“What?”
“You know what I mean,” Jamie snapped. “You want to fuck me, but you think I can’t handle it. Fucking hell, you fucking bastard!”
Jamie punched the dashboard. The impact blasted through his hand and up to his shoulder, but he welcomed the pain. Compared to the realisation that Marc saw him as nothing more than a damaged junkie hooker, it didn’t mean much.
Fuck this.
Jamie got out of the car. The level of his rage shocked him, and seemed to come from nowhere, but he couldn’t control it.Control. Ha—the tiny little word that held so much power over him, and probably always would, but the bubble he’d imagined around him and Marc had become his sanctuary. Even the tramadol hadn’t broken through. He’d never imagined that Marc had only had one foot in the boat the whole time.
Jamie turned his back on the car, but strong hands gripped his arms, and Jamie realised that he’d somehow missed Marc getting out of the car too.Fucking ninja soldier bastard.Jamie struggled, but Marc’s grip was absolute, and defeat rolled through Jamie as fast as his temper had risen. Faster. “Get off me.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to go home.”
“Get in the car, then.”
“No.”
“Really?” Marc gently pushed Jamie against the car and caged him in his arms. “Is that how this is going down? Because I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter how angry you get with me, I’m never going to treat you like a piece of shit.”
“But you’ll make me feel like one?”
“How? Why? Because I don’t bend you over and take what I want?”
“Yes.”
Marc laughed, but there was no humour in him. “Did Zac do that?”
“Sometimes... when he needed to.”
“And I’m some kind of cunt because I don’t?”
“No. You’re a cunt because you’ve assumed that I can’t handle it... that I don’twantit. Don’t you see how fucked up that is?”
Marc shook his head, though it was hard to tell if he was disagreeing or simply had nothing to say. Or maybe he was horrified. Nausea washed over Jamie. Was he so fucking wrong? Had the few johns whose company he’d perversely enjoyed been monsters? Was Jamie, for every orgasm he’d ever had?
Because there weren’t many that hadn’t been paid for, in one way or another.
Jamie shivered. “I want to go home.”
Marc stepped away. “Then get in the car.”
The rest of the drive was silent, save the chaos in Jamie’s head, and the cold damp seeping through his socks. His chest ached too, and as his fury cooled, it occurred to him that perhaps his thought process wasn’t entirely rational. He’d been warned that addiction screwed up far more than the obvious, but was this part of that? Or did the idea of Marc looking at him and seeing a fragile ex-hooker just hurt too much to bear?
Either way, it seemed that Marc was done trying to find out. He pulled up outside Jamie’s flat and kept his eyes on the horizon. Taking his cue, Jamie stamped into his shoes, got out, kicked the door shut, and stormed inside without looking back.
He was on his kitchen floor, head on his knees, before he realised the strange gasping noises were his own sobs.
Fourteen
Marc slammed the front door, wishing the big old house would shake and shudder like the crappy prefab he’d shared with his wife. That house had been great for rows—bits would satisfyingly fall off it with a correctly aimed punch. Not that he’d done much punching. Hadn’t cared enough, and the relationship had meant nothing compared to the hold Jamie had on his heart.
Fuck this.Marc eyed the nearby wall, but what was left of his common sense kept his hands at his sides. Smashed knuckles would mean fucking up the hospital schedule, and Marc’s own addiction to responsibility was too ingrained to ignore.
Dazed, he went to the kitchen and opened the cupboard where he kept his emergency bottle of whiskey. It wasn’t there. Marc closed his eyes and tried to picture what Jamie might’ve done with it.“I wanted to hide it, but I’m trying to stop doing that...”
At the time, Marc hadn’t taken Jamie’s words literally, but perhaps that had been the problem all along. Instinct took him to the one place in the house that Jamie still avoided—the corridor that had once led to the old church, and sure enough, a lone bottle of whiskey held court in a gloomy corner.