Page 26 of Compulsion

So maybe that was going to be the last time I saw him.

I still didn’t.

Chapter Twelve

LOUIS had another of those looks on his face. When I was at my meanest, I wondered how the hell Jack coped with the exhausting range of emotions that Louis inflicted on us all. Then I’d watch Jack’s calm, possessive hand on Louis’s arse and I knew they had it sorted out between them. I was the one who had nothing sorted out with anyone, and I was the one who really needed help. It was long overdue.

“Tell us, Max,” Jack said. They’d pulled the couch in the living room over to a couple of feet from the armchair, effectively forcing me to talk to them. It was late in the evening and I’d sat curled up in that chair ever since supper, with the remote control on my lap but the TV screen still blank and my book closed on the floor beside the chair, waiting hopelessly for attention.

“What do you mean?”

Louis opened his mouth to add his opinion, but Jack held up a hand to hush him. “Tell us what happened while you were away. There’s something going on that I don’t understand, and I suspect it’s to do with that missing time.”

I tried to shake my head but it just hurt. Everything hurt.

“I don’t see how we can help you, Max, if you don’t tell us everything.”

“Don’t need—”

“Yes, you do,” Jack replied firmly. He had a full cup of steaming fruit tea in his other hand. He was in for the duration. Bloody friends. “You’ve been restless and low since you got beaten up.”

“Hey, that’s to be expec—”

“But it’s not only to do with that. You haven’t been out on your own since the attack, so you’re obviously not seeing Seve anymore. You work extra shifts at work, you’re knackered and hardly eating.”

“You sleep badly too,” Louis added. “You shout out in the night.”

Fuck. “I’m sorry, guys….”

“No problem,” Louis said, and he really did sound like it wasn’t. “Just saying.”

“I think it’s depression,” Jack said gently.

Something twisted in my chest. “That’s crap.” My voice was thin. I looked at their concerned faces, and in my mind, something shook loose. Feelings that I’d kept well buried began to stir. This time I wasn’t sure I could keep the lid on them. My gut ached like those feelings were bleeding emotion inside my body.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Jack continued. “But I think it has roots back in the time before you met Seve, before the attack, before you came back here—”

“To hide,” I said quickly, too loudly. They both stopped talking and stared at me. “That’s what it was, you know. I’m a coward and a fuckup and I ran back here with my tail between my legs.”

“Max—”

“I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” I continued, speaking swiftly to make sure they didn’t stop me, didn’t allow me the benefit of the doubt any longer. “I left Uni because I couldn’t cope with it. I liked drinking and fucking and taking plenty of drugs, and I thought it’d go on forever. But I ran out of money and the course was coming to an end. I knew I’d be thrown out and all the friends I had were getting truly sick of me fucking them over—”

“Not all,” Louis said, only half under his breath, his eyes both angry and sad.

“So I left and took all that baggage with me to London.” I ran away—the first time. “I told you I was living with that moron Vince, but to be honest I already knew he was going to dump me. So I went out on my own, kept on the same way—drink, drugs, casual work. Plenty of action with men, some I liked, some I didn’t, but they gave me money or supplies.” Louis blinked a couple of extra times, but Jack’s gaze was steady. “It all turned sour pretty bloody quickly, but I thought I could make it work if I kept going. I didn’t have any other choice, did I?”

“Max,” Jack said. “Take it slow.”

I shook my head. I had to go on or I might never be brave enough again. “I wanted to be the great independent—be the man. Instead, I had no money, no food, couldn’t hold down a job, got hit on whenever I tried to sleep on a park bench….”

Louis leaned over and touched my shoulder. It was surprisingly comforting.

“Then I got offered a job at a club near Soho. I’d exhausted everything else—pub work, office cleaning at night, runner for the Chinese restaurants. The club was a new renovation, but it wasn’t exactly a regular job, you know? This man approached me and offered to find me a room and board if I did some errands for him. At first I just did some low-level running—some messages, a few packages.”

“Packages?”

“Drugs, money—shit, I didn’t know and I didn’t care. The guy got me regular food and a bed in a local hostel with other casual workers.” I edited over the following months as the trips got more frequent, the men I met more aggressive, the drop locations more dangerous. “It got to be a regular thing.”