The Devil's Trill Sonata (24 page)

“He…he has bad days, sometimes,” he said finally, and Rachel tilted her head.

“Bad days like how?”

“Like…” Jayden lowered his voice. “Like he’s lethargic and apathetic, he sleeps all the time, he starts on this little self-loathing cycle…”

“He’s depressed?”

“Sometimes,” Jayden hedged.

Rachel pursed her lips and sighed. “I…kind of guessed. He seems the type.” Jayden didn’t know what that meant. “I won’t say anything,” she added. “But I’ll keep an eye on him, if you want.”

“Please.”

“But for the record, he’s been doing
that
since he moved in,” she said, jerking a thumb over her shoulder. “Apparently the dusting powder they use for prints feels rank, so he comes home and tries to prune himself before anything else.”

Jayden stared at the door, opened his mouth—and snapped it shut again when the lock clicked and Darren emerged in a cloud of steam, completely naked aside from his boxers, and a towel round his hair.

“Better?” Rachel asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “On-the-job training
sucks
.”

“What’d you do?” Rachel asked, while Jayden watched the progress of Darren’s naked, wet torso cross the room and rummage in his chest-of-drawers.

“Instructor had us doing fingertip searches to find bomb fragments in a bloody dumping ground,” Darren said. “Set up,” he added, when Jayden’s jaw dropped. “It wasn’t a real bomb or anything.”

“Bloody good!” Jayden burst out.

“Productive day?” Darren asked, rubbing off his hair and draping the towel over a radiator. His damp curls were enthusiastically springy, and Jayden itched to touch them. Instead, he simply nodded and shifted his laptop to the coffee table when Darren dropped into the gap between him and Rachel.

“C’mere,” Jayden said, dragging Darren into a hug. He was overheated and humid from the shower, his fresh T-shirt slightly damp, and he smelled sharply clean.

“Oh, disgusting,” Rachel said loudly and shut her folder. “I’ll see you lovebirds later.”

“Still on for curry at seven?” Darren called after her.

“Yeah, but no macking in my flat!”

“Bitch,” Darren said affectionately as she slammed the door behind her, a fine spray of plaster dust shaking itself free from the open eaves above their heads. “What’d you do all day?”

“Essays.”

Darren wrinkled his nose, so Jayden pinched him.

“They don’t just
hand
me a degree, I have to work for it.”

“Yeah, but it’s English.”

“I like English!”

“And that’s great, but you have to get a job someday too.”

Jayden scowled. “Don’t you start. Dad already rants at me for doing a useless subject. I enjoy it!”

“Do you?” Darren asked flatly.

Jayden blinked, brought up short. Part of his brain twitched instantly towards a vehement ‘yes!’ but the other half paused. And it was the pause that he didn’t like—and the pause that Darren had obviously been waiting for.

“Right,” he said, and untangled himself. “Tea?”

“Since when do you drink tea?” Jayden blurted out.

“Since I started work,” Darren said. “Instructor’s banned me from more than six cups of coffee a day. Says it scares him how I don’t have a heart attack.”

“You used to manage twelve before you even got the shakes,” Jayden pointed out dryly.

“Mm,” Darren rummaged for cups. “If you drink wine now, I drink tea. Deal with it. You want one or not?”

“Okay,” Jayden said, pushing away the hurt irritation at the shot at his degree. And his wine. At least he was
getting
a degree, getting some life experience. Darren had just gone straight from school to work, and okay, he wouldn’t have liked a degree anyway because of the stuck-in-a-classroom thing, but he’d not even taken a gap year. And it wasn’t like he couldn’t afford to, he was always squeezing money out of his parents.

Jayden eyed the laptop with the nearly finished essay, and closed it. Suddenly, there was a distance in the room, like the flat was thirty miles long instead of thirty feet tops. Darren seemed like he was an age away, and someone
different
from the boy Jayden had met in the theatre storeroom at the beginning of Year Eleven. He was taller, stockier, a little more age and hurt ground into the lines on his face and the scars on his shoulder. He was more cynical, and less open, and…and different, somehow.

