Darren simply held out one arm. The other was still strapped to his chest in a sling, and Jayden slid onto the edge of the mattress beside him and tucked his head against the good shoulder, hugging him around the waist cautiously. He smelled of hospital and disinfectant and the very faint tang of stale sweat.
And his hand was firm on the back of Jayden’s neck.
“Oh, my God,” Jayden whispered, and took a shaky breath, turning his face to kiss the T-shirt. “You have no idea how glad I am to see you.”
Darren pressed his face into Jayden’s hair. Faintly, Jayden thought he felt a kiss. “I feel like I can think,” he said lowly.
Jayden unpeeled himself, but didn’t move off the mattress, taking Darren’s good hand and rubbing his fingers over his knuckles. His skin was dry. “You seem better. You seem…”
“Coherent?”
“Yeah,” Jayden said and laughed breathlessly. “You’ve been…God, I’ve missed you, and you’re okay, and…”
He could feel tears coming. Darren retrieved his hand and cupped Jayden’s neck, pulling him in for a light, short kiss. It tasted stale; any other time, Jayden would have pushed him away and offered mints. As it was, he felt the anxiety that had married him the moment Scott had called in the middle of the night beginning to ease.
“I don’t know anything,” he whispered, taking the hand back and squeezing it. “I just…Scott called me in the middle of night, asking when you left, and then you were here, and your parents hate me and…”
“What? Why?”
“Huh?”
“My parents hate you?”
Jayden coloured. “Um. You’re not in the closet anymore.”
Darren stared. “…What?”
“I just…Scott called saying the police said they found you and they put two and two together and you were here and…”
“What?”
“Okay.” Jayden took a deep breath and calmed himself. It was done now. He just had to say that. “The night you were brought in, Scott had called me asking where you were. And eventually he rang again saying you were here, so Mum and I came here. I mean, you could have been…Okay, well, your mum arrived and was all ‘who the fuck is that’ and I was just…I was upset and I was scared and I wanted to know what was going on because your dad’s an arse and wouldn’t say anything with me around…”
“So…you told Mother you were my boyfriend?”
“…Yeah.”
Darren took a deep breath. It hitched in the middle, and he coughed with a wince. When he exhaled, it shuddered like an asthmatic in the middle of an attack, and Jayden squeezed his hand anxiously.
“…Okay?” he prompted.
“Mm,” Darren said and rolled his eyes. “They’ve taken the painkillers down too much. My shoulder’s killing me.”
“It nearly did,” Jayden protested.
“Don’t be dramatic.”
“I’m not.”
“Oi,” Darren squeezed his hand, locking their fingers together tightly. “Calm down, all right? I’m sore and I’m grumpy and if I have to eat one more tub of fucking green jelly I’m going to strangle a nurse with this IV, but I’m recovering. All right? And I’m not impressed that the first thing I’m going to get is a lecture on ‘succumbing to teenage hormones’ or something, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Jayden bit his lip. “I’m sorry,” he tried.
Darren sighed heavily. It didn’t catch this time. “No,” he said. “It’s fine. Ish. I would have probably done the same.”
“…You might have just hit my dad if he’d done that,” Jayden offered.
“No thanks. Your dad would wipe the floor with me.”
Jayden smiled and didn’t bother refuting it, turning around to sit up on the bed alongside Darren and stretch one leg out down the bed. Darren’s hand ended up on his lap, still wrapped up in Jayden’s grip, and he dropped his head to Darren’s shoulder with a sigh.
“What’s…what’s the damage?” he asked.
“You don’t even know that?”
“Scott said you were stabbed, but…I just don’t have details,” Jayden shifted uncomfortably. “I want them and I don’t. I mean…do you…remember?”
“Yes,” Darren said flatly. “And four times, by the way. Stabbed four times.”
Jayden shuddered.
“Sort of,” Darren amended. “It’s a bit hazy, and then there’s a lot of pain, and then it starts getting confusing and tangled up. I remember being in the park, and I remember them getting me in the ambulance, and then I go a bit loopy.”
