Jamie listened to Marc manoeuvre himself down the steep narrow staircase. Every instinct he had screamed at him to help, but he stayed where he was. Marc struck him as a dude who didn’t accept help easily, and Jamie got that. How many times had he burned Marvin’s helping hand? “Leave me alone. I can do it.”

When he heard Marc safely reach the bottom, he returned to his love affair with the groaning bookshelves. He recognised some titles from the community library he’d hung out at in King’s Cross before the security guards had got wind that he was using the place to hide from the rain, and a few titles from school, but there were many he’d never heard of.

He pulled out one that caught his eye—Charlie Big Potatoes—and scanned the back, and then wished he hadn’t. It read like a lad’s mag cover, laced with the socially acceptable version of alcoholism—turn up drunk to a few business meetings, run naked down the street in the dead of night when no one will see you, then see the light and live happily ever after. Blah, blah, blah. Jamie had heard enough of that bullshit in rehab, and had found himself gravitating to the hard-core meth-heads who’d ruined far more lives than just their own. Misery loves company.

Jamie put the book back and picked up a Stephen King that he’d read before. Horror novels were his favourite, along with Russian history; one of his weird obsessions. He blamed his grandmother for that. Evil old witch. But Jamie wasn’t going to think about her now.

He wandered to the only seat in the room—a bench built into the windowsill—and sat down, flicking absently through Carrie, but after a few minutes, he cast the book aside and instead gazed around the book-filled room again, comparing it to the rest of the house that he’d seen so far. It hadn’t taken him long to find it—it was the only house for miles in the direction Marc had pointed—though he’d had trouble reconciling the grand old building with the humble bloke he’d met on the plane. Now he was inside, and knew about Marc’s mum, it all made sense, but still . . . the house didn’t feel like Marc. At least not the Marc that Jamie had spent the last three weeks dreaming of.

The interior of the house wasn’t what he’d expected either. Far from stuffed with grandeur and luxury, the house was old and shabby, and the upstairs was caked in dust, like no one had been up there in years. Jamie heard Marc moving around somewhere below him and imagined him wincing as he tackled the stairs again. Fuck that. Jamie tore himself away from the window—and the books—and returned to the kitchen.

Marc was toasting bread on the giant oven. His half-closed eyes made him look a million miles away, and Jamie considered leaving him to it. Poor bloke had been at work all night, and now he was faffing around for Jamie’s sake.

But Jamie didn’t leave. Couldn’t. Marc’s broad back called to him, and he found himself treading silently across the surprisingly sleek kitchen until he was at Marc’s side. “How come it’s all modern down here and like a museum upstairs?”

“Because I live downstairs, so I had to fix it up before I could move in for good.”

“Where did you live before?”

“Here and there. Hospital until I was back on my feet, then I travelled around a bit, working in a couple of hospitals until I learned the ropes of civvie medicine.”

“‘Civvie’?”

“Civilian. The anatomy is the same, but it’s a different animal. It took me a while to get used to assessing a patient without a helicopter buzzing above my head.”

And the rest. But Jamie suppressed his shudder. The idea of Marc being blown to bits lanced his heart with a pain that he’d never encountered before, even in the deepest throes of withdrawal. He leaned closer to Marc and looked over his shoulder at the great hunks of bread Marc had jammed into some kind of cage. “I’ve never seen toast made like that.”

“It’s the AGA way. This stove was the one thing I could salvage from my mum’s old kitchen. And it saves me a fortune on heating.”

“Mmm. I like the warmth. It’s like an open fire. You just need a dog sleeping in front of it.”

Marc chuckled softly. “That’s usually me. Once I drop on that couch over there, I’m done for most days. Shouldn’t have bothered buying a bed.”

It was on the tip of Jamie’s tongue to ask just where Marc’s bedroom was as he couldn’t see any sign of one, but Marc broke the moment by stepping away to open a door marked Pantry.

He disappeared inside. Jamie mourned the loss of his soothing presence, but he was back before Jamie could blink, armed with a clutch of jam jars.

“Take some home, mate. I’m running out of old ladies to give it to.”

Jamie wasn’t about to refuse free food—a habit he’d yet to kick, even though he had enough money in the bank to buy plenty of his own. He took the jar Marc proffered, and held it up to the light. The jam inside was an odd greenish-brown, and didn’t seem that appetising until Marc opened the jar he’d kept back and spooned it onto the thick toast he’d made. “Wow. That looks like nectar.”

“It ain’t bad,” Marc said. “I love my grub, but some days I’m too tired and pissed off to eat anything but this stuff with a big-arse spoon.”

“I used to do that with peanut butter when Zac wasn’t around to feed me.”

“Zac?”

“My friend . . . at least, he used to be. I crashed at his flat sometimes before I went to America.”

“Before you got clean?”

Jamie blinked. “What?”

“Sorry,” Marc said, though he didn’t appear particularly remorseful. “I get a bit of a recovery vibe from you. And I saw the needle scars on your arms.”

“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’t fair, 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.”

“They’re not your friends when you’re shooting the life out of each other, hoping that one of you dies so you can either have the rest of their junk, or be finally free—” Jamie covered his mouth with his other hand and sucked in a shaky breath before letting his hand drop again. “They weren’t my friends.”

