Marc swapped it for his own in one smooth motion, as though they’d eaten together like this—hunched over a small table, their knees so nearly touching—a thousand times before. “You’re a perceptive motherfucker.”
“And I’ve never heard a doctor say ‘motherfucker’ before, so you’re gonna have to enlighten me about what makes you so different.”
“You know what makes me different. Gun in my hands, remember?”
“That’s not who you are, I see that now. That’s what you did.”
“Are we not the sum of our actions?”
“If we are, then you don’t want to be sitting here with me.” Jamie said it almost absently as his wayward brain returned him abruptly to the backstreets of Norwich, to his knees on the grimy pavements, the ever-present itch in his veins and a stranger’s cock in his mouth. It had taken months of clean living to truly realise how desperately depraved his life had become, and even then what he’d subjected himself to paled in comparison to what he’d done to Zac.
Marc touched Jamie’s hand. “I’m sorry. I get a bit dark when I’ve been stuck with my own company too long. And for the record, I don’t care what you’ve done, okay? There aren’t many things that can’t be forgiven.”
Somehow, coming from Marc it seemed believable, but it wasn’t enough for Jamie. He didn’t deserve Marc’s kindness any more than he had Zac’s, or Liam’s, or Marvin’s.I am the storm.
Marc’s fingers wrapped around Jamie’s. “Hey... look at me. Do you want to go home?”
Jamie could only nod. He’d fought this particular demon many times in California, but in the relentless sunshine, surrounded by the perpetually cheerful, it had been easier to convince himself that his past belonged to someone else... that he’d seen it on telly, or read it on one of those news sites that led you to article after article of soap-opera-style human tragedy. Here, in the dreary gloom that he’d craved almost as much as the junk, the reality of who he had been haunted him so entirely that he couldn’t breathe.
He found his wallet and ripped some notes free, tossing them on the table without counting them. With wobbly legs, he found himself outside before he knew it, leaning against the café window, sucking in great gulps of air. His heart hammering in his chest in much the same way it had on the plane when he’d been so certain that he was going to die. Then, it had been the first time that death had ever scared him. Now?I want to go home.
Like magic, Marc appeared. Jamie’s body cried out for his grounding hands, but for once Marc didn’t touch him. He merely pulled his keys from his pocket and nodded in the general direction of the car. “Ready?”
He took off without waiting for an answer, and Jamie followed, chewing his bottom lip. Marc was moving more gingerly now, wincing as he set his crutches on the damp pavement. A better man would’ve guided him to the nearby bench and fetched the car for him. But Jamie wasn’t a better man. Not today, or a thousand other days that had come before, and he remained mute and useless at Marc’s side until they reached the yellow Punto, and even then, his tongue stuck viciously to the roof of his mouth.
They were in spitting distance of Matlock Bath when Marc finally broke the odd silence that had settled over them. “You’re gonna have to tell me where you live.”
“Why?”
Marc slowed as the speed limit changed, in preparation for entering the town. “So I know when to stop driving.”
There was no impatience in Marc’s voice, only the kind equanimity that Jamie remembered from the plane. Jamie forced himself to look at him, swallowing the increasing bile in his throat. “I live up the hill, a few streets behind the aquarium.”
“Yeah? You can probably see me from your windows, then. My mum’s old house is across the river.” Marc returned his eyes to the road.
Home was a few minutes away, but as desperate as Jamie was to lock himself in his soulless bedsit, the thought of letting Marc go hurt his chest. “I’m sorry.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know.”
Marc smiled slightly. “Story of my life. I always know I’m doing it wrong, but how to fix it eludes me.”
“I don’t believe that. You’re a doctor. You fix people every day.”
“I put them back together after a tangible force has torn them apart. It’s not the same as knowing you’re fucking things up and, at the same time, being unable to stop.”
That sounded like addiction and as hard as Jamie tried, he couldn’t imagine Marc to be as brutally indulgent as Jamie was with his own demons. “You’re a good person.”
Marc snorted and turned the car down the narrow street that Jamie now called home. “Most people are before life gets in the way. This okay for you?”
He’d pulled up outside the old converted terrace that housed Jamie’s bedsit. Jamie blinked. “How did you know?”
“Know what?”
“That I live in this building?”
Marc shrugged. “No offense, mate, but I didn’t figure you for a half-a-million-bungalow kind of bloke.”