Chapter 287

“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.

* * * *

25

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.