a lack of anything else to say. What was he supposed to say?
Darren didn’t reply to that, burrowing his head down into the pillow next to Jayden’s and either turning his attention to the TV, or turning it off altogether. Around the time Dad starting swearing at the sports news downstairs, Darren’s arm went lax over Jayden’s chest, and when Jayden next glanced aside, those green eyes were closed.
“I…” Jayden began, but stopped himself. This wasn’t the time for big declarations. He was asleep for one, and…and Jayden didn’t want to sound like he was saying it out of pity or anything like that, because Darren never quite took things the way Jayden thought he was going to. He laughed at bullies, and he rolled his eyes when Jayden came out with something horrible and bitchy and offensive—he’d accidentally called Darren’s brand new jeans ‘Primark rejects’ the other day, and Darren had casually dropped the dregs of his coffee on Jayden’s knees in revenge, ruining his much nicer clothes. How would he react to a big declaration in the middle of this? Something told Jayden that it wouldn’t be a good reaction, so he let the sentence trail away, and let go of Darren’s hand to touch his curls lightly with one finger.
“I love your hair,” he murmured instead, but Darren didn’t hear him. He pushed one particular curl back and watched it bounce defiantly back into its preferred place to the deep tones of Morgan Freeman monologuing from the TV.
He had to look into this. Properly.
Chapter 17
Mr. Weber’s baton came down, and the music stopped. His obsession with The Four Seasons hadn’t let up over the Christmas break in the slightest, and Darren itched to break off a string and garrotte the melodramatic German weasel with it.
“You’d think he’d be more into Wagner,” one of the cellists muttered after Weber had flounced his way out, and Darren was inclined to agree. And Wagner wasn’t so bloody boring. He’d be playing in his sleep by the summer.
He didn’t notice Jayden coming in until he was at his shoulder and helping collapse the music stand. He stuck out in the melee of St. John’s blacks, his polo shirt, hideous maroon jumper and lack of a tie looking sloppy compared to the collected, united front of the orchestra. Mr. Weber didn’t accept scruffy appearance as legitimate for musicians. He barely accepted Darren’s hair.
“Hi,” Jayden said, bouncing on the balls of his feet a little. He looked flushed. Perhaps it was the cold outside, but Darren was suspicious. He had a look on his face.
“What do you want?” he asked flatly.
“Just to talk,” Jayden said, shrugging. The moment the door clanged shut behind the last cellist, he leaned forward and offered a brief kiss, reaching for Darren’s hand. “Um. Actually, we do need to talk.”
Darren’s gut clenched.
“I mean, I need to…I want to talk about…oh, look, here.”
Jayden dropped his bag onto the boards and bent to rifle through it. Warily, Darren sat on the edge of the stage, dangling his legs off into the empty space, and swallowed down on his trepidation. And when Jayden shoved a handful of printouts from various websites into his hands, Darren took one look at the subject matter and felt even worse.
“Oh, no. No.”
“Darren.” Jayden caught his wrists. He was doing that earnest face: the wide open one, where he just showed his heart on his sleeve and begged Darren—or whoever—to go along with it. “Please. I want to know. I want to know what you’re dealing with, what we’re dealing with, so I can help. Even if it’s just a little bit. I want to help.”
Darren glanced back at the papers, the subtitle Causes of Clinical Depression jumping out in obscene bold text, and pushed them back at Jayden. “Jayden, I really don’t want to talk about this.” Not here, not now. Not after an hour of Vivaldi, conducting summer storms in strings. Not after a day of staring at his hands and wondering if he’d cease to exist if they ever did anything that didn’t involve a C sharp somewhere along the line.
“We need to.”
Darren shook his head. Jayden edged closer and slid an arm around his back. He was trying to get Darren to look him in the face, but Darren knew better. Jayden’s face was his weapon, and Darren had no intention of losing this battle.
“Darren, please. I said I’d try, didn’t I? But I don’t know…all the stuff I could find, it was so…so big, and so varied¸ and I don’t know what applies to you. I need you to tell me.”