Or maybe it was Jayden who was different. Darren was wealthy and worldly and had been to exotic countries before he was walking and talking properly. Jayden hadn’t experienced anything but Attlee Road and the theatre and school until Cambridge, and maybe it was him that was changing. Darren was always taking shots at the way he dressed now and what he drank, but maybe it went further than that. Maybe he really was different, and he just hadn’t realised yet.

Whoever had changed—whoever
was
changing—there was a gap in the room, like a crack in the floor that was widening into a chasm, and Jayden didn’t like it.

* * * *

Jayden went home on the following Saturday morning.

The trip had been…weird. It had been nice to see Darren again, and get to hug him and feel him and sleep with him again, but…as the train pulled away from the station and began to haul him back towards Cambridge, Jayden couldn’t help but feel like that was
all
he’d gotten to do. Physically, they’d reconnected, but there was still something…adrift.

Darren
was
depressed, that much had become obvious. He
was
sleeping too much, and he
was
unusually quiet, and Jayden hadn’t missed the way he’d kept flexing and clenching both hands like the fingers weren’t working properly. That was normal on his left, but not his right, he only
ever
did it on his right hand when he was
depressed
. He wasn’t eating everything that came within range, and Rachel did
good
curry, Jayden had learned, so he should have been pilfering Jayden’s share and wheedling for more and…

And worst of all, Rachel didn’t seem to
know
that Darren was the human equivalent of a food bin.

Darren had been distant, and Jayden hadn’t liked it. He’d been slow to answer, quick to question, and hadn’t
talked
to Jayden like he used to. Everything had been ‘fine’ or ‘okay’ or ‘mm.’ He hadn’t been all funny and sarcastic, and when he
had
talked it had been to take shots at Jayden’s friends at Cambridge and…and
okay
, Jayden felt a little bad about bailing right before his birthday to go to Paris with them, but some of Darren’s comments were uncalled for. And it wasn’t like Darren hadn’t changed either, but…

Back to the point, something was sitting between them for the first time, and Jayden hated it. Darren had never exactly been open, but he’d always been honest and let Jayden in with his depression, even when it had caused arguments (like about his calling the Samaritans, which judging by Jayden’s sneaky check on his phone on Monday night wasn’t happening anymore; and in the last year of school, his tendency to wait out his moods until Jayden had finished a stressful piece of work, and hadn’t
that
been a nasty row, and…)

In a way, it was happening all over again, but now…now was different, somehow, and Jayden didn’t know how to handle it. He didn’t know what to do or say to make anything better, and the lingering
it’s complicated
from before he’d even gone to Paris hung between them, and neither of them wanted to discuss it, and…

One new message

From: Ella

Message: Hey, hun! :) You coming back today or tomorrow? Shopping trip for some retail therapy tomorrow if you want in, a load of us girls are going but you’re invited too ;) Hope you enjoyed the trip to your boyfriend’s, but it’s back to Olde School now, haha! Only a few more weeks until all the coursework is done and then summer! xxx

He closed his phone and dropped his head back against the rest, staring blindly out of the window at the passing south coast. He had always presumed that in the summer he would take a huge chunk of time to go and stay with Darren and be
them
again without the rest of the world poking in, but now…

Now, he wondered if there was any point to that.

Jayden arrived back to Cambridge late.

In part, he engineered it to avoid Ella; he suspected from her text that she’d want to talk about Darren (and the four million reasons Jayden should break up with him, and Jayden was
sick
of being between the rock and the hard place, so just
no
, not
tonight
), and in part it was helped by a signal failure in London that screwed up his connection.

As a result, it was mid-afternoon by the time he slipped into the college, and his room was cold and barren, his sheets still messed from waking up late the Friday morning that they went to Paris. He dropped his bag and fell onto the mattress, staring up at the ceiling morosely. Paris seemed…less stunning, now that he’d been. Now he’d been to Paris and Southampton, that was. Bitterly, he wished he’d just stayed here for the entire break and finished off all the work he
still
hadn’t done.

