But Marc lingers, tilting his head a little, scanning me with a thoughtful stare I’m never in the mood for. “Everything okay?”
“Better now the rain’s stopped.” The meaningless words come easy. And they hit the spot. Marc’s no fool, but he’s spread thin, distracted by trying to keep an underfunded department safe. He believes me and asks about Jack instead, about his brother Mal, because Marc was a soldier once too.
“You know him?”
“Mal Gallagher?” Marc shrugs. “Way after my time, but I’ve trained with him. Know his face and where it’s been. It’s shit what happened to his crew.”
He speaks as if I know, but it’s the one thing Jack hasn’t told me. Because it doesn’t matter how many shadows mar my friend’s brain, he’ll take his military omertà to the grave.
“Anyway.” Marc turns his head as someone calls his name. “I’m going to need you tonight, okay? So don’t let anyone fuck you about.”
He leaves me with that, and a hollow ache in my stomach that has nothing to do with anyone but me. An empty wrench I can’t seem to rectify, not today.Should’ve eaten.Story of my life. But I ignore it, just like I ignored Jack’s breakfast and the questionable muffins admin dumped on the stupid fucking table I’m still sitting at.
I push upright and escape to my locker, digging out the protein snacks I keep stashed at the back. White chocolate. Vanilla. I hate them. But I slowly chew an over-sweet bar, andswallow even slower until it’s gone. Until it’s down and I win the war to keep it that way.
Function.
That’s all I need today. To survive, until this time tomorrow. If Marc gets his way, it’ll be easier. But this life…it’s never fucking easy, unless I’m asleep, and that’s not happening until I sit at another cursed table, wishing I was dead.
Is that even living?
Today’s one of those days I’m not so sure it is.
Marc does get his way. It’s hard for even the most jobsworth manager to argue with a doc as experienced as him. And I’m as glad of it as I am unnerved when the late shift descends into the kind of carnage that makes the hours fly by. I work overtime because they need me as much as I need to be occupied, but it’s over before I can blink.
Fuck.
I’m at my locker again, contemplating my options. I’ve been gone long enough that my housemates have noticed, but I turn my phone off and shove it in my pocket, shovethemin my pocket—I can’t go home right now.
Not like this.
Notyet.
But it’s the middle of the night in Cornwall, a county that keeps civilised hours outside of the few wild towns scattered up and down the coast. I live in the wildest of them all, but lucky for me, there are others with underground bars dark enough that no one knows my name, and that’s where I need to be to kill this godforsaken time.
I leave the hospital and step outside, drawing my hood up against nothing but my own fucking self. A bad habit, maybe, but I have enough that this one doesn’t seem too important. I don’t think about it as I find my car, slide behind the wheel, and drive away from my late shift. I don’t think about anything, and by the time I reach the only place I can stand to be, my mind is scarily blank.
At least, it’d be scary if I knew. But like this, I don’t know anything except it’s the only port in a storm I can handle.
I ditch my car and move through the dodgy after-hours pub as if I’ve been here a hundred times, when in truth it’s only been a couple. I don’t get like this much. It’s why it’s so gnarly when I do. Why something so horribly familiar leaves me so shell-shocked.
Drink.
I want to. But despite the disassociation bearing down on me, enough awareness lingers for me to know it’s a bad idea on a stomach as empty as mine.
A shadowed corner at the end of the bar calls my name. I claim the stool pushed against the wall and sink into it. I get a beer I won’t drink and stare at my phone, angling it so no one nearby can see it’s dead. And that’s me for the longest time, head spinning and yet so fucking still a breath of wind would blow me over. There’s nothing else, until there is, and the footprint of the bar creeps into my fucked-up reality.
The scent of over-fermented cider and spilt beer. A tangle of fairy lights in a cracked jam jar. Low music I’d probably hate if I listened hard enough, and a tanned hand on the bar way too close to my untouched beer for comfort.
Unblinking, I study the hand, then a corded forearm and bicep, and finally the face of the man they belong to.
Tall.
Scruffy.
Ash-brown hair framing his unshaven jaw, and long lashes and sage green eyes that stir something in me, but I’m too foggy and spun out to know what.
Then he turns his head. He locks his gaze on mine, and like magic, I’m not spinning anymore. “Rough fucking night?”