He forced that sliding door to close. It relented with a shove and a rusty shriek.
She hovered her finger an inch off his lips, her eyebrows raised in warning. Ah, what did it matter how much she knew? He couldn’t shock or disappoint her any more than he had. And there was already no future for them—she’d said it herself.
“Okay, okay, you win. No tennis.” He crossed his foot over his knee. “Which is a shame because I really like it when you play with my—”
The finger, again. He grinned and gently bit it. She pursed her lips, shaking her head.
“Fine,” he mumbled, releasing her finger and turning back to the mirror. “There it is, look! The mother lode!” A thick metal fiber, the tip just visible. “Can you hold the wound open while I grab it?”
She met his eye in the mirror. “Only if you talk.”
“You’re not serious?”
“I’m not serious about withholding my services but I am serious about wanting you to talk.” She held his gaze awhile. What happened to her always being the first to turn away? “Jamie, I admire the doctor in you. And I admire the soldier. But the human—that’s the part I like best of all.”
Okay, so that kind of gutted him. “Fine, you win. I’ll talk.” He closed in on the fiber with the precision of a drunk trying to walk a straight line. “What do you want to know?”
“The drugs, I guess.”
“Where do I start?”
“Try the beginning.”
He took a breath. “Okay. I was a med student. A few of us started playing with taking uppers to get through shifts, to cope with the pressure, the lack of sleep. With me they helped a little too much. I became the golden boy.”
She was silent awhile. “Youaregoing to give me more than that, yes? I had to work very hard to...formulate all those sentences earlier, and put them together in a coherent way.”
He closed the tweezers, felt them grip and gently pulled, steadying his breath. No resistance, it just slid out, bringing a whole lot of blood with it.Jackpot.“Aye, you were very coherent. You can let go now. I’ll clean it, we’ll put fresh strips on and that should do me until Corsica.”
As he reached for the gauze, her mirror image narrowed its eyes. “So the uppers?”
He sighed, wiping the blood. “Were supposed to be a temporary fix. I thought I could cope with them, quit at any time, because I knew the theory behind it, I understood exactly what they were doing to my brain. I was arrogant enough to think that that put me in control of the drugs. By the time I realized it was the other way around it was too late.”
“Go on.”
“Jesus, you’ve missed your calling. You should go and work for Tess’s TV station.”
“Jamie...” A warning tone, which kind of turned him on.
“It’s the classic stupid story. I was supposed to stop before it got to the point where I couldn’t operate without them. But I didn’t see that point coming until I got way past it. I felt sharper with them, until suddenly I didn’t, and by that time I didn’t know how to function sober. I needed the drugs to feel normal, whatever that was. And meanwhile I’d started taking sleeping tablets to switch off at night, and then those stopped working so well, so I...”
He closed his eyes. Fuck.
“Go on,” she said, gently.
He blinked hard. At least dressing the wound gave him an excuse to avoid her gaze. “I started using more serious drugs, whatever I could get a supply of—amphetamines, opiates... So, aye, a classic vicious cycle—the stronger the drug, the more I needed it. Then my stash of uppers ran out and I couldn’t get more. I freaked, fucked up, and a woman nearly died.”
“Oh my God, I’m sorry.”
“My supervisor stepped in just in time, and no harm came to her. But I would have killed her.” He exhaled, heavily. “And she had young kids...” His voice cracked.
“Oh Jamie...”
“The chief exec of the hospital got suspicious and had me drug tested. She wanted to hand me to the cops until she found out just how many of her staff were using drugs—and had stolen them, and bought and sold them. All illegally, of course—and she knew I wasn’t bullshitting because she’d had several reports of missing and stolen drugs. In a competitive environment like that, everybody’s trying to get an edge.”
“I can imagine. God, that must have been awful.”
“It was. I thought I was so smart. Kept promising myself that I’d take leave for a month and dry out but it’s really bloody hard to do that in such an intense job. I didn’t want to miss out on anything, get left behind, be seen as a slacker. In a weird way it was a relief to come clean.”