He twisted over onto his back to text Darren with,
Back at Cambridge :) Speak soon, love you x
in an effort to keep up a cheerful facade to him, to make him hopefully feel a little bit better, but…but his heart wasn’t in it. He wanted to sleep. He wanted to forget the entire world existed and sleep. Maybe go home and let Mum feed him and allow him to wriggle out of household chores and not
bother
him all the time. He just wanted to not be
bothered
.

And that was when someone knocked on his door.

Jayden groaned and put both hands over his face, but a tiny reprieve was granted when instead of the door opening and Ella’s blonde waterfall shimmering into view, the intruder knocked again and Jonathon’s voice filtered through the wood. “Jayden? Are you all right?”

Jayden heaved himself off the bed and opened the door. Jonathon offered a small smile and cocked his head.

“Are you all right?” he repeated.

“No,” Jayden said honestly.

Jonathon eyed him, then jerked his head down the corridor. “Want some tea and cake?” he offered. “My sister was visiting this week and left some of her supplies.”

“…What kind of cake?”

“Chocolate. Obviously.”

“…Okay,” Jayden caved.

He’d not been actually
in
Jonathon’s room since the beginning of the year, and there were more posters of various indie bands on the walls than he remembered. And a lot more snack food and remnants of snack food.

“Comfort eater?” he asked as Jonathon flicked on a kettle tucked out of sight of the room inspections and opened a drawer full of goodies.

“In a big way,” Jonathon agreed. In no time at all, Jayden was sitting cross-legged on the end of his bed (which had a disturbingly psychedelic bedspread) with a cup of steaming Chinese tea and a slab of chocolate cake that could have fed a small African nation for a good couple of weeks. “What’s up?”

Jayden shrugged and tried the tea. It wasn’t too bad, surprisingly.

“Visit not go so well?”

“How do you know?”

“Ella was suspicious when you ignored her text-bombing,” Jonathon said. “You have to admit, you usually answer her.”

“She’s going to accost me in the morning.”

“Come late to breakfast,” Jonathon advised. “I’ll tell her I saw you and you were fine, just tired.”

“Lifesaver,” Jayden said, and they both grinned guiltily. “I do like her, she’s just…”

“Overbearing, I know.” Jonathon rolled his eyes.

“You don’t have a boyfriend she disapproves of.”

“I have an ex she disapproves of,” Jonathon said. “We’re still friends. Apparently that’s not allowed.”

Jayden rolled his eyes, but privately thought it
was
a bit strange. He couldn’t quite imagine him and Darren being friends if they split up, because Darren had been so
against
the idea when they left school, and…

And maybe he didn’t think that anymore.

“Jayden?”

“I…” Jayden crumbled a pinch of cake between finger and thumb. “I don’t know what to do about Darren.”

“What do you mean?” Jonathon prompted gently.

“I…he’s…different.”

“Well,” Jonathon said delicately, “you’re both bound to be a bit different. This isn’t school anymore.”

“Yes, but…” Jayden fidgeted. “There was this distance, all week. It was like I couldn’t get through to him, like there was this gap between us.”

“People grow apart,” Jonathon said, eyeing him carefully.

“I
know
, but…I can’t just…I don’t know whether…” Jayden took a deep breath, and blurted out the horrible, nagging worry that had teased at him since…no, since
before
Paris, that had never
really
gone away since they’d left school. “I don’t know whether to break up with him or not.”

“Oh.”

“…Yeah,” Jayden whispered in a rush.

“Well…do you still love him?”

“Yes,” Jayden said automatically, then frowned. “I do. I’m just…I’m not sure that’s enough. You know? He won’t talk to me, and he picks on what I do here and at my friends, and…”

“You…did kind of let Ella do the same,” Jonathon pointed out.

“I know, but that’s different,” Jayden said.
Is it?
demanded the snotty voice in his head, the one he’d been ignoring since he got here, and he ignored it once again. “And if he won’t talk to me anymore, and he’s so different, then…”

“Yeah, but…okay, look, I don’t
know
him, I only met him the once and only for a little bit, but…he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’ll let you come back from a proper break-up,” Jonathon said.

“He’s not,” Jayden agreed.

“So until you’re
sure
, you know, I…well, I wouldn’t,” Jonathon said. “I mean, until you’re totally sure…”