Benito said nothing. Couldn’t, with his tongue wedged to the roof of his mouth and a cinderblock wedged in his throat. He lay a cautious hand on Mickey’s chest, absorbing the still muscles and the steady thump of his heart.He’s calm. Maybe he needs this... to talk.
Maybe Benito needed to listen.
He rubbed Mickey’s warm skin, ignoring the ache in his groin. “I know what it’s like to get cornered by shit you can’t control.”
Mickey watched Benito’s fingers trace patterns on his torso. “I could’ve controlled it—at least at the start, but I was weak, man, and it swallowed me whole.”
“The coke?”
“Yeah. We were moving so much product I thought they wouldn’t noticed if I lifted some for myself, but then one gram became five, then ten, and I couldn’t keep up with the lies.”
“You got caught?”
“I think so. Even now, I’m not sure, and that’s the worst part. I’ll take addiction over paranoia any day of the week.”
Benito turned it over in his mind. Addiction wasn’t a vice he owned, but he knew paranoia all too well. The shadows that danced too fast to catch. “What do you think happened?”
“I think I spent a week locked in my flat thinking someone was coming to murder me. The bloke I lived with found me boarding up the windows with a nail gun.”
“How likely was it that someone was gonna whack you?”
Mickey shrugged. “Fifty-fifty. That’s the game, right? Kill or be killed?”
“If you play it that way.”
Mickey caught Benito’s hand. For a moment, Benito feared it was to push him away, but Mickey laced their fingers together and held tight. “I thought he was trying to help me.”
“Who? Your flatmate?”
“Yeah. But he called our boss. They took me to a field in the middle of fucking nowhere and told me to get the fuck out of the city and stay out, or they’d burn my whole family. I didn’t question if they meant it or not. I’d seen shit, you know?”
Benito nodded, guilt and pain manifesting so tightly in his chest he couldn’t breathe. Again. “What did you do?”
“What they said. I had fifty quid in clean money, so I bought a ticket heading south and got on a train. I woke up in hospital three days later. I’m not sure what happened in between.”
“Did they help you? In the hospital?”
“They had to. I’d banged so much coke I’d had a fucking stroke, so I was in there a while.”
“You had a stroke?”
“A tiny one. Couldn’t close my eye properly for six months or use my left hand. It was some fucked-up shit.”
Benito squeezed Mickey’s hand. “You’re okay now, though, right?”
“Yeah. I was lucky. Getting hooked on the gym helped. And I kept busy with night courses and stuff. It’s harder now I have more free time.”
“I meant the after-effects of the stroke, not your addiction.”
“I know you did, but I don’t care about the stroke. Recovering from that was easy because there was an end point. I’d reach milestones and move past them forever. Addiction isn’t like that. Some days I wake up—if I ever fucking sleep—and I’m back where I started.”
“When did you last use?”
“The day I left Manchester.”
“When you got on the train?”
Mickey hummed and fixed Benito with a gaze that was somehow penetrating and yet so distant Benito wanted to cry. “It was three years ago, and I’m still a mess. You need to think about that when you’re out there doing whatever you do with two phones and bundles of dirty cash.”