“You’ve been a bit loopy for days,” Jayden tried, but the humour fell flat. He stared blankly down the bed towards the oversized peaks of Darren’s feet. “What…what’s got to heal?”
“Left shoulder,” Darren said. “He got me twice and fucked up my nerves and tendons a lot. I can’t lift my arm and my elbow’s jacked up. Two flesh wounds in my side and my hip. My hip hurts like hell ‘cause he grazed the bone, and the doctor keeps wanting me to sit up. And I really don’t want to.”
Jayden managed a smile at the indignant tone, and Darren rubbed his thumb over his knuckles lightly.
“I whacked my head on the way down, too,” he said. “But the best bit?”
“There’s a best bit?”
“He kicked me in the balls. Who does that?” Darren asked. “Seriously. If I ever find out I’m infertile, I’m suing him as well.”
Jayden laughed. Finally, he found a shred of genuine happiness and outright laughed, hiding the undignified snort in the back of his hand and dissolving into a fit of giggles worthy of a schoolgirl.
“What a cunt,” Darren continued. “Knifing me is one thing, but that’s just below the belt. Literally!”
Jayden curled over on himself, laughing almost hysterically. There was a sharp tinge of relief to it, something settling at Darren’s tone. He’d come back. He was here.
“Hey.” Darren slid his good arm around Jayden’s back and tugged him back for a proper hug. “I’m all right.”
“You are now.”
“Meh. I’m going to be in physiotherapy for months. I might not ever get full function of my shoulder back.”
“What’s…wrong with it?” Jayden attempted.
“You sure you want this much detail?”
“…Yes?”
Darren took a breath. “Right. Well. He told me to give him my phone. I told him to piss off. He grabbed for it. I hit him, he stabbed me. I’ll be honest, I thought he’d punched me. Seriously,” he added. “I didn’t realise. I just had so much adrenaline in my system, I didn’t notice. So I punched him, hard as I could. So he stabbed me in the shoulder, twice, and the second time…”
Jayden squeezed his hand when he trailed off. He felt sick. It was burning low in his stomach, and he had the awful feeling that maybe he didn’t want to hear this, but he had to know. He had to know.
“It got stuck.”
“It what?”
“The knife. It got stuck.” Darren pulled a face. “The doctor said he hit the bones in the joint and it…well, yeah.”
“Oh, God, I think I’m going to be sick,” Jayden mumbled, clapping a hand over his mouth. The nausea swelled; Darren’s hand rubbed up his side in slow, firm strokes.
“Hey. Hey. Relax, come on. Deep breaths.”
“I’m going to be sick. No, seriously, I am.”
“No, you’re not,” Darren said. “You’re all right. I’m all right. It hurt like hell and it did a lot of damage and I’ve probably screwed up my shoulder for life, but, you know, it wasn’t my chest. I can live with a dodgy shoulder.”
Jayden closed his eyes and took the prescribed deep breaths. It had gotten stuck. He’d been stabbed so hard it had hit a bone and stuck there. Had the guy just, what, tried to get it out? Jerked it around? Had he…?
He lunged, diving off the bed and seizing the sides of the trolley the nurse had left behind. Darren’s empty lunch tray was still on top, and Jayden promptly threw
up onto it, the mental image taking breakfast with it.
“That’s disgusting,” Darren opined from over his shoulder. “I’m calling a nurse.”
“I’m okay,” Jayden croaked. “I’m okay. Oh my God.”
“Mm,” Darren said sceptically.
A troll of a nurse materialised in the doorway; Jayden fled for the ward bathroom, locking himself in and hunching over the toilet in time for the second wave. It hadn’t hit him before. It hadn’t entered his head exactly what had happened. He’d known, yeah, Scott had told him the vaguest of details, but…
But Darren’d had most of his shoulder torn up. He’d been stabbed until he couldn’t move his arm properly. What about the others? He’d complained about sitting up, hadn’t he? What if he couldn’t? What if he never could again?
Jayden stayed until he was certain the vomiting had passed—or at least he had nothing left to vomit—and then stood shaking over the sink as he washed his mouth out. He couldn’t even hug Darren properly. Or at all. He wanted to just hug him for hours and not let go but he couldn’t.
