Rhapsody on a Theme (29 page)

“Bring him here?” he repeated beseechingly.

“If I do, will you let the doctor put your shoulder back in, because
that
,” she jabbed a finger in the direction of his left shoulder, “looks disgusting.”

“When you’ve brought him,” Jayden bargained, and she sighed heavily before disappearing. He waited, fidgeting with the urge to just get up and follow her, but he’d nearly passed out from the pain of getting out of the car, so figured maybe it wasn’t a good idea. The nurses already all thought he was a complete prick anyway, they might just leave him there, and then…

“Darren!”

Rachel pushed Darren in, like a tugboat steering a destroyer. Darren was very white in the face, a narrow gash along the edge of his hairline held together with a neat run of tiny black stitches, blood all down his T-shirt, but he was walking normally and his hair was damply fluffy instead of glued together with rusty clots.

“Oh my God,” Jayden said and reached. Darren caught his hand and squeezed it. His fingers were warm and steady. “Are you all right? You were knocked out, and—they’ve checked, right, that you’re okay? Are they going to keep you in?”

“Relax,” Darren drawled. “I’m fine. Not even a concussion.”

He perched on the edge of the bed, Jayden’s hand in his lap. His fingers were warm, and—okay, so Rachel was right and he was going to have an
amazing
black eye in the morning, a ring of ferocious purple and stinging deep blue and framed by several little scratches around the eye socket, and the black stitches under his hair looked weird, but the relief was so staggeringly sharp that to Jayden he’d never looked more beautiful.

“Are you going to let the doctor put your shoulder back?”

“I guess,” Jayden said, and Rachel vanished again, probably to drop him in it. “You’ll stay though, right?”

“Yeah.” Darren squeezed his hand again. “If you want. Why were you freaking so badly?”

“I dunno.” Jayden flushed. It had been stupid, he knew, but…but he
had
, all the same. “I…I have no idea. Panicked? I don’t know, you were unconscious and bleeding and I…I got scared, because we’d been arguing and you’ve been ill and you could have been really hurt and you had a head injury and God knows what that could do and…”

“Mm, okay,” Darren said, his voice dropping into a deep murmur. His soothing voice. “For the record, be grateful they didn’t put you in the same ambo as me.”

“Why?”

“I threw up on an orderly.”

“That sounds concussed,” Jayden fussed.

“No, it was the huge bruise from the seatbelt,” Darren said. “I got winded. Doctor reckons that’s actually why I blacked out—combination of the smack in the head and the punch in the gut. I have a stripe.”

“He does!” Rachel called, bouncing back into the ward. “It looks amazing!”

“Ah.” The doctor was back, trailing in Rachel’s wake, and Jayden clutched Darren’s hand tightly. “I am informed I might be
permitted
to see to your shoulder now, Mr. Phillips?”

Darren’s face smoothed into that façade Jayden remembered so, so well from school. The
I’m about to be a massive tool
face. The one he got from his mother. “Jayden had concerns that were not addressed by your medical team,” he said briskly. “As the doctor for a patient with mental competency, you should always be seeking his permission to treat. Why is this any different?”

The doctor’s lips thinned angrily, but he huffed through his nose and came around to the other side of the bed. “Sit up for me, Mr. Phillips.”

“Your name?” Darren prompted.

“Sorry?”

“What’s your name?”

“Dr. Jacobs.”

“Noted,” Darren drawled.

“Darren, cut it out,” Jayden muttered, wincing as the doctor palmed the shoulder, leaving flares of throbbing pain in the wake of his hands. He squeezed Darren’s fingers tightly. “This is going to
hurt
,” he said, and his voice was almost a whine.

“Well, yeah. A popped shoulder hurts like hell, I’d know.”

Jayden gave him a look. “When did you ever pop your shoulder?”

“Few years back,” Darren said, and Jayden eyed him suspiciously. “What?”

“I didn’t know you did that, when did—
JESUS
!” Jayden yelped as the doctor quickly, expertly, and incredibly painfully slammed the shoulder back into its socket. Almost instantly, the flash of pain subsided, but Jayden ground his teeth against the memory of it, his vision blurring, and when Darren stroked his hair and murmured something soothing, he realised he was crying. “Oh Jesus.
Ow
. Jesus.”

