Marc kicked the front door shut and quickly scanned the ground floor of the house. Connor appeared from the downstairs bedroom, so Jamie had to be somewhere else.

Dimly aware of Nat pushing past him to get to Connor, Marc made for the stairs. His body ached, but he welcomed it. For hours now, pain had been the only thing keeping him awake. That and the fear of crashing his car into a ditch and leaving Nat in the same state that Wedge was in. Yeah, that was right—fifteen years of active service and a rolling Land Rover on the backstreets of Aleppo had snapped his fucking neck.

Anger kept Marc upright as he hauled himself upstairs, and then relief nearly floored him when Jamie appeared on the landing.

Jamie stepped forward, arms outstretched. “You’re home—”

Marc cut him off with a crazed kiss, and pushed him backwards into a bedroom that had been crammed floor to ceiling with junk until Jamie had come along.

It felt like Marc’s heart had been through the same rebirth. He’d intended to fall on top of Jamie, kiss the hell out of him, then pass out for as long as his treacherous conscience would allow him, but his tired body had other ideas. Jamie was dressed in loose sweatpants with no underwear beneath. Marc stripped them away and took Jamie in his mouth before Jamie could rid Marc of his own clothes.

Jamie’s body arched up from the bed, and Marc grabbed his hands and slammed them onto the back of his own head. Clearly reading the move, Jamie gripped Marc’s skull and fucked Marc’s mouth, driving his cock deep with the brutal force that Marc needed to tie him down to the world.

“Oh God,” Jamie ground out. “I’m going to come.”

Not yet. Marc pulled back and shoved Jamie over. He wanted to fuck him so badly, but what was left of his perspective reminded him that there was no lube to hand.

Or so he thought. Jamie reached for his discarded sweatpants and retrieved a small bottle of lube. “It was on the side in your room. I swiped it before Connor saw it.”

“He wouldn’t have minded.”

Jamie smirked. “Maybe not, but just as well, eh?”

“Yep.” Marc took the lube and shucked his clothes.

Jamie, already on his knees, fell forward and pressed his chest to the bed. Marc sucked in a shaky breath, shed his prosthesis, and then moved on Jamie like a starving man. He fucked Jamie all over the bed, in every position. But in the end, he brought Jamie back to where he could hold him close, and stare into his eyes as he fucked him, hoping that Jamie interpreted the harsh drive of his cock as a measure of how much he loved him. Because, fuck, he loved Jamie. He’d known it from the moment they met, but now . . . damn. He loved the bloody bones off him. “I love you.”

“I know,” Jamie whispered. And he came with a ragged cry. “I love you too. Please believe me.”

Marc closed his eyes and thrust into Jamie even harder. White spots danced behind his eyelids, and he climaxed with a violent shudder. “I do believe you,” he gasped out. “Of course I do. I love you, Jamie. I love you so much.”

For a long moment neither of them spoke, but then perspective nudged at Marc’s consciousness and he rolled off Jamie, collapsing onto his back, panting wildly. He threw an arm out and found Jamie’s belly, and then his hand, and they twined their fingers in the cooling sticky mess on Jamie’s abdomen.

“I’m sorry,” Marc said into the darkness.

“You said that a hundred times on the phone.” Jamie shifted, still clutching Marc’s hand. “But I don’t get why.”

“Because I promised I’d be there for you, and I wasn’t.”

“Because someone else needed you more. I’m never going to flip my shit because of that. I know I’m lucky to have you at all.”

Marc turned his head sharply. “You aren’t less deserving of love than anyone else. Who says I’m not the lucky one to come home to you?”

“I do.”

“Don’t.”

Jamie squeezed Marc’s fingers. “Sorry. Old habits die hard. How’s your friend?”

“Alive.” Marc sighed heavily and tried not to let his imagination treat him to images of Wedge lying stricken in a Syrian field hospital. “You know I can’t tell you much, don’t you?”

“I’m not asking much. Just how he is. When will he arrive back here?”

“Tomorrow, probably. He’s going to be out of commission for a while, but . . . I’d like you to meet him when he’s with it again. I think you’ll like him. He’s much more fun than me or Nat.”

“Fun?”

Marc smiled wistfully. “Yeah. I always thought I’d die laughing before anything else when he was around.”