The nurse and the trolley had disappeared by the time he slipped back out of the toilet, but Darren was waiting. He raised an eyebrow when Jayden slid back onto the edge of the bed, edging into the circle of his good arm almost gingerly, and huffed when he settled into the thin pillows.
“You asked.”
“You didn’t have to tell me,” Jayden mumbled petulantly. Darren snorted. “I just…God. I was fucking asleep, and you were…”
“Cut it out,” Darren said. “Look. I’m going to need you these next few months, you know that?”
“What?”
“I’m going to need you,” Darren repeated. “I’m going to have months of physio. The doctor reckons I’ve skipped out on any nerve damage in my hip, but my shoulder’s a wreck. I can’t clench my fist. Seriously. I’ve got nerve and tendon and ligament damage up the wazoo, and there’s not going to be anyone there. I’m going to hate this. It’s going to hurt and I’m going to want to give up and just put up with a dead arm, so I’m going to need you.”
Said dead arm was strapped to his chest, the shoulder pulled into a tight position against his body, but Jayden could see the fingers at the end of the mess, curling into a loose fist against his near collarbone. Slowly, he reached out and slid two fingers under them until it was almost as though Darren were gripping back.
“What’s the damage?” he repeated quietly.
“They’re not sure yet,” Darren said. “I can feel my hand. I can’t grip for shit. It hurts too much to move my upper arm at all, and I nearly blacked out when they strapped me up. I think maybe I did.”
Jayden stroked the limp fingers. They were warm, but there was no response at all.
“You won’t be able to play the violin,” he said suddenly.
“I’m out for at least a year.”
Jayden took a breath. “I want you to stop playing.”
“I just said…”
“No, I mean…permanently. I mean, never take it up again,” Jayden barrelled on. He slid his thumb over the wasted fingers and squeezed as gently as possible. “I know it’s not the violin causing your…your illness, but it makes you worse. You know how I know you’re having a bad day sometimes? Because I come to The Brightside and you’re playing Vivaldi. You only ever play Vivaldi when you’re hurting and you’re miserable and I hate it because you’re not even letting off steam. You’re even more upset when you’re finished playing than when you started, and I…I hate it, Darren, I hate your violin. I hate your constant practice and I hate that you hate it, and I fucking hate Vivaldi.”
Darren was staring at him. Jayden dared to slide his arm around Darren’s waist, turning into him gingerly, watching and waiting for any tension, any pain. When nothing happened, he settled his head onto the pillow beside Darren’s and squeezed lightly. “I want you to quit,” he breathed. “Hide it behind the physio if you want, for now, but quit. Stop playing. You don’t like it, and it makes you worse, and…find some other way to cope, go back to boxing if it helped, tell your father where to get off because I can’t watch you drown, Darren. I can’t, and if you don’t quit, I’ll…”
“You’re banning me from Vivaldi.”
“Because I think it’ll work,” Jayden insisted. “I’m not stupid, it won’t make you better, but you’re still okay when you’re not playing. That stuff turns your less good days into awful days, and I don’t…you’ve got to stop. Please.”
Darren nodded slowly, taking a couple of breaths so deep that his waist rose lightly under Jayden’s arm and he winced as the stitches in his side pulled. “All right,” he said. “I mean…if I feel…better, maybe, in this time off, then…”
“You will,” Jayden swore.
“If I do, then I won’t take it back up,” Darren compromised. “And at least Father can’t get on my back about practice if I can’t even lift the bow properly.”
“This goes for the piano too. Stop with the classical. Do your stupid drinking songs with Paul or whatever, but…no serious stuff. No proper music.”
“Paul will be hurt.”
“I don’t care,” Jayden rejected the distraction. “Please. Promise me. Promise me no more violin and no more Vivaldi and no more classical music of any kind. At least until you’re cleared from physio.”
“All right.” Darren folded up his good arm to stroke Jayden’s elbow. “I promise.”