“It’ll ease up in a minute,” Darren said.

“I’d keep it in the sling a couple of days if I were you, Mr. Phillips, but you’re young and fit and it was a clean dislocation. Let it rest, then gentle exercise until it’s healed. See your GP if it gives you any problem or you’re concerned.”

“That’s it?” Jayden mumbled, still clenching his jaw. The shoulder throbbed dully, and he wiggled his fingers against his chest. “I’m discharged?”

“This is A&E. We’re busy,” the doctor said flatly. He looked haggard, as though he’d been on shift for hours, and Jayden felt a very dull pang of pity. Darren looked mutinous, though, and Jayden pre-empted the words by sighing and pulling on his hand.

“I want to go home,” he said thinly.

“Okay,” Darren slid an arm carefully around him, and Jayden sagged gratefully into his side. The T-shirt was ruined, he decided vaguely. “Rachel’s going to take us home. She’s just getting some sheet on head injuries from the quack who saw to me, and then we’ll go home, all right?”

Jayden wound his fingers into Darren’s shirt, buried his nose in the top of his good shoulder, and inhaled.

Darren smelled of petrol, smoke, and blood. But underneath, when Jayden concentrated, he could smell Darren himself, and finally relaxed.

By eight o’clock that evening, Jayden was absolutely shattered.

He had twitched all the way home in Rachel’s car, still jittery, and Darren had bundled him off to bed in a strict no-nonsense manner he’d
definitely
picked up from Mrs. Peace (or whatever she was called after the divorce. Ms. Akbar?). Then the phone hadn’t stopped ringing for a couple of hours—Jayden’s mum, after the hospital had finally decided to call her; Darren’s brother, for the same reason; Ethan, after seeing Rachel’s laughing Facebook update that tagged both of them as having been in a smash…

Ethan had been funny, actually, because he’d spent half an hour shouting at Darren for ‘fucking up your fuck-ugly face a week before my big fucking day, you fuck!’ and hadn’t deviated from the theme much for the entire call, getting steadily more and more inventive as he went along. Darren had nearly laughed himself sick, and Jayden had curled up against him in the warm safety of their bed and let the banter and the heat of Darren’s skin soothe his jangled nerves.

But one thing had kept niggling away in the back of his mind, and once Darren had finally fended off a
bizarre
call from his
mother
, of all people (who had apparently also been contacted by the hospital, despite his other emergency contact being Scott) Jayden opted to find out the history to Darren’s odd reassurance that had been lingering in the back of his mind all evening.

“When did you dislocate your shoulder?” he asked in a quiet voice as Darren hung up on his mother.

“What?” Darren asked absently.

Jayden curled around the left arm he had caught and adopted for a hug. Darren’s fingers twitched lightly on his back. “You said…you said you knew what this felt like. But you never told me you dislocated your shoulder.”

Darren paused. “Oh,” he said. Then, after a moment, he added: “I guess I just forgot.”

“You forgot?” Jayden asked curiously.

“Don’t get mad.”

Jayden blinked, and got mad. “Why not? When was it? What did you
do
?”

“I, er. Well. I had a lapse of judgment and offered the wrong arm in self-defence training when I started this job,” Darren explained. He was staring at the ceiling, very carefully not looking Jayden’s way, but his fingers were still rubbing warm little circles into Jayden’s spine. He felt relaxed under Jayden’s weight, for the moment. “It was when you were at Cambridge.”

Jayden paused. “So…”

“So…things were…getting weird between us, and I didn’t want to tell you,” Darren admitted. Jayden felt a little sick at that. “I figured you’d only nag me about my job and why I hadn’t gone to university again and I…wasn’t in the mental place to deal with that.”

Jayden flinched and shifted his face to kiss the shoulder. The tattoo ink still felt strange under his lips, and he kissed it again absently, turning it over in his mind—which offered him the other question, the one Paul had raised months ago now, the one Jayden had wanted and not wanted to ask about. “Is this…is, um…don’t get mad?” he echoed, and Darren raised his eyebrows. “I mean…I don’t know, don’t get…defensive?”

“…Why?”

Jayden took a deep breath. “When we went for the suit fittings, Paul, um…Paul said…said he’d never tried to take his car off-road.”

