Chapter 2 #2
River O’Brian. The younger brother who joins Orla at the bar as she says his name. But she’s not done talking about mine. “Where are you hiding him, eh?”
Mal. “I’m not hiding my brother.” Not on purpose, anyway. Can’t say I know where he is, though. He’s not good at staying put when Skylar’s not here. “He’s out with the dog.”
Relief calms me as I remember that. Mal loves Fiadh and I know he won’t do anything reckless if he has her.
“Does he look like you?”
I’m staring at nothing. I snap out of it and focus on Orla again. “I don’t think so.”
Her red-lipped smile sharpens to a grin. “Shame. Though I reckon Skylar’s pretty enough to make anyone chopped.”
She pushes off the bar and leaves me with that, striding to the door and into the arms of a man I should know, but I’m too frayed tonight to recall.
I brace both hands on sticky wood and seek out Sol again.
Someone’s talking to him, slapping his back and shoving a pint glass into his hands.
But his gaze is on me, and I realise he saw everything from the trickster to my brief encounter with the feared matriarch of the Rebel Kings Motorcycle Club.
He tilts his head a little, a silent question through the rowdy chaos of the Joker tonight. All right?
Am I?
I think about it and nod slowly, my bearings coming back to me as the presence of an O’Brian at the bar keeps patrons away for now.
I’m okay.
Sol holds my gaze a moment longer. Then the singing starts again, another storm rolls in, and life moves on.
River drinks the beer his sister left on the trickster’s pile of fake cash.
Then he hops up on the bar where Skylar sometimes perches, and I don’t stop him.
The River O’Brian I used to know was never present enough to enjoy anything, let alone the spectacle of Porth Luck’s fishermen bringing the house down.
This version of him, clean, grounded, and married to his childhood best friend, is transfixed by another mate.
By Oscar and the years of trust and friendship between them.
By the fraternal love they share in its purest form.
Know how that feels.
Without the pure part.
Maybe—
Thunder booms, rattling the steamed up windows. Lightning forks over the black swell beyond the sea wall and the flash seems to hold a warning I can’t decipher. The air tastes of metal. An echo stirs inside me, but of what?
Fuck, I wish I knew.
Fuck, I need Sol. But I can’t lean on him every moment my heart yearns for him. If I did, I’d never be upright, and he’d never be without the weight of me slowing him down.
Get your shit together.
Sometimes I can’t.
Tonight, I latch onto River O’Brian’s hard-won calm and find my rhythm again. Pour ale and cider. Take the money. Open the back doors to the storm so the Rebel King bikers gathered under the smoking shelter can hear the Irish lament more tied to their ancestry than Sol’s.
It’s a night that lasts forever. Time slips through my fingers. It’s late when I lock up, the Joker still rattling in the bitter wind, salt and ale clinging to my skin.
I’ve lost track of Sol. He’s not supposed to be working tonight, but I know he won’t be far.
I flick off the lights and contemplate the alarm system.
Mal says it’s simple, but I’ve come to learn there’s no such thing for me.
Too many buttons. Too many teeny bulbs that blink and flash with no reason I can find.
Give me a weapon to strip and clean. A field radio with sand in the dials. This shite means nothing to me.
Somehow, I figure it out, safe in the knowledge wherever my brother has taken himself tonight, he’ll be back to check my work.
Check and test.
It’s the Regiment way. I taught him that, long before he followed me into the SAS, and I remember it, clear as day.
The conversation. The bad Guinness we sank in some dodgy bar while we had it.
Can’t recall who I was, though. What I liked, what I hated, and these great yawning holes in my foundations sometimes hit like a truck.
Sudden.
Heavy.
Noise and light I’m not equipped for these days.
I blink it away before it takes hold. Let instinct draw me outside to where Sol stands on the sea wall, at one with the storm, his face tilted to the lashing rain, the wind in his hair, arms raised in worship to Mother Nature.
Mad bastard.
Except, he’s not.
Sol’s just wild, the elements in his blood, and as much as I flinch every time the lightning strikes too close, I love seeing him like this for as long as I can stand him being wet and cold.
Which isn’t all that long. I step out into the gale, rain soaking my clothes. “Sol.”
He doesn’t hear me. The wind is too loud and he’s too lost in his communion with the weather.
“Sol.”
He turns as I reach him. As I wrap my stronger arm around his waist and hoist him down.
Sol laughs. “I wasn’t going to jump, Jackie.”
“I know.” Even Sol’s not bonkers enough to take a dip in the roiling winter chop tonight. “Come inside.”
