Chapter 2 #3
His door is open. He hardly ever shuts it. And he’s still in his underwear, though he’s kept his promise to rub his wild curls dry. “What’s up?”
I lean in the doorway, hiding my dick, just in case. “Do you think Mal’s okay? He’s not home yet.”
If Sol’s awake, he’s rarely doing nothing.
Tonight, he’s reading on the bed pushed into the corner of the room.
His boho sheets are rumpled from never being straightened and incense burns in a ceramic pot, smoke seeping from the subtle vents and curling up to the antique concertina hanging on the dented wall.
Skylar did that.
The dent.
Sol lowers his paperback, giving me his full attention, like he always does until the sea calls him home. “Mal took my car, so he probably drove to Devon to mooch with Saint.”
Saint Malone. Another Rebel King biker. It’s never surprised me that my brother came back here and made friends with a man who doesn’t speak.
“Want me to check?” Sol asks when I fail to respond. “I have a number for Saint. He might not tell Mally we asked.”
“I don’t mind Mal knowing I give a shit.”
“Okay.”
Sol reaches for the phone on his bedside table.
No.
I take it off him, invading his room without thinking. Without steeling myself for a featherlight collision that sends me reeling.
Our fingers brush.
A light touch that shouldn’t register given how often we have contact, but that inexplicable itch, that flare in my brain. It ignites again and I’m not ready for the bolt of sensation shivering through me.
I set the phone down, angling my body away from Sol. “It’s so bright in here.”
That’s not what I mean. Sometimes I pick the wrong words. But as well as Sol knows me, he’s not a mind reader.
He dims his lamp.
“I meant colourful,” I amend as near darkness cloaks us. “And that I like it.”
My room is grey and white. Can’t remember why. If I chose it. If I painted it myself. Except…I probably would if I could think past the memory of paint flecks scattered in sun-kissed brown curls. Inked and scarred hands that make magic from the simplest things.
One of those hands reaches for me now.
Reaches for me again.
I evade him and go back to the door. “Don’t call Saint. Mal comes home for Skylar, right?”
“He comes home for you too.”
I’m not so convinced. Mal’s my brother and we’re closer now than I ever thought we’d be again. But what if he hadn’t fallen in love with Skylar? What if he’d never come back here?
I don’t like those thoughts. Or how they make me picture him drifting the same way too many fellas from the Regiment have.
Haunted.
Half-