A glance around revealed a scrawny girl crouched in the corner, with dirty hair and bad teeth, like every smackhead tramp Zac had ever seen. He turned back to Jamie and saw the powder and syringes covering the coffee table. My coffee table. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Jamie didn’t look up, engrossed in chopping and scraping the powder on the table. “What do you think?”
“I think you’ve brought a load of skag and a crack whore to my place.”
“Your place? Thought this was home for both of us?”
Jamie seemed amused, but Zac was far from it. His blood boiled with rage, and worse than that, his soul—which moments ago had been only for Liam—wept for the sticky brown powder he’d fought so hard to escape. He stared at it, knowing how easy it would be to swipe a handful and cook it up, load a syringe and fire it into his veins. The euphoria would be instant and all-consuming, and it would likely be days, weeks, months before regret caught up with him.
Zac’s hands twitched and his skin prickled. He took a step towards the table, but when Liam’s voice echoed in his brain again, instead of reaching for the smack, he lunged at Jamie, knocked the razor blade from his hand, and sent the powder flying. “Get out.”
Jamie blinked, his bloodshot gaze only mildly surprised, like he’d already jacked so much junk he barely felt Zac’s bruising grip on his wrist. “Easy, mate. I’m cutting it . . . you know, like we did back home, stirring in a bit of talc so we can flog it, yeah? Make some dosh. Kelly’s going to get—”
Zac lifted Jamie from the couch and threw him across the room, scattering the contents of the coffee table and the mud from Jamie’s shoes all over the floor. “Get the fuck out!”
Jamie landed in a heap by the girl’s feet. She got up and backed towards the door, eyeing Zac like he was an unexploded bomb, but Jamie didn’t move. Just stared as though Zac was the one who’d lost his fucking mind. “What’s wrong with you? Thought you’d be pleased I’d brought cash home.”
“But you haven’t brought cash home, have you? It’s a bucketload of fucking smack, and I don’t want it. I don’t want it in my place. Take it and go, Jamie. Before I fuck you up.”
Zac’s fury finally registered in Jamie’s long-dead eyes. He stood and faced Zac down, a cold sneer marring his wrecked face. “Fuck me up? Watcha gonna do? Stab me or some shit?”
“Get out!” Zac sprang at Jamie again, shoving him back. Jamie was taller than him, but his once-athletic frame had shrunk and shrunk over the past few months, leaving him nothing but bone and sinister ink that clung to his pale skin like broken barbed wire.
Jamie stumbled, saved from losing his feet only by the living room door. “Don’t be a dick, Zac. I’m not going anywhere.”
For a brief, foolish moment, guilt-tinged second thoughts clouded Zac’s brain, then he remembered the drugs on the table and knew without doubt that there was only one reason Jamie wouldn’t leave.
He spun around and grabbed a handful of Jamie’s stash from the floor. “This what you want? Go fucking get it.”
Zac opened the window and tossed the powder into the dim early-morning air, then grabbed another handful and another and another until Jamie jumped on him, but by then it was too late. There wasn’t much left of his haul save a few bags, some syringes, and a sprinkling of brown powder on the cream carpet that looked like sugar on porridge.
“You fucking arsehole!” Jamie lashed out, catching Zac with a clumsy punch and a swipe of his grimy, too-long nails. “What have you done?”
Zac growled and threw Jamie off him. “Chucked your junk on the street where it belongs. You’re next.”
Jamie wiped his nose with the back of his hand. In the scuffle, his hood had slipped, revealing his unshaved face and sunken eyes, his cracked, sore lips and chattering teeth. Zac’s heart ached for him, but he had too much to lose to let Jamie’s plight break them both. As much as he owed Jamie, he couldn’t save him. Not from this.
“Please, Jay, just go. You can’t be here right now.”
“Don’t want to fucking be here anyway. You’re a cunt, and I should’ve left you to rot when I had the chance.”
It would’ve hurt less if Jamie had kicked him in the face, but there was little Zac could do but watch him stumble out of the living room and wait for the thud that would surely come next.
The front door slammed a few moments later. Zac closed his eyes as his fury left him, mentally following Jamie wherever he was headed, like his own imagination could cocoon Jamie and shield him from whatever life held for him now. Would he ever come back? Perhaps when he was hungry . . . or desperate. Shit. Zac knew addiction well enough to know he’d have to change the locks.
He sank to the floor and put his head in his hands. The light and air he’d woken up with was long gone, leaving in its place the dark suffocation that came from the world he truly belonged in. Damn it, Jamie. Why today? Not that it mattered. With junk and syringes scattered over the living room floor, calling to him like a long-lost child, Zac was no better than Jamie. Never had been, and never would be unless he found the strength to scrape the remaining heroin from the carpet and let it join the rest on the pavement below.
With a heavy sigh, Zac opened his eyes and crawled across the floor, picking up syringes and bags as he went, until he got to the cupboard where he kept the cheap Hoover he’d bought with the money from his first night with Liam. He hoovered up the mess, being sure to get every last speck, but knowing it was languishing in the Hoover bag still did his head in.
Cursing Jamie, he wrestled the bag from the Hoover and took it outside, bypassing the wheelie bin assigned to the flat and traipsing barefoot down the road until he came to the bin that belonged to the three-bed semi with a gaggle of young children. It felt a little wrong to be stuffing a heroin-laced bag in with family rubbish, but addict or not, there was no way he’d be revisiting the rotting nappies of that bin.
Back at the flat, he noted that there was no sign of Jamie or his pal scrabbling around on the pavement, which was just as well. It had been dark when Zac had got up, but the sun was rising now, revealing the first frost of the year, a light, sparkling sprinkle that bit into his bare feet. As angry as he was with Jamie, he didn’t want to think of him down on his knees in this, not that there was much hope that Jamie wouldn’t end up on his knees somewhere that night.
Zac shut the front door with a heavy heart. He’d always known he’d lose Jamie at some point, had even prepared himself for the possibility that the very worst could happen, but he’d honestly believed they had more time. That the inevitable was far enough away that he could take comfort in an unhealthy dose of denial. But it wasn’t to be. Even if Jamie made it through the winter, he’d likely not forgive Zac this side of Christmas. Besides, as Zac checked his stash of cash behind the toilet and found it significantly lighter than it had been before Jamie’s clusterfuck of a homecoming, Zac was still angry enough for the both of them. Fuck Jamie. And fuck his junk.
The flat had been warm and cosy when Zac had got out of the shower, but it had cooled while he’d fought with Jamie and made his sad dash to the neighbour’s bins. And an empty bag and syringe wedged halfway under the sofa chilled his bones even more. Zac scooped them up and stuffed them in his pocket. He couldn’t face trudging back to the nappy pit just yet, but there was no way they could stay in the flat. Fuck no. I’ll deal with them later. He shut the window shivering, and picked up his phone as an afterthought. Seeing a message from Liam stilled his heart, and he was almost afraid to open it. It would top off his already shit day if Liam had changed his mind overnight.
Zac opened the message, squinting with one eye like it might blow up in his face at any moment, but Liam’s three words, punctuated by a kiss, quieted the demons dancing in his soul and made him smile so hard his face ached.