He makes a defiant sound low in his throat. One that goes straight to parts of me I don’t know what to do with anymore, even when I’m with him.
Especially when I’m with him.
But he doesn’t resist as I tow him inside and shut the doors behind us. Doesn’t fight me as I steer him to the stairs, water dripping on the flagstone floor and my arm stays locked around his waist all the way to the top.
On the landing, we kick off our shoes and veer left to the bathroom we share. Sol takes a step towards his bedroom, but I tug him back. “You need out of those wet clothes.”
“I’m going to.”
Maybe. But he won’t dry his hair. Or his tattooed skin. He’ll fall asleep with rain on his pillow, dampness seeping into his bones, and I…I can’t bear it.
“Sol.”
“Okay, okay.”
He steps into the bathroom and strips his t-shirt. The worn cotton falls to the floor—the soaked cotton. But it’s the moisture sheening Sol’s torso that bothers me, not the water pooling on the tiles.
I lose my own shirt and join him in the bathroom, grabbing the only towel hanging on the rail. “Get out of those jeans.”
Sol’s gaze flickers. “Get out of yours.”
“In a minute.”
He sighs, a rueful grin lighting his face. “Why are you like this, eh? Been telling you our whole lives water isn’t going to hurt me.”
I know that. I’ve always known it. But I don’t like damp things. The smell. The spongey texture in the air. Reminds me too much of the shitcan bedsit me and Mal lived in with our dad, and of all the fucking things I’ve forgotten, why not that?
Sol takes off his jeans. I force the towel on him and retreat to my room to grab him dry underwear from the basket of clean laundry by my bed.
When I go back, he’s not dry. And he doesn’t give a shit.
He’s too busy fiddling with the analogue radio that lives on the windowsill, searching for Saltkiss FM, the pirate radio station transmitting from the town up the coast of the same name.
Modern Cornish folk—if there is such a thing—filters from the tinny speakers, filling the low lit bathroom until it hums with an energy I don’t usually feel at this time of night.
Unless he’s with me.
Sol straightens, turning to face me. The air is damp and heavy, but it dries as I near him, his underwear clutched in my hand, and I drink him in without making a conscious decision to do it.
That inked skin.
Those work-honed muscles.
The dark hair low on his stomach that wasn’t there when we were gangly teenagers trying to buy weed to choke and splutter through on the beach.
I swallow, reeled in like a moth to something I don’t understand.
We’re a breath apart. His bare chest and mine.
A situation we find ourselves in most days.
Only tonight, it feels different. It feels old and brand new, as though I’ve stepped into someone else’s life and can’t find my way back.
A borrowed memory that has me narrowing the distance between us until Sol has to flatten himself to the tiled wall.
Until too much heat pools in my wet jeans and I realise what the hell I’m doing.
“Hey.” Sol holds my face with both hands. Steady hands. “Are you okay?”
No. I’m not. I have a fucking boner and the only reason he doesn’t know it is because he won’t break my gaze.
I grip his wrists and take a shaky breath. “I need to go to bed.”
Sol nods. “Go on. I’ll dry my hair and tidy up, I promise.”
He knows me so well.
So how can it be that he lets go of my face? For a charged second, I don’t move. Then my faculties return to me and I make my escape before Sol can look at me too closely.
I shut my bedroom door behind me and lean against it in my rain-damp jeans.
Take them off.
I want to—I need to. But that means facing the throb in my groin and I just fucking can’t. Not without shattering a moment that doesn’t belong to the storm. A moment that’s mine, if only I could grind the gears in my brain enough to know what it means.
I’ve learned the shite way not to push myself too hard.
To reach for things that aren’t there yet, and might never be.
I close my eyes, breathing deep and slow as I listen to Sol move around in the bathroom, taking a shower.
I need one too. A cold one. But I like knowing he’s warm again.
It feels good in the face of the barbed anxiety scratching my nerves, and my dick calms down.
I strip my jeans and underwear. Dress in the only pair of sweatpants my brother hasn’t stolen and go to my bed.
Lie down.
Get up again, unruly animation pumping in my veins.
I need to sleep. If I don’t, I crash to the floor and my body becomes a force I can’t control. A thrashing, dribbling monster who makes Sol cry. But I’m so fucking drawn to him I can’t stay in my room. Can’t close my eyes without seeing him one more time.
Sol.
I open my bedroom door and slip onto the landing, the floor cold to my bare feet. Follow the sound of the radio he’s taken from the bathroom and into his own room.