Chapter 33
Three-thirty had never felt so good. Today was D-Day. Diagnosis Day. The day that Darren would take his first independent steps since the stabbing, and maybe even the day he went home. Jayden paid no attention to the corridors, no attention to the other kids. He even zipped around an incoming shove without bothering to stop or get worked up about it. He had more important shit to do, and his phone was silent, which meant Darren was still there. Three-thirty and he hadn’t left. That…didn’t sound good.
He was almost jogging by the time he reached the reception desk. He’d sorted out money for the bus down to the hospital car park, and it jingled happily in his blazer pocket as he shouldered through the glass doors into the deceptive sunlight.
And stopped dead.
Scott’s car was parked brazenly just inside of the gates, half up on the pavement, engine running. And Darren was leaning against the boot, half-drowned in his familiar dark hoodie and jeans, washed-out white and smiling.
“Oh, my God,” Jayden said and lurched forward to throw his arms around Darren’s shoulders and hug him tightly. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Darren’s grip was tight, even if he did tuck his face into the top of Jayden’s shoulder in an oddly sweet gesture for being so out in the open. “Got let out this morning,” he said and fisted his hands in the back of Jayden’s blazer, one strong, one weak. “Surprise?”
“Okay, I like this one,” Jayden admitted, releasing him reluctantly when he felt the first tell-tale tension creeping into Darren’s posture. “Shouldn’t you be, y’know, home in bed?”
“I’ve been in bed for weeks, I’m going mad,” Darren said, dropping his hands to Jayden’s waist and refusing to let go entirely. “I missed you, so I guilt-tripped Scott.”
Jayden bit his lip to hide the grin, but failed. When he did, he found himself laughing breathlessly, almost giddy with the swell of happiness in the middle of his chest, like a band around his heart had snapped and released him. And when he gave in and pushed forward for a kiss, Darren’s jaw was smooth with the results of having his own razor back and not the borrowed electric from Scott.
He tasted of peaches, not hospital food and spearmint toothpaste, and the familiarity made breathing a little hard to come by.
“We’re right outside your school,” Darren whispered in the pause, and Jayden shook his head, forehead pressed to Darren’s, eyes closed.
“I don’t fucking care,” he said. “I nearly…you nearly died, Darren. I don’t give a shit what anyone in there says anymore.”
He didn’t let Darren form any answer to that, pulling him back for another, deeper kiss that said everything he couldn’t, from how surprised he was to find him here today at all to the unending loop of thank God you’re okay that had been running through his head ever since he’d turned the corner in the night and started to come back from the brink. Ever since he’d squeezed Jayden’s hand and asked that unintelligible question through the drugs. Because Darren was here: he tasted like peaches and the fingers of his left hand were hooked weakly into the belt loops at Jayden’s hip and his hair tickled and Jayden could feel him breathing, in the movements of his ribs and the rush of air where his nose was pressed to Jayden’s cheek.
He also felt the sudden drop of weight, the heavy sway, and caught at Darren’s arms before he could do anything more than stagger.
“What?” he asked breathlessly. “What was that? Darren?”
Darren fumbled for the boot of the car and laughed a little shakily as the tremor faded out. “I don’t have enough blood,” he said.
“What does…?”
“I don’t have enough blood to go south and leave me conscious,” he said meaningfully and Jayden flushed with the implication.
“Well, I think you’d burst the scar if we did that anyway,” he said, laughing dizzily, and pressing Darren against the body of the car until the shivering eased entirely. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Darren nodded, squeezing Jayden’s shoulder. “Just dizzy. It’s passed.”
“Maybe you should go home.”
“If you come with me.”
Jayden bit his lip. “I don’t think I’m very popular with your parents right now.”
“Neither am I.” Darren squeezed his arm, dropping his head to Jayden’s shoulder again. He was exhausted; it was written in every line in his too-pale face. “Yours, then.”
Jayden nodded, easing him back and kissing him quickly. “Okay,” he said. “If you promise to just lounge around and do nothing. You’re white as a sheet.”
“I’ll probably fall asleep on you,” Darren admitted. “I’ve just…I’ve missed you. Mother is driving me up the wall and Misha doesn’t understand why I can’t play with her. I needed out.”
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