Chapter 2
NOW
Thunder rolls. Brittle. Loud. I jerk awake to an empty bed, heart pounding, sheets twisted, nerves thrumming with unspent want.
I’m shaking. For a charged second, I don’t know where I am. Just that the storm outside is real and the imaginary one that has my stomach aching with pent-up need is far from over.
You’re at home.
Right.
Porth Luck.
The Joker.
I own a pub, my brain doesn’t work anymore, and I have a boner hard enough to excavate granite.
Fuck.
Why does this shit always surface when the earth is so angry it batters the windows with enough rain to scuttle the ark? To sink a fishing boat—
Sol.
Panic grips me. I lurch upright, my best friend’s name on my lips, calling for him before I get a hold of myself and remember he’s not at sea tonight. That he’s home, safe and warm—safe and dry—and asleep next door, in a room that smells of incense and adventure.
A room that smells of him.
Thunder rolls again and I slam a hand over my mouth, the dream that woke me slipping away.
I drag in a thick breath and try to catch the pieces, but they fade too fast, leaving my scarred grey matter to conjure ghosts from fantasies old and new.
Leaving me to pant in the dark as footsteps sound on the landing.
Sol opens my bedroom door and slips inside, padding across the room and sinking to a crouch where I’m hunched over, skin slick with cooling sweat, breathing as if I’ve run a fucking marathon.
He doesn’t say anything. Just finds me in the dark, takes my hand, and rubs my shoulder, and his touch…
I can’t remember if I’ve ever had the words to describe what it does to me. I don’t have them now. All I am is yearning for something I’m not sure is real, and regret I woke him up. “Sorry.”
“Shh.” Sol moves a little closer, rich-brown curls falling into his face. “It’s rowdy out there, Jackie. Made me jump too.”
Bet it didn’t. Sol loves storms. He’d dance in them all night if the rest of us weren’t scared the lightning might strike him.
Sometimes I wonder if he was a god in another life.
If the power he has over me was something far greater before I ever knew him.
Most times, though, I can only cling to him as if he’s a life raft.
Stare at him with blank space between my ears.
And as louder thunder batters the sky, that’s what happens now.
I stare.
He smiles, eyes gleaming in the dark. Work-hardened hands so warm on my skin. So fucking hot—
Whoa.
Misfired desire throbs through me again. I shift onto my stomach, hiding my face in my pillow, praying Sol thinks I’ve passed out without explaining why I’m shouting his name in the middle of the night. Praying he stays anyway.
Please stay.
The bed dips with his weight, graceful—careful—as he stretches out beside me. His hand eases down my bare arm, slow and steady over my tense muscles, smoothing the chaos from my pulse with each pass.
Outside, the storm rages on.
In my cracked heart, it peters out enough that the live-wire trembling in my body meanders, rolling out to sea, leaving me with a shiver in my bones that latches onto Sol’s even breaths.
We sync, but I need more, and I roll onto my side, knowing he’ll curve his slimmer frame around me while I’m still shaking. That he’ll stay long after I stop.
Sol hears me.
His chest moulds to my spine.
In the dark, he hums something wordless and old, finding the tune with absent ease as he reaches round my broader frame to find my wrist, thumb stroking my pulse point.
The touch settles me like an anchor sinking deep into the sea bed.
Reminds me I’m alive, my body knowing I’m safe before my shadowed brain catches up.
A shuddering exhale leaves my lungs. I tip my head back, lolling it onto his shoulder.
He kisses my temple, platonic and soothing. “Sleep, love. I have you. You’re home.”
Home.
That’s him, not Porth Luck. Not the Joker or this confusing place we’ve found ourselves.
And I want to tell him—I need to tell him—that when I forgot my own name and the bones of who I used to be, he was still there.
But I’m so tired the words won’t come. My throat is thick, eyes weighted by anvils.
I drift as the storm grows distant, energy fading, and as the dark and the noise ebb away, he never lets go of my hand.
He never lets go of my heart.
Sol is so Cornish. Sometimes I think if you cut him open, he’d bleed sea water and sand to the tune of the ancient shanties he and Oscar Kuznetov are singing in the back bar.
The Joker is packed.
I move through the crowd, collecting glasses and sweeping my gaze through every nook and corner of the old building, scanning every shadow. The whole town seems to be in tonight, the good, the bad, and the ugly drowning out the gloomy weather with one pint too many and a wall of noise.
Too much noise.