“I don’t believe you.” Marc spoke with a sad smile and started to pull his hand back, but Jamie gripped it tight.

“There was one person I cared about, right at the beginning . . . Um, she was kind of my girlfriend, without actually being my girlfriend, because we were both gay.”

“How old were you?”

“Sixteen. We ran away together after I got expelled from school.”

“What was her name?”

“Chloe.” Jamie chewed on his lip as Marc and his big old house evaporated, and in his place came the wild blonde hair of the girl who’d been his constant companion until one day she hadn’t been. “She wasn’t like me, though. She ran off for a while, but she always went home at the weekends. Her parents knew about the junk, but they didn’t get it, you know? They thought she’d just stop one day and it would all be okay.”

“What about your parents?”

“I don’t want to talk about them.” I can’t talk about them.

“Sorry. It’s the doctor in me. I can’t help pushing when I know there’s more. Carry on, please.”

“There’s not much to tell. Eventually, she stopped going home, and her dad stopped coming by the squat to get her. She couldn’t go home anymore, you see, because she was hooking by then, we both were. And it killed her.”

“How?”

“She was strangled by a john and dumped in the woods. It took them five months to find her body. I knew she was dead, of course; I could feel it. But it didn’t stop me looking for her. Even now, I do a double take when I see hair like hers. Sometimes it feels like I’ll never stop looking.”

“You probably won’t. I’m still looking for mates who’ve been dead more than a decade. But it does get better . . . for a while, until you lose someone else, and then it’s like the first time all over again.”

“You don’t get used to it?”

Marc shook his head. “I never did, because I didn’t want to . . . because it would have meant that my friends weren’t really my friends. And in my line of work, you need your buddies. It isn’t worth it without them. Nothing is.”

Jamie stared at their entwined hands, and then at Marc, losing himself in a desperate desire to kiss him, until he saw that Marc looked suddenly and profoundly tired.

“I should go,” he said reluctantly. “You need to get to bed.”

Marc snorted. “Fat chance. I crash on the couch most days.”

“Is your bed upstairs?”

“No, I just can’t be arsed with it. When you’re used to sleeping on bunks, a big empty bed feels weird. I sleep better in here.”

With the warmth of the AGA warming Jamie’s back, he could well imagine why; he didn’t relish the idea of a windy walk home. And it felt entirely wrong to leave Marc, even though Marc’s enduring grip on Jamie’s hand was the only sign that Marc wanted him to stay.

With herculean effort, Jamie detangled himself and stood. Marc’s cat appeared like a disapproving ghost and used his shoulder as a bridge to the windowsill. Her claws digging into his flesh brought some much-needed perspective, and Jamie turned away from Marc and drifted to the front door. He was dimly aware of Marc following, but he didn’t look back.

“Jamie.”

I don’t want to go.

Jamie glanced over his shoulder. “Thanks for breakfast. Sorry it got a little heavy at the end.”

“Jamie.”

“What?”

Silence.

Jamie turned to find Marc behind him, strong arms folded across his chest, his expression similar to the one he’d worn on the plane all those weeks ago. Damn. Had that only been weeks ago? Right now, it seemed like a year.

“Jamie,” Marc said again. “You don’t have to run away every time you’ve had enough of me for one day.”

“It’s not you I’ve had enough of. It’s me. Besides, you’ve been up all night. You might not want to go to bed, but you still need to sleep.”

“Are you going to be okay?”

Jamie shrugged. “I think so. I’m not usually this morbid, I swear. I guess I’m just bored. Maybe I’ll be better when I find a job.”

“I’ve been thinking about that.”

“Why?”

It was Marc’s turn to shrug. “Why not? We’re, uh, friends, aren’t we?”

Were they? Jamie had no idea, but he wasn’t going to shoot Marc down if he was offering. “What’s that got to do with me being terminally unemployed?”

“I’ve got something you can help me with if you want to earn some cash while you keep looking.”

“Like what?”

Marc gestured all around them. “This house. It needs clearing out, and I don’t have the time or the legs to do it myself. I’ve been meaning to put an ad in the local rag for weeks now, but if you’re willing you, could save me the trouble.”

“You want me to work for you?”

“Not particularly. I want to spend time with you—get to know you better, but I also want to help you. And I need some help myself. What do you say?”

“Um.” Jamie chewed his lip. The notion of spending his days in Marc’s house, rooting through the contents of all the mystery rooms, was the best offer he’d had in years, but did he want to take Marc’s money when, if they were friends after all, it was something he could do out of the simple desire to help a mate out?

“Don’t answer me now,” Marc said when Jamie didn’t respond with a sensible answer. “Think about it. You know where I am when you decide. And come over anyway, even if you don’t want to do it. If I’m not at the hospital, I’m usually here.”

“You don’t go anywhere else?”

“Not around here. I shoot off to see friends when I get itchy feet, but I’m trying to stop that at the moment. Face my life for what it is so I can make it better.”

“It’s not easy to face yourself?”

“You tell me.”

Jamie grinned a little. “Touché. I’d better go. I’ll see you soon?”

“With any luck. Take care, Jamie.”

“You too.”