Jamie said nothing, and Marc closed his eyes, absorbing the peaceful silence for a while, but he didn’t sleep. At least, he didn’t think he had until he came to and found Jamie busy with a notebook and pencil he hadn’t seen before. “What’s that?”

“Homework. I don’t start CBT for a few weeks, but the psychiatrist wants me to keep a journal.”

Marc sat up, careful not to look too closely at Jamie’s neat handwriting. “How do you feel about that?”

“Good, actually.” Jamie kept his eyes on his work. “And you were right about those pills. I didn’t feel a thing.”

“You might never feel any tangible effects, but sometimes the act of just doing something constructive is enough.”

Jamie smiled and his gaze flickered to Marc. “I’m learning that.”

* * *

Later, after a few hours’ sleep and three bowls of Jamie’s groundnut chicken, Marc wandered to the bottom of the garden to make a plethora of official phone calls. Most were to old colleagues at Selly Oak, but the last was to the trauma surgeon who had taken Ludo—a case that felt like a lifetime ago, but had been on Marc’s mind all the way home.

“A suicide attempt, apparently,” the surgeon said bluntly after he’d updated Marc on Ludo’s medical status. “I’d argue that it was a cry for help, but a jump like that is hard to interpret as much else but a desire for death.”

Marc couldn’t argue, and he hung up with a heavy sigh and a sudden need to be as close to Jamie as possible.

Pocketing his phone, he hurried inside and found Jamie stripping the bed that Nat and Connor had slept in, his face a study in careful concentration. Marc wound his arms tight around Jamie’s narrow waist and buried his face in hair that smelled of sex and beeswax furniture polish. “I love you.”

Jamie leaned back against him. “I love you too. Are you okay?”

“Yep.”

“Are you?” Jamie twisted in Marc’s embrace and studied him. “You look like you’re fretting.”

“I am. That’s my addiction, remember?”

“I do. Who are you fretting about? ’Cause I’d bet my balls it’s not your own skin. Is it Wedge?”

Marc shook his head. “No. Wedge will be okay . . . eventually, at least. He’s a tough motherfucker.”

“Then who? Nat? Because he seemed okay when they left. Connor said he’d be right as rain after a few days’ rest.”

“It’s not Nat. It’s another patient—the call I got when you were at the hospital.”

“Oh. I guess you can’t tell me much about that either, eh?”

“No, but he reminded me of you, and it scared me. When I woke up earlier, I had to check you were really there and not some figment of my dreams. That the worst hadn’t happened while I’d been asleep.”

Comprehension dawned in Jamie’s sharp eyes. “Is that why you slapped me round the face?”

“Did I? Shit, I’m sorry.”

Jamie shrugged. “It’s okay. It felt symbolic, actually, even though I could tell that you didn’t know you’d done it.”

“Symbolic? In what way?”

“Everyone needs a kick up the arse sometimes, right?”

Marc tilted his head to one side and regarded Jamie, the subtle change in him suddenly and glaringly obvious. “What’s going on with you? You seem different.”

“I feel different.”

“Already?”

“Mad, huh?” Jamie disentangled himself from Marc and gathered up the bed sheets to stuff in the laundry bag. “It’s not the pills; I think it’s just the perspective I’ve been missing all this time. The therapists I saw in Cali were too positive, you know? Too optimistic. They told me that I could get better, but I didn’t believe them. It wasn’t like that yesterday. The bloke said I could manage the OCD, but it would never go away entirely, and I found that weirdly reassuring.”

“Makes sense,” Marc said. “Living with it doesn’t mean that you can’t be happy. I suppose it’s about acceptance, and being kind to yourself?”

“I think so. It’s going to be really hard, but I feel ready for it now in a way that I haven’t before. I’ve got a new job; I’ve, um, got you; and I can see a future. I didn’t have that in California. It was all too—I don’t know—temporary?”

That Jamie saw them as permanent made Marc weak at the knees. He sat on the edge of the bed and tugged Jamie to him. Jamie, attuned to him as ever, knelt down and rolled Marc’s sweatpants up, working quickly to free him of the prosthesis.

The relief was instant. Marc cupped Jamie’s face, tracing his thumb along the fading smudges beneath Jamie’s eyes. “You know there’s nothing I won’t do to help you, don’t you?”

Jamie nodded. “Always have, but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t let me help you too.”

“I’ll let you.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”