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He was so close to being done with this. He had so many things on his mind right now, stacking in his brain like a house of cards. He’d been on this program for five years, and this was one of the biggest disasters they had ever had. If it got a reputation for extended outages like this, especially right before that big client demo, the company would be lambasted in the news this week.
“Dylan?” The sound of his name was muffled, but some part of his mind processed it.
He held up a finger and then clicked and typed and moved between his monitors. Checking his email for updates from the team out west. Deleting stupid texts from Chase and trying not to panic when he was copied on emails with angry executives who were panicking about this impacting the big client demos next week.
Christ, they were doing the best they could.
His fingers sped over the keyboard. Lines of code scrolled on one side of his screen. He reran the new changes to see if it fixed the errors.
Crap. Crap. Crap.
Something was still not quite right. He pulled off his headphones and rubbed his temples.
“Dylan? What is going on with you?”
Dylan jolted, slamming his knee on the bottom of his desk.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Derek,” He whipped around, blinking furiously to fix the dryness in his eyes. “I said one sec.”
Derek was completely dressed. His mouth was hanging open with a mix of emotions on his face that Dylan was too tired to decipher.
“Dude, I was just checking on you.” He shifted Gus’s leash from one hand to the other. “For the record, you said one sec an hour ago.” His face studied Dylan. “What’s your Adderall dosage? If you’re not careful, and if it’s too high—”
“Okay… so I need you to not do the thing that people always do, which is to assume that I haven’t painstakingly tried to figure out what works for me.” He palmed his face, seeing that the medication bottle was still on the kitchen counter. He’d never taken it. No wonder he’d forgotten to set his alarms. He probably hadn’t really moved in hours. He’d be paying for this tomorrow.
Derek shook his head. “I had a friend in nursing school who—”
“Please don’t.” Dylan was too damn exhausted to have this conversation. “So, for starters, for someone who gave my brothers shit a week ago about mocking my ADHD, trying to be a back seat psychiatrist is—”
“Oh—I wasn’t trying to—”
“This always happens. People assume that there’s a better option or that I’m not doing and didn’t do everything I possibly could to figure out what worked for me. God, people never do this stuff about blood pressure medicine, why do people get so judgmental about—”
“I wasn’t trying to be judgmental…”
“For the record…” Dylan sighed and rubbed his temples. “I forgot to take my Adderall when I got up to start working. Forgot it because I was distracted tonight. Which meant I forgot to do all the things that make me healthier while I was working. I’m not a tweaking college student taking Adderall to stay up thirty hours straight to cram for exams. I have an actual chemical imbalance in my brain. So, no, I don’t think I have a ‘dangerous addiction’ to a controlled substance.” Dylan barked out a self-hating laugh. “Ironically, my brain would remember to take my goddamn pills if I were addicted.”
“I didn’t say anything about a dangerous addiction.”
“It’s what other people say anytime they find out I’m on it.”
“I was just saying this was just like last week when you went on some work bender and were barely sleeping. I didn’t say anything then, but I’m just worried all of this is not healthy.” His knuckles whitened as his hand gripped the leash.
“I need to get back to work.” Dylan pulled the headphones on and swiveled around in his chair to his monitor. His head was still spinning. He just needed to finish this so he could sleep. Just a little sleep.
Dylan turned on music, and his fingers returned to his keyboard.
When he finished the next call with the team and got the all clear from management, he threw off his headphones. After taking a piss in the bathroom like that one drunk Tom Hanks took in A League of Their Own, he tossed his glasses on the side table and fell fully clothed onto his bed.
When he woke up, panic propelled him out of bed. Shit shit shit.
Everything he had said to Derek was true, but he shouldn’t have said it like that. Shit, he’d gone from having one of the sweetest, tenderest moments with a man he… really liked… to petulantly yelling and messing everything up with him.
He flung open the door and something hit him smack in the face.
Chapter 43
Derek was honestly surprised Dylan caught the pillow, but the guy had supposedly grown up playing hockey. “That was for being a dick to me.” He handed Dylan a Taco Bell bag. Somehow in the couple weeks they’d been together he’d noticed what Dylan ate when he was stressed or working. “This is because I was also an insensitive ass about your medication.”