“I can’t talk about this, Jayden. I can’t, and don’t try to make me.”
Jayden put the papers aside and wrapped his other arm around Darren’s chest until he was held fast in an awkward side-hug. “What if,” he asked, close to Darren’s ear, “I ask questions, and you answer them?”
Darren swallowed, flexing his fingers against his knees. The tips and pads felt numb. Absent.
“Do you see a counsellor?” Jayden asked gently.
Darren forced his throat to work. “No.”
“A doctor?”
“No.”
“Do you have any medication?”
“No.”
Jayden’s arms tightened and relaxed. “Do you…do your parents know?”
Darren snorted.
“Is that a no?”
“It’s an ‘I don’t know’,” he translated bitterly. “I haven’t told them anything. God knows they wouldn’t notice a hurricane coming through the house unless it upset a dinner party.”
Jayden shuffled a little closer, until their thighs were touching, and held on harder. “So nobody knows?”
“You.”
“Okay,” he said, his voice almost disappearing in a whisper. Darren could tell—could hear it, just like he could hear the actual words—that he wanted to say more, and was keeping it back. He was too tired to push Jayden to say it, and let it slide. “Is it depression, then? I mean…”
“Yes.” Probably. He wasn’t a psychiatrist, but he knew how he felt.
“Do you know…what type?”
Darren glanced at the papers on the boards. “You’ve probably done more research than me.”
Jayden rubbed his thumb into Darren’s upper arm and rested his cheek on Darren’s opposite shoulder. Darren took a deep breath. He could do this. He could answer questions to the invisible audience. He didn’t have to explain with questions.
“Are you…are you suicidal?”
The word hung in the air, almost visible. Darren could picture it: looping calligraphy, glittery blue, gleaming in the gloom. And then it would spark out, one end to the other. Probably starting with the ‘l.’
“Sometimes,” he whispered, and the word winked out. Jayden’s grip tightened painfully for a moment, and Darren brought a hand up to clasp at the wrist lying across his collarbone. The grip eased fractionally when he squeezed it.
“Have you tried? To…do that?”
Darren swallowed. The lump in his throat was bigger and scratchier than the pills had been. And there was no breeze in here, not like the wind that had yanked at his hair. The drop beneath his feet right now was measured in inches, not metres. The numbness in his fingers meant he’d never written down a word.
“I…I think you know the answer to that.”
He felt the shuddery breath that Jayden took. “How…how many…?”
Darren closed his eyes and rummaged in his head for the flippancy that he carried like a shield. The dry tone, the exasperated humour, the amused patience with the world. Scott’s tone, Mother’s tone, the tone that meant he’d slipped by so long unseen. The tone that meant he would not be missed when his luck ran out.
“Depends what we count as taking a proper shot at it, doesn’t it?”
“Don’t,” Jayden’s voice was sharp. “Don’t joke about this. Don’t brush it off like it doesn’t matter!”
“It doesn’t,” Darren returned equally sharply, latching on to the heat in his words. Slowly, his heart began to pick up.
“It doesn’t matter, Jayden, because it’s over. I obviously didn’t succeed, did I?”
“It still matters. If you…it matters.”
Darren kept his eyes closed, and said nothing. After a long pause, Jayden’s voice dropped and neared, his breath on Darren’s ear.
“If…if you don’t want to tell me about…that, right now, then okay,” he whispered. “But…someday? Tell me someday?”
“Maybe,” Darren croaked, and he started when Jayden kissed the spot where his jaw met his ear.
“Is it…is it all the time? The…bad feelings? Or…?”
His voice trailed off. Darren swallowed, breathing slowly through his nose. “I have bad days,” he said eventually.
“When was the last one?”
“Today.”
Jayden kissed that spot again, both hands squeezing patterns into his shoulder and arm. “Tell me about it?” he whispered.
