Rhapsody on a Theme Read Free Page B

close to guessing your measurements, right?”
    “Depends what she’s measuring.”
    “Darren!”
    “Anyway, it changes when it’s…”
    “Darren!”
    Darren chuckled as they reached the pub door. Jayden pulled his ID from his back pocket as they approached the bar—he always got checked, and it was getting embarrassing—but Darren waved it away. “My round,” he said simply. Jayden squeezed his elbow lightly and smiled.
    “You might be earning points here,” he said. “Maybe. I mean, maybe not, depends if you let me win at pool or not, but you might be.”
    “What if I buy the takeaway too?”
    “Oh, that’s worth, like, a hundred points. Maybe even two hundred.”
    “What are these points worth , exactly?”
    “We can work out a conversion rate on the way home,” Jayden said loftily as Darren passed him a bottle of pear cider and handed off a tenner to the barman. “And what I’m supposed to do with you when we get back on Sunday, because Rachel said she’ll probably still be out when we get back, so…”
    “I can think of a few things,” Darren said with a smirk and held out his pint of lager. “Merry Christmas.”
    “And you, I suppose,” Jayden said, clinking their drinks together. He had a sip, then frowned at Darren’s glass. “How many are you going to have?”
    “Only two.” Jayden was wary of Darren drinking too much. Alcohol was a depressant, and he couldn’t imagine it would do Darren’s mental health any favours. But getting him to give up entirely would probably be overkill, especially as Darren didn’t actually go weird on alcohol as a general rule, so they’d settled on a kind of low-level compromise—that Darren was only to drink socially, and not much when he did. Darren had pulled a lot of faces and complained when Jayden had issued the orders, but hadn’t been too bad. In general , he was reasonable.
    More importantly, he hadn’t been too ill since then either. That had been in June, right after he’d come off the antidepressants that had messed him around so badly, and Jayden was hoping that the good streak was going to last. But then, it might just have been that the last three months in London had had him too busy, or busy enough that he could hide it easier. Maybe. He was good at hiding it, when he really wanted to. Worryingly good.
    But it wasn’t worth thinking about now. Now was Christmas and tacky decorations and Rosie and having a headache by two in the afternoon and maybe sneaking Darren off upstairs again for ‘a game’ in Jayden’s room. Jayden might try and tell Rosie that ‘necking’ was a vampire game too, it had worked on Misha when they were teenagers. Or maybe Darren would invent some other excuse for her, and Jayden would try not to laugh, and Dad would make a snide comment when he heard about it and Mum would hit him for being scandalous…
    Now was for family and celebration and being happy and sleeping wound around each other as tightly as possible in Jayden’s tiny bed.
    Now wasn’t for depression.
    “Game of pool?” he asked, nodding towards the tables, and Darren shrugged, one shoulder higher than the other.
    “Go on, then,” he said, and Jayden watched him set up, left arm still slightly awkward, hair burning almost copper in the warm pub light. Jayden felt like he was in a more-than-good place, eyeing Darren’s long legs and narrow hips in baggy jeans, his broad shoulders and leather jacket, his wild hair and the glasses that had become permanent last Christmas instead of fleeting.
    Jayden felt lucky.
    * * * *
    It was half past midnight when they turned into Attlee Road: dark, icy cold, and spinning loosely underneath their shoes. Darren’s arm was warm around Jayden’s waist, the leather too cool, and two drinks had turned into five each (Jayden suspected Darren had snuck in a sixth when he wasn’t paying attention) and a pool tournament with a couple of guys who had turned up at around eight that had gone to St. John’s