I block most of it out, imaginary plugs sealing my ears shut, turning down the volume on a life I should be used to by now.
The life Sol and Skylar built me when I took a mortar round to my thick skull and forgot how to tie my own laces.
I scout for the local dealers who sneak in to peddle ket and coke in the toilets.
I’m not looking for Sol.
Don’t need to. I know where he is. I hear him as his voice lifts over the muffled din smooth as sea-worn driftwood. I feel him under my skin like something old waking up, always have, and I’ve never really learned what to do with it.
The Joker is the oldest building in Porth Luck. A fortress against the elements, it sits right on the sea wall, holding its breath against the waves, and it belongs to all of us.
Mal and Skylar.
Me and Sol, and it’s him I see in the low beams and mismatched tables. The crammed shelves of dusty books and nautical artefacts. His sea breeze scent I taste in air stained heavy with woodsmoke and salt.
Don’t look at him.
A feat I can usually manage when I’m working and simple tasks require all the brain function I have left.
But Sol…when he sings like he is tonight, lit from within, wild and warm, how indelibly I’m drawn to him is a tough ask to ignore.
I slip behind the bar and dump the glasses I’ve picked up along the way. Locals clamour around the cider pumps, and though I’ve only been gone a few minutes, there are already too many thirsty fishermen to count.
It’s not hard.
Pulling pints.
Counting the hard-earned coins they chuck at me to pay for them.
At least it shouldn’t be. But the rush at the bar absorbs me until it dies down a little and my brain spins from the effort it takes to keep up.
I shut the till, blinking against vibrations in my left eye, my skin prickling from the awareness of attention on me, but it’s not a bad feeling.
Can’t be—it’s Sol’s attention, and this time, I’m powerless against the need to find him in the crowd as the shanty ends on a roar, boots and pint glasses thumping in time with the final beat.
The kind of sound that hits your ribs. The songs Porth Luck is built on.
But the racket, the riot of noise, falls to a low buzz as my searching gaze lands on my best friend.
Through the carnage of a regular Thursday night, everything does.
I don’t see people or pints. Only his tousled curly hair sticking up in every direction, his chest rising and falling as he catches his breath.
His bronze-brown eyes so bright and luminous it’s hard to remember there’s anyone else in the world.
Fuck.
We lock in for barely a beat. But it’s enough for my pulse to thud in my ears, a loaded tattoo that should have me wondering if the fault in my kid brother’s heart is genetic.
Keyword: should. The truth is zero thoughts pass through my brain while I stare at Sol, every nerve coiling with a heat that sticks to my skin and lingers in the wreckage of my shattered memory.
Reach for it—
“Oi. You serving or what?”
I blink and jerk my head too fast. The impact almost tips me sideways, but I catch myself on the bar as the familiar lurch hits the eye that already feels like it’s about to fall out of my skull, and set my jaw, irritation and anxiety surging in my veins, chasing off the vertigo. “Sorry. What do you want?”
The old man in front of me grins, showing his rotten teeth. He points at the brown ale. “One of them. And one for yerself.”
I don’t drink. Can’t. But it’s quicker to nod than explain myself. To pour an extra half I’ll slide Sol’s way next time he’s close enough.
He doesn’t like brown ale.
Another silent curse rattles me, frustration roiling with the hangover effect of a simple glance from my housemate. My business partner. We’re so many things to each other, and so many feelings I can’t catch them all.
I take the old geezer’s pint to him. Place it on the bar. He opens his hand to reveal a roll of notes and I realise too late that he’s on the take. Notes blur as he shuffles them, talking a mile a minute, all charm and smoke, a vagabond trickster playing a con as old as the Joker itself.
Nothing I haven’t seen before, but my eye…it throbs in its socket, and my focus frays. I can’t keep up—
Bang!
A beer bottle slams on the bar, thunking down on the notes the player has laid out.
A storm of dark hair and ink invades his space, but it’s not Sol and his sun-warmed curls.
It’s a woman with raven locks and daggers tattooed on her collarbones, her glare as lethal as the notoriety of her family name.
O’Brian. “Fuck off,” the woman snarls. “Now.”
The old fella takes a breath, brash stupidity rolling off him in waves. Then he spies something beyond the biker queen staring him down and does himself a runner.
She sneers after him. Then she turns to me and her face softens to something beautiful. “Hey, Jack.”
I tip my head. “Orla. How goes it?”
The queen smiles. “You’re not the Gallagher I came to peep on, but you’ll do. And we came to see Oscar too. River misses him.”