“Tomorrow, probably. He’s going to be out of commission for a while, but... I’d like you to meet him when he’s with it again. I think you’ll like him. He’s much more fun than me or Nat.”
“Fun?”
Marc smiled wistfully. “Yeah. I always thought I’d die laughing before anything else when he was around.”
Jamie said nothing, and Marc closed his eyes, absorbing the peaceful silence for a while, but he didn’t sleep. At least, he didn’t think he had until he came to and found Jamie busy with a notebook and pencil he hadn’t seen before. “What’s that?”
“Homework. I don’t start CBT for a few weeks, but the psychiatrist wants me to keep a journal.”
Marc sat up, careful not to look too closely at Jamie’s neat handwriting. “How do you feel about that?”
“Good, actually.” Jamie kept his eyes on his work. “And you were right about those pills. I didn’t feel a thing.”
“You might never feel any tangible effects, but sometimes the act of just doing something constructive is enough.”
Jamie smiled and his gaze flickered to Marc. “I’m learning that.”
* * *
Later, after a few hours’ sleep and three bowls of Jamie’s groundnut chicken, Marc wandered to the bottom of the garden to make a plethora of official phone calls. Most were to old colleagues at Selly Oak, but the last was to the trauma surgeon who had taken Ludo—a case that felt like a lifetime ago, but had been on Marc’s mind all the way home.
“A suicide attempt, apparently,” the surgeon said bluntly after he’d updated Marc on Ludo’s medical status. “I’d argue that it was a cry for help, but a jump like that is hard to interpret as much else but a desire for death.”
Marc couldn’t argue, and he hung up with a heavy sigh and a sudden need to be as close to Jamie as possible.
Pocketing his phone, he hurried inside and found Jamie stripping the bed that Nat and Connor had slept in, his face a study in careful concentration. Marc wound his arms tight around Jamie’s narrow waist and buried his face in hair that smelled of sex and beeswax furniture polish. “I love you.”
Jamie leaned back against him. “I love you too. Are you okay?”
“Yep.”
“Are you?” Jamie twisted in Marc’s embrace and studied him. “You look like you’re fretting.”
“I am. That’s my addiction, remember?”
“I do. Who are you fretting about? ’Cause I’d bet my balls it’s not your own skin. Is it Wedge?”
Marc shook his head. “No. Wedge will be okay... eventually, at least. He’s a tough motherfucker.”
“Then who? Nat? Because he seemed okay when they left. Connor said he’d be right as rain after a few days’ rest.”
“It’s not Nat. It’s another patient—the call I got when you were at the hospital.”
“Oh. I guess you can’t tell me much about that either, eh?”
“No, but he reminded me of you, and it scared me. When I woke up earlier, I had to check you were really there and not some figment of my dreams. That the worst hadn’t happened while I’d been asleep.”
Comprehension dawned in Jamie’s sharp eyes. “Is that why you slapped me round the face?”
“Did I? Shit, I’m sorry.”
Jamie shrugged. “It’s okay. It felt symbolic, actually, even though I could tell that you didn’t know you’d done it.”
“Symbolic? In what way?”
“Everyone needs a kick up the arse sometimes, right?”
Marc tilted his head to one side and regarded Jamie, the subtle change in him suddenly and glaringly obvious. “What’s going on with you? You seem different.”