Darren stiffened, and Jayden went from warily curious to outright alarmed.

“Darren?” he whispered fearfully.

“I…”

“Oh God, Darren, what did he mean?”

Darren took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “It was…it was that year you were at Cambridge,” he said. “And never since. Or before. That was the only time.”

“What did you do?” Jayden repeated in a hollow whisper.

“It’s
history
, and it’s dead and buried.”

“What did you
do
?”

“The training centre…just above it, there’s a bend with a tree by the road. A couple of times, going to work, I’d look at that tree and think it’d be so easy to just…not turn. Just keep going, wrap the car around the tree, and…bang. That’d be it. Couple of times, I turned at the very last second. Right before I overdosed…maybe a week earlier, I can’t quite remember, I was sent home sick. They thought I had flu. And I drove like a fucking idiot back home, intended to go up into the flat and…well, knife drawer, you know. But then you texted me. Can’t even remember what you said, but you texted me something and it stopped me. But I got…rattled, and after…after the overdose, Paul grilled me about what had been going on and I told him. He just about murdered me too, but…that’s what he was referring to.”

Jayden stared at that still, closed face for a moment, and then…just…he started crying.

Maybe it was the sore nerves from the crash, maybe the lingering shock, or maybe just the flat-out, stark reminder of how
bad
Darren had gotten that year and how he’d only just now started to
really
recover…but it struck home, like a knife in the heart, and suddenly Jayden just burst into tears.

“Oh Jesus. Hey, hey, no,” Darren murmured soothingly, and Jayden was being turned and pulled into a hug, firm but gentle in deference to his strapped shoulder and the lingering soreness in both of them. Darren smelled of shower gel and cooking now, and he was
hot
in that pulsating way he always was in bed, and Jayden clung to him and cried into his sleep shirt, great wracking sobs that tore through his chest until they were physically painful. “Ssh, come on, Jayden. It’s okay—
I’m
okay—and I never did it, did I? I’ve never had a crash before either, ‘cept if you count that silly cow who took my wing mirror off in the Asda car park last year. It’s all right. It was just a fleeting thing, I haven’t done it since, I swear to you.”

Jayden shook his head and just cried harder. It hurt. It
hurt
, that Darren had ever wanted to, that Jayden hadn’t been there then, that he’d
let
Darren get that bad, that…that he’d been so fucking
stupid
to think that Cambridge—or
anything—
was ever going to be more important than
this
, than this man talking to him and holding him and…

“It’s all right,” Darren said, a large hand briefly cupping the back of Jayden’s head before beginning to stroke his hair in a soothing, almost petting motion. “Come on, calm down. We’re okay, aren’t we? We’re here and we’re fine and we got through the bad spell, and if this stuff I’m popping every morning keeps working, we might be out the other side as much as we can be.”

“I was so fucking stupid,” Jayden croaked, and a sob hitched and turned into a choking cough. “I was so
stupid
.”

“You were like nineteen,” Darren said. “And you’ve easily been dumber before.”

“Like when?”

“Like the first time you made me bleed during sex and wanted to take me to hospital and wouldn’t so much as kiss me for like a week, even though I could barely feel it?”

“That’s different,” Jayden stammered and clung tighter. “I love you. I love you, I
love
you, and you…just…don’t leave me,” he begged. “Don’t…don’t ever. Ever.”

Darren made a soothing noise, and dropped both arms around Jayden’s waist, twisting them until Jayden was settled over his chest. Jayden dropped his head to listen to that steady, slow heartbeat—so
slow
, it had always been so slow, it had
fascinated
him when they were teenagers—and push his good arm up under the sleeping shirt to find the wash of heat and smooth expanses of Darren’s bare skin.

Slowly, he calmed, the tears gradually abating, and he wrapped his mind around where they were
now
. It
was
history. Darren was here, and Jayden could keep him okay here. The pregabalin was keeping him safe, for the minute. And it was
working
, because Darren was
himself
at the moment, even after a head injury and an accident, and…and he’d promised. Darren didn’t promise if he couldn’t keep it. He’d never promised not to kill himself, because they both knew when he was having an episode he was irrational. But he’d promised that he hadn’t done it since, hadn’t he? So he
hadn’t
.