Darren’s vision blurred, and he clenched his jaw momentarily before beginning to talk. “Some days,” he said, “I wake up, and…there’s a wardrobe on my chest. I can’t move. I can’t feel. It’s like I’m wrapped in a latex glove. Nothing’s getting through. I feel…exhausted. Permanently exhausted. Coffee won’t touch it. I can’t sleep it off. I’ll sleep most of the day if I can, but it doesn’t help. I’m shattered. I don’t want to do anything or see anyone or talk. Everything’s an effort. And I…”
His voice cracked, and he shut up. Jayden murmured something soft and incoherent, pressing his nose to Darren’s cheek. An Eskimo kiss that missed.
“I feel like I’m disappearing,” he whispered.
“How do you mean?” Jayden prompted, and Darren shook his head. He could barely see, and when he blinked, a hot tear escaped down his face. “Oh, Darren. Don’t. Don’t do that.”
He let Jayden fold him up into a hug. He sagged into it, pressing his face into Jayden’s shoulder and breathing in that weird fabric conditioner his mum used. He fought the tears, but he couldn’t fight the aching burn in his chest, the slice of sheer pain that came from talking about it. He didn’t want to talk about it. He’d told Jayden because it was only fair, and he shouldn’t have been dragged into any of this without proper warning, but he didn’t want to talk about it!
“It’s okay,” Jayden whispered. “It’s okay, don’t cry, it’s okay…”
“Three times,” he said hoarsely.
“What?”
“The first time, I jumped off a multi-storey car park,” Darren told Jayden’s shoulder. He could still feel it, that breathless method of weightlessness, before the excruciating pain. “I broke both legs. I was thirteen.”
Jayden took a deep breath; Darren listened to the catch in the exhale.
“The second time,” Darren continued, “I took pills. I wouldn’t stop throwing up for three nights. Blew it off as stomach flu. Third time…third time was the same. More pills, same result. Same excuse.”
“When was that?” Jayden murmured, his voice barely audible.
“Which?”
“Both.”
“Last March…and last May.” Seven days after his fifteenth birthday.
Jayden slid his arms down around Darren’s waist, pressing into his side like he was trying to push the bad feeling away. “What about…” He paused. “Do you…I mean…” he took another deep breath. “Are you a self-harmer?” he ground out through gritted teeth.
Darren hesitated. When did you stop being one? When could you say you didn’t? And what counted?
“Darren?”
“Narrow it down.”
Jayden flinched, but didn’t let go. “Do you…cut yourself?”
“Not anymore.”
“When was the last time?”
Darren calmed himself in the rhythm of the questions. This was okay. Answering questions was okay. “August.”
“And you haven’t cut since?”
“No.”
“Have you..done anything else since? Um, you know, like…burned yourself?”
“I never did that,” Darren murmured, and with a flash of gallows humour: “Don’t smoke.”
Jayden made a noise like he wanted to yell at him again; Darren didn’t need to look to know the tight, angry expression he’d be wearing. But after a moment, he seemed to brush it off and said, “But you hurt yourself, don’t you? If you weren’t, you’d just say you weren’t.”
Darren shrugged.
“How?” Jayden pushed gently.
Darren flexed his hands. They were still on his lap, and after a moment he folded up the right one to clasp at Jayden’s forearm. He was still here, for the moment. For now. “Hit the walls. Scratch. Used to bite hangnails, but Father got on at me about the state of my hands. I try not to, it’s sick, but…”
“It’s not sick,” Jayden interrupted, squeezing tightly. “You’re ill, Darren. You’re ill. It doesn’t make you sick or pathetic or any of the rest of it.”
Darren snorted.
“It doesn’t,” Jayden insisted. “I mean it.”
“I have nothing to be fucked up about,” Darren snapped.
Jayden made that tight noise again. “I don’t think you’re right, you know,” he murmured. “But even if you don’t, it’s chemical too. You’re the science nerd, you should know that. Maybe it’s just your brain out of whack, but it’s not pathetic and it’s not your fault. It’s just an illness. It’s like saying I’m pathetic for getting the flu or something.”
That was all very well and good—but they were just words. Darren wasn’t stupid; Jayden wasn’t a martyr. He had ambitions and dreams and a massive sense of romance and none of it factored in a fucked-up boyfriend. He’d be gone soon, now that he’d seen it. Darren had squeezed every last good memory out of it possible. It was all downhill from here.
