Exhausted, Marc sank down beside it, oddly reluctant to disturb it. The darkness of the stooped corridor enveloped him, and he welcomed it; it suited his mood. Life with Jamie was turning out to be more complicated than he’d imagined, and the clusterfuck of a journey home had just about finished him off. That Jamie truly believed Marc looked at him and saw only his past made Marc sick to his stomach, and no amount of Glenfiddich was going to fix that.
But still he sat in the dark by the bottle and dissected the convoluted conversation that had gone so wrong. Perhaps he should’ve come clean and admitted that there was nothing he wanted more than the very thing he couldn’t bring himself to do. Would that have eased the hurt in Jamie’s eyes?Fuck, I have no idea.Because every time he’d told Jamie that he had limited knowledge of what made Jamie so very afraid of the outside world, he’d been telling the truth. The Jamie that wiped the sink in equal numbers and hid bottles of whiskey in dark corridors made little sense to Marc, and how could he hold that kid down and fuck the living daylights out of him when he didn’t know how tocarefor him, goddamn it?
Huh.Maybe that was the point. He’d been drowning in Jamie from the moment they’d met, but pushing his heart aside, perhaps for the first time in a long while, he wasmedicallyout of his depth.
Maybe it was time to accept that he couldn’t help Jamie at all.
Despair pinning him down on the cold stone floor, Marc pulled out his phone and brought up the short message thread between him and Jamie. To an outsider, it wasn’t that interesting, but Marc studied every word, every syllable, like they could explain how he’d screwed things up so badly.
It didn’t, of course, and he was still staring at it when a message from Connor flashed up on the screen.
Thanks for coming today. Nat was so pleased to see you, and I loved Jamie. He’s a good fella. Hope you can work it out.
It was so Connor to sense that life was already complicated enough that Marc needed a passive-aggressive push to sort shit out. Marc shook his head and dropped his phone on the stone floor with an alarming clatter.Damn you, Connor.But the message resonated, and Marc couldn’t sit in the dark another second. He hauled himself to his feet and out of the corridor, leaving his phone behind. His body ached from driving for hours, but he felt no pain as he dashed through the house and back out to the car.
He squealed off the driveway in a hail of gravel. Jamie’s flat was five minutes away, but it felt like an hour—which was about as long as they’d been apart. Marc drove like a maniac, thankful that Matlock Bath was a quiet town and its residents tended to retire early, until he pulled up at Jamie’s building.
Marc abandoned the car at the side of the road and jogged to the main door. It was open, but once inside, Marc realised that he had no idea which flat was Jamie’s. He went back to the outside door and scanned the names next to the buzzers. For a horrifying moment, a black hole filled the space where Jamie’s surname had once been. And then his eyes fell onFlat 2and the barely legible scrawl next to it:Yorke. Jamie Yorke. Or was it James? Marc had never got round to asking.
Not that it mattered right now. Marc took the stairs two at a time, ignoring the protests of his duffed-up hip, and slid to a stop at Jamie’s door. The temptation to hammer on it was strong, but he settled for a light tap, and then a firmer one when there was no response.
But Jamie didn’t come to the door however loudly Marc knocked, and by the fourth attempt to rouse him, panic like Marc had never felt before set in. The ever-dwindling rational part of his brain reasoned that Jamie might simply be out, or asleep, or just plain old shutting himself away from the world—fromMarc. He’d been angry enough. But beyond Jamie’s rage had been real hurt, and however long he’d been clean, there was still only one way he knew would truly ease his pain.
Fuck this.Marc dug his keys out of his pocket. On the chain was a Swiss Army knife he’d carried since he’d joined the Army twenty-one years ago. He opened it and jimmied the simple Yale lock on Jamie’s door until it clicked.
He kicked the door open and hurried inside, barely remembering to slam it shut behind him as he searched for Jamie.
At first nothing seemed amiss. Jamie’s home was as spotless as Marc had expected it to be, with low lights, and heavy metal playing softly from an iPhone dock in the living room, but as Marc ventured farther into Jamie’s space, he smelled bleach, lots of bleach, and the scent of it drew him to the bathroom.
Jamie was on his hands and knees, scrubbing a furious rhythm at the pristine tiles with a toothbrush, his hair wild, his face flushed, and his eyes so focussed he seemed almost manic. He didn’t seem to notice Marc in the doorway, and didn’t look up when Marc called his name.
Marc stepped closer. “Jamie.”
Nothing.
He grabbed Jamie’s shoulders. Gripped them hard and shook him. “Jamie.”
The toothbrush slipped from Jamie’s grasp. He seemed to come back into himself, his eyes widened, and then he jumped, and shock appeared to shudder through him. “What are you— How did you get in here?”
“Doesn’t matter. Are you okay? You...” Marc’s voice fell away as he realised that he didn’t have the words to describe the frenetic energy vibrating from every part of Jamie. Even through his bony shoulders, Marc could feel Jamie’s racing pulse. “Are you freaking out?”
It was a clumsy was of putting it, but it was all he had, and for a fleeting moment, Jamie seemed like he might answer.
But then he pushed Marc away and turned the taps on in the bath. “You shouldn’t be here. It’s not clean.”
“It is clean, Jamie... cleaner than my place, anyway, and you don’t mind that.”
“That’s different.”
“Why?”
“Because things were all right then,” Jamie snapped. “Everything’s gone wrong now, and it’s all my fault. And I can’t stop it going round in my head until everything’s clean and I’ve counted—”
Marc tugged Jamie away from the bath and tapped his finger to Jamie’s lips. “Slow down. I can’t understand you when you chatter a million miles an hour.”
Jamie took a shaky breath and shook his head. “I don’t need you to understand. I need you to not be here until it’s all done. Then we can talk... or not. But I can’t think straight until it’s done. You know that, I’ve told you before.”
“You haven’t, actually.” Marc forced himself to keep his tone mild. “You’ve changed the subject every time I’ve asked you about this. I got the impression that it was something you did to calm yourself down, but you don’t seem very calm right now.”