“Gives me away as what?” Mickey pushed his plate away a second time and leaned closer to Benito. “What do you think I am that I haven’t shown you in plain sight?”
Benito started to speak. Then stopped and shook his head, uncertainty clouding his face, sudden and dark. “I don’t know. I just—feel something with you that I recognise. It’s weird.”
“Maybe you’re the weird one.”
“Or maybe you’ve lived the same life.”
“Lived isn’t living.” Mickey spoke without thinking.
Benito’s gaze sparked again. He sucked in a breath that seemed to go nowhere, then released it in a shaky whoosh. “Why do I feel like I just busted open the trapdoor to hell?”
Mickey let out a strangled laugh. “That’s the realest fucking thing you’ve said all day.”
“It’s eight in the morning.”
“So? Feels like a write off to me.”
“Pessimist?”
“Does it matter?”
“No. None of it does.”
Mickey felt like he was living someone else’s life. Who he’d been three days ago was a different man to the one so lost in Benito now. “Why did you say it then?”
“You asked.”
“I didn’t ask for that.”
“What did you want then?”
“I—” The caff closed in on Mickey. Then retreated, like hot and cold water being poured over his head. It flayed him open, then left him bereft, icy wind blasting the cavernous space his real self had once been. “I wanted you to know I understood. That I wasn’t standing in your mum’s flat judging you.”
“So you asked me to judge you. Dude, that makes no sense.”
“Doesn’t it?”
Benito shook his head. “I never felt judged by you. Or ashamed that my mum can’t get herself together enough to take care of business. I wish you never saw it, but not because of that.”
“Why then?”
“Because I liked what we were doing. I liked how you made me feel when we hooked up. It—I don’t know—made me feel human.”
“How do you feel now?”
“Like I’ve been on a bender for three days straight. When I saw you across the gym, it went away. Then I looked in your eyes and it was like a mirror. You feel what I feel, and I thought I needed to know why.”
Mickey’s head spun a bewilderment he’d never felt before. “You don’t anymore?”
“No, man. I just need to know you’re okay before I say goodbye to you.”
Goodbye. It sounded so final. And perhaps it was. Whatever madness the world had been since Friday, it was finite. Benito had his life, and Mickey had his. They couldn’t entwine. They couldn’t.
But for reasons Mickey didn’t understand, he couldn’t lie to Benito either. “I’m not like you,” he said, voice like gravel. “At least, I don’t think I am. You seem stronger.”
“Than you?” Benito laughed. “Wow, son. I’d love to know how you figure that.”
Mickey shrugged and his tense muscles shrieked in protest. “You’re doing something I had to stop because I’m fucking weak. I couldn’t be around what I was doing without becoming what I was trying to exploit, and I’m still fighting that. I’ll always be fighting that.”
Benito frowned, piecing together Mickey’s cryptic confession. Perhaps a different person would’ve found no logic in it, but Benito, whether he knew it or not, was a thinker. He took the scraps Mickey offered him and put them together. “Are you trying to tell me you’re a fiend, and the wreckage I see in you right now is you fighting that battle over and over, like you have long before we fucking met?”
Relief swept over Mickey, fast and kind, even if the wasteland it left behind was cold and cruel. “Don’t call me a fucking fiend. But, yeah. I’m an addict. Coke. It’s been years, but it never goes away, and I can’t look at someone like you without . . . Jesus fucking Christ, I can almost smell it on you.”
“I don’t use. Never have.”
“Doesn’t matter. You move it, and don’t deny it. I know your life. It was mine before I fucked it up so bad I had to run a thousand miles to make it right.” Mickey slammed his mouth shut and closed his eyes. Fuck. This was why he didn’t have deep conversations. With anyone. Because he was shit at keeping himself locked up. The gates looked strong, but up close, they were rusted and weak.
He blew out a breath.
Opened his eyes.
Benito was still there, still leaning forward, gaze open, searching. Under the table, his hand found Mickey’s knee. He laid his palm over it, warm and soothing. “Breathe,” he whispered. “It’s okay.”
It wasn’t okay, but Mickey obeyed anyway. After a minute, he dropped his elbows on the table. “I’m sorry. Maybe I got it all wrong and I’m just fucking paranoid. That’s a thing I have too, or I used to, anyway. It’s not so bad these days.”
“What about the rest of it?”
“What do you mean?”
“How long have you been clean?”
“Three years.”
“That’s a long time.”
“Doesn’t feel that way.” Mickey reached for his cold coffee. Glared at it and set it aside again. “Some days it’s brand new, and I’m not as good at dealing with it as I need to be.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“For putting you back there. I had no idea.”
“I’m not wrong, am I?”
“About what?”
“All of it.”
It was Benito’s turn to shiver and close his eyes. Mickey gave him a minute, caught up counting his own pulse as it thumped in his brain. This wasn’t how he’d imagined this morning to play out. He’d picked the gym to meet as neutral ground. Where they could be two blokes who liked to lift while having a simple conversation. But nothing about either one of them was fucking simple. So let it go. Let him go.
No chance. Mickey added it to the long list of things he was too weak to do.
Benito opened his eyes. Where they’d been clear since he’d demolished his breakfast, now they were strained. “I can’t tell you anything.”
“I know.”
“You don’t. It’s not as easy as being what I am or what I do. It’s all I know.”
“I thought that too.”
“What changed?”
“I couldn’t be that person. I had to escape and evolve or I was going to die.”
Benito let out a short, dark laugh. “Been there, done that.”
“That how you got shanked?” Mickey pictured the scar on Benito’s inked torso and shuddered again. It was a vicious mark on glorious skin. He couldn’t imagine Benito without it, though he wanted to. Mickey had scars of his own, and he knew how deeply they hurt.
Benito rubbed his arms. “I got stabbed in a fight I started.”
“Are you trying to tell me you deserved it?”
“Maybe. That’s how it goes, though, isn’t it? Where we come from. I had a tool in my hand. I’d have cut him if he hadn’t cut me first.”