“Is there…” Jayden paused, then let go. Darren reeled a little from the loss of warmth, but then Jayden was folding himself up to sit cross-legged on the boards beside him and take both his hands. “Is there anything that would make you feel even a bit better right now?”
Darren swallowed. Maybe it was emotional suicide, but…
“I could just use a fucking hug,” he admitted, and Jayden squeezed his hands.
“Okay,” he said. “Want to come back to mine? We can watch another film and cuddle on my bed or something, skip rehearsal again. Yeah? Would that…?”
“Yeah,” Darren interrupted, quashing the urge to add burning the violin and running away to Prague to the wish list, and let Jayden pull him off the stage by the hands, dropping to the slightly sticky carpet effortlessly.
He still wished, bitterly, that it was another four-floor drop, and that this time, he’d break more than just his legs.
Chapter 18
If there was something scarier than the bad days and the blunt, flat way Darren had admitted to trying to kill himself three times—and once less than a year ago—it was, Jayden discovered on the following Saturday, the end.
The speed with which the spells broke.
Darren described it to him, after a lot of coaxing and a lot of cuddling the life out of him on Jayden’s bed, as ‘waking up fine.’ He seemed to be set from the moment he woke up, and reset sometime in the night. And it happened on that Saturday, after a long and hard week of Darren being largely unresponsive, absolutely indifferent, and difficult. So different from the dry humour and quiet confidence that it hurt.
And then Saturday, he turned up on Jayden’s doorstep as instructed in time for lunch, wearing that red beanie and those glasses again, and smiling. Properly smiling. Hands-in-pockets, half-amused, half-embarrassed smirk on his face, and looking one hundred percent beautiful.
And one hundred percent okay.
“Are you feeling better?” Jayden asked lowly, after pulling him inside and kissing him before Mum or Dad came out of the woodwork to investigate the doorbell.
“Yeah,” Darren said. “I’m okay now.”
“Do you…is there a pattern?”
“No. It�
�s not PMS.”
Jayden rolled his eyes; Darren laughed, and it soothed the raw hurt in Jayden’s chest that the last few days had inflicted. “Come on,” he said. “Mum’s gardening. I think Dad’s in the garage.”
“Someone’s under your car.”
“That’ll be Dad,” Jayden agreed, pulling Darren by the hand into the kitchen. Mum had stupid lace curtains in the kitchen, but the plus side was that nobody could look in through the window. For the moment, they had privacy.
“Got any of those oatmeal cookie things again?” Darren asked.
“Um, sure, I think so. Shortbread,” Jayden corrected over his shoulder, rummaging through the biscuit tin. He heard Darren open the fridge and the gentle clink of cans. “I swear you’re like a dustbin.”
“Mother’s fault,” Darren retorted. “Her idea of a snack is carrot sticks. I think I’m accidentally vegetarian six days out of seven.”
“She’s a health n- enthusiast?”
“Nut,” Darren said and grinned when Jayden flushed again. “Yeah. Something about her granddad having a heart attack. I dunno, I was about two when he died.” He sneaked a finger of the shortbread away from Jayden’s hands, and by the blissful expression on his face when he bit into the shortbread, Jayden didn’t believe that he was too bothered about the prospect of a heart attack now.
“I think you’ll live,” he said airily, retrieving his own can from the fridge. Darren cracked his own open noisily behind him. “The coffee might kill you, though.”
“The coffin will be buzzing, at least.”
The joking was odd. It was…nice, in a way, because it meant that Darren really was feeling so much better, and yet it wasn’t, because that long afternoon of wriggling the answers out of him was so fresh in Jayden’s mind. He couldn’t decide what to think. He wanted to talk about it, but he didn’t want to disturb the peace. He wanted to kiss Darren breathless again, but didn’t know if it would be welcome yet. He wanted to know what to do.
He pressed the cold can to his burning face, shut the fridge, and jumped violently as he turned straight into Darren. “Jesus!” he yelped.
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