“Oh.”
Marc slid toast onto two plates and inclined his head to the table a few feet away. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Jamie. Addiction is an illness as much as any other. You didn’t make yourself that way.”
It was a theory Jamie had heard before—that biology was to blame for his fucked-up impulses and crazed inability to control himself, but he didn’t buy it. Addict or not, he knew right from wrong, and time and time again, he’d chosen wrong.
Marc touched Jamie’s arm, gently forcing him to meet his eyes. “Sit down. Eat. I don’t care about anything else.”
“What if I’m not as clean as you think I am and I rob you blind?”
“Take what you want. Amount of shite I’ve got stuffed upstairs, you’d be doing me a favour.”
Jamie’s sleep-deprived brain couldn’t formulate a sensible response, and lacking any better ideas, he took a seat at the table and helped himself to a doorstop-sized slice of toast. Jam dripped onto his fingers, and he licked them clean. Damn. That shit was good. “Fuck, that’s gorgeous.”
“Yup. Good job too. Thirty jars to go.”
Jamie laughed, couldn’t help it as the ridiculous fluctuation in the subject matter hit home: junk to jam. There was a novel in there somewhere. There had to be. “I’ll help you eat it. It’s the least I can do after all you’ve done for me.”
“I haven’t done anything for you. I owed you breakfast from last time.”
A dim memory of chucking notes on the café table swam in Jamie’s mind, but he pushed back the roiling disquiet that had sent him dashing outside like a maniac that day. The warmth from the AGA and Marc’s company was too special to let go, though the need to be frank wouldn’t quite quit. “You know I’m a proper fucking junkie, don’t you? A year ago, I really would’ve cleaned you out.”
Marc chewed slowly and brushed crumbs from his hands. “I’ve never met a halfway addict. Never worked beyond emergency care with a heroin user either. My experience is mainly with booze, but I’d imagine the chemistry is the same whatever the poison. How long were you using heroin?”
“Three, four years, maybe? I don’t really remember, but it wasn’t just heroin. I rinsed anything I could get my hands on. I can’t have a beer anymore without wanting to drink the bar dry.”
“Case in point,” Marc said dryly.
“Is it?” Jamie licked jam from his fingers. “Zac isn’t like that. He got clean way before me, and he can drink booze fine. He even let me live with him when I was using, and he never slipped.”
“Sounds like you hate him a little bit for that.”
Jamie scowled, and he couldn’t deny it. Zac’s ability to compartmentalise his smack habit had driven Jamie up the wall. Still did. Because it wasn’tfair, damn it, even if it was Jamie’s own bullshit that had nearly cost Zac his life. “I could never hate him.”
“You love him?”
Marc’s tone gave nothing away, but Jamie interpreted the question to be one that he often asked himself. “Yes, but not like I used to—or how I thought I did, if that makes sense?”
“Do these things ever make sense?” Marc got up and put the kettle back on the stove. “I was in love with my CO for a while until I really started figuring out my sexuality, and realised my crush on him was a warped kind of hero complex.”
Jamie searched his brain for his limited grasp of military jargon. “‘CO’? That’s your boss, right?”
“One of them. You answer to a thousand men when you’re a medic, especially when you work on the ground, rather than the base hospitals.”
“And did you figure it out?”
“What? My sexuality?” Marc came back to the table with more coffee. “Heh. Maybe. I was married at the time, and it was easy to blame the breakdown of that relationship on the fact that I was getting a boner over my mate, but it wasn’t like that. My marriage didn’t work because I was too emotionally involved with my job. I had nothing left for my wife.”
Jamie absorbed that and tried to apply it to his own messed-up life. His relationship with junk had left him devoid of emotion for anything else.Just one more hit.Was that the same?He cleared his throat. “Was your friend gay?”
“Nah. He’s bi, which I think was the clincher for me. He did it so well, you know? Picking up girls in one country, and blokes in another. And there was me in my sinking marriage, desperate to have it all. I got over it, though. A shitty deployment will do that.”
“Where was your shitty deployment?”
“Iraq. I lost a lot of friends there.”
Marc’s eyes flickered to the window, his stare distant, and the pain was impossible to miss. Jamie laid a hand over his with little conscious thought. “I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose your friends like that. And to know that it could happen the next day all over again.”
“No?” Marc’s fingers tangled with Jamie’s, and he turned his gaze back to him, the hurt in his face fading fast, like he’d caught it and locked it up in a box with a tiny hole. “You must have lost friends too.”
