“Then you must like everything from Roy Orbison to Slipknot.”
Any other day, Jamie would’ve laughed, but humour had left the building, taking the conversation with it. Connor closed his eyes and slumped forward, his head on his folded arms, and Jamie left him to it. The urge to count and clean was bubbling up inside him, but the promise he hadn’t had the chance to make to Marc was louder, fuelled by a desperate need to be strong for Marc when he eventually came home. There wasn’t much in Jamie’s arsenal, but it was bigger than yesterday.
He finished up his cooking and washed the pots and pans, leaving them to dry on the draining board for the first time ever. The resulting twist of dread in his gut was as fierce as he’d always imagined, but he still had more weapons.
The antidepressants were harder to take, and the knowledge that they’d take weeks to work didn’t make it any easier, even if it came with a guarantee that he’d feel absolutely nothing when he swallowed the first pill.
But he did swallow it, and then he took his phone to the kitchen couch and curled up with the cat. Sleep was a million miles away, and the imagined sensation of the antidepressant fizzing in his belly and polluting his veins nearly sent him into OCD hyperspeed, but somehow—somehow—he fell asleep.
He woke to the buzz of a phone that wasn’t his. Stumbling, he followed the sound to the kitchen table, glanced at the screen, and then shook Connor awake. “Phone. It’s Nat.”
Connor took the phone from Jamie and pressed it to his ear, blinking, clearly dazed. “Nat?”
Jamie moved away to give him some privacy, though he couldn’t help straining to hear any mention of Marc. He was folding the couch blankets into perfect right angles when Connor tapped him on the shoulder.
“He’s right here, mate. Love ya.”
Jamie took the phone. “Marc?”
“It’s me. Listen, I’m so sorry I didn’t call you. My phone died when I was talking to Nat, and then I was driving, and then I was somewhere where we didn’t have access to civilian phone lines. I’m so fucking sorry. Are you okay?”
A rush of tension left Jamie so fast that his knees buckled. He sank onto the couch and pushed his thumb and finger into his eyes. “I’m fine. Connor turned up and told me some stuff, and then I took my pill and went to sleep.”
“How do you feel?”
“Groggy, but not in the fun way. Um, how’s your friend?”
“Not dead, which is as good as we can hope for right now. He’s getting med-evacced to Selly Oak in the next twenty-four hours. I’ll be able to do more then.”
“Will he live?”
“Yes, but that’s not always enough, is it?”
Jamie didn’t have the balls to ask Marc to expand, and Marc’s silence betrayed that he didn’t want to either. “What happens now... for you, I mean?”
“I’m coming home, Jamie. I just need to get Nat to Hereford first.”
“Bring him here,” Jamie said. “Connor’s here.”
“Oh yeah. Damn, I’m tired. Is Connor staying put?”
Jamie glanced up. Connor was a few feet away, but seemed to catch the gist, and nodded.
“He is,” Jamie said.
“Okay. I’ll see you in an hour or so, then. Oh, and it might be as well to lend them our bed for a bit. Nat’s dead on his feet.”
Our bed. Marc hung up. Jamie held the phone out to Connor. “They’re coming home. Marc said Nat’s tired, so you might want to rest up here before you head back. Take Marc’s room—it’s got clean sheets—I’ll fix something upstairs for us.”
Connor nodded slowly. “Nat gets tired when he’s stressed. He got really ill after a deployment a long time ago. It comes back sometimes.”
“PTSD?”
“No, it’s a more physical condition, but he took these for a while for depression.” Connor held up the box Jamie had left on the side. “They helped until the therapy kicked in too.”
“Nat had therapy?”
Jamie couldn’t see it, but Connor smiled wryly. “You’d be surprised how many of them do these days. War is the same as ever, but the world they return to is changing all the time. There’s no shame in asking for help, and Nat doing just that meant he could carry on. Without it, he’d be in a place where he and Marc wouldn’t have known so fast what had happened to Wedge. Andthatwould’ve killed the both of them.”