Jamie scowled, but the fight in him seemed to be fading. “I don’t care about being calm, I want it to stop.”
“Want what to stop?”
“All of it. It’s like a never-ending thunderstorm. Like, I know that you don’t see me as a fucked-up hooker, and I knew it when I punched a hole in your dashboard, but I couldn’t catch the thought when it blew up in my mind, and then it ran away from me, and I chased it and—”
Marc tapped Jamie’s lips again. “Take a breath.”
Jamie tried, but it was strangled and weak, and the panic in his already chaotic eyes deepened.
Marc rubbed Jamie’s chest, like he could push the tension away. “Keep trying. It’ll come.”
“It won’t.” Jamie shook his head vehemently. “And I don’t care. I just want to make it stop.”
It broke Marc’s heart all over again to know that the only way Jamie believed that would happen was if he got down on his hands and knees and scrubbed the floors until his hands were raw and bleeding. “Jamie—”
“Don’t!” Jamie shouted, his voice bouncing off the walls in the tiny bathroom. “Don’t tell me to calm down and fucking breathe, okay? Because I’ve been trying that shit for fourteen fucking months and I’m as crazy as I was when Zac’sboyfriendchucked me in rehab.”
“You told me Zac’s boyfriend was a good bloke.”
Jamie blinked. “What?”
“You told me you liked him.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Nothing.” Marc let Jamie go and stepped back, thrusting his hands in his pockets. His mind was in bits, but the longer he observed Jamie, the more obvious it became that Jamie was experiencing a major anxiety episode. He wasn’t delusional or psychotic, but he was severely distressed, and there was no way out of it unless Marc could draw him away from his usual coping mechanisms—bad habits that plainly did nothing but feed the monster. “Have you got any tea?”
“What?”
“Tea,” Marc repeated. “I’m gasping over here.”
Jamie glared, but his suspicion was a welcome relief. “You want me to make you a cuppa?”
“I can make it.”
“No... no, it’s okay. Hang on.” Jamie ran his hands through his hair, and then bent to retrieve his bleach-sodden toothbrush.
“That’s not the one you stick in your gob, is it?”
“What?”
Focus.But Marc didn’t dare say it out loud. Instead, he turned on his heel and left the bathroom, praying that Jamie would follow him to the kitchen—which turned out to be a small cramped space that Jamie had clearly already blown through with a bottle of bleach.
Marc found the kettle and filled it with water. There was tea in the canister, but Jamie reached around him and took it from him before he could take two bags out. “Not those ones. I use the stuff in the box.”
“The box?”
Jamie opened a cupboard and retrieved a box of teabags. “This box.”
“Why? They’re the same as the ones on the side.”
“I know, but I don’t drink those.”
“Why not.”
Jamie set his jaw. “Because I don’t want to.”
The lack of logic added fuel to the already alarming fire poking at the doctor mind-set Marc had tried so hard to leave at home. “What would happen if you did?”