“You want me to meet your friends?”
Marc hadn’t thought about it like that, but he nodded anyway. “Nat and Connor are both cool. I served with Nat for a long time. He was my CO for a while.”
“You’re looking forward to seeing them.”
“I am. It’s been too long.”
“And they won’t mind me coming?”
“Nah, they’re sociable fuckers.”
“Yeah?”
“Not really, but they’re nice—well,Connor’snice—and they’ll be relieved to see me with someone other than the terminally pissed-off cat they forced on me.”
That was apparently good enough for Jamie. They took a quick, teasing shower together, then left Derbyshire behind. The motorways were mostly clear, and they were past Birmingham when Marc remembered the question he’d gone to sleep on. “What was bugging you this morning, apart from my bag of doom?”
Jamie turned from where he’d been staring out of the window. “This morning?”
“When we were eating, before you told me about finding my bag. You said it was addiction related, but not what I was thinking. Which was nothing, by the way. I hadn’t noticed the bag in the kitchen.”
“Moved it now, though, haven’t you?”
“That a problem?”
“No.”
Marc changed lanes, noting that the pain that had plagued him for most of the previous day was all but gone. “I didn’t get rid of the drugs, if that’s what the face is for. I just put them somewhere else. I’m sure you could find them if you wanted to.”
“I’ll let you know if I feel the urge to look.”
“Will you?”
“If you’re around.”
And right there was Marc’s biggest fear: that Jamie would hit crisis point when he wasn’t there. Marc didn’t have a job where he could drop everything and come home, even if he truly believed that Jamie would reach out to him like that. But ditching the tramadol had seemed somehow daft, especially with Jamie’s chilling words echoing in his head:“I’d have gone down the pub by the lime quarry and scored a bag...”
“Anyway,” Marc said. “What was really on your mind if it wasn’t that?”
“Nothing quite so tragic. Billy found me a possible job.”
“Yeah? Doing what?”
“Cooking stew in an old lady kitchen in Derby.”
“That sounds like the worst euphemism.”
Jamie chuckled. “You’ve got the weirdest dirty mind if you think that. It’s actually a community project... a food bank, meal-delivery thing. It sends hot dinners out to vulnerable people who can’t get to the shops or cook for themselves. Billy set it up, but they need more hands in the kitchen. I spent a few hours there yesterday and I liked it.”
“But?”
Jamie shrugged. “They’re good people down there.”
“So? You’ve worked with good people before, surely?”
“Yeah, but that was on the other side of the world, so I could kid myself that I had somewhere else to run if I fucked it all up. It’s not like that here. I like it, and I want to stay.”
Jamie wasn’t even looking at Marc, but Marc took his words to heart anyway. He wasn’t naïve enough to believe that it was him that tied Jamie to Matlock Bath, but the fact that Jamie wanted to stick around felt good. Better than good. “What would you be doing at the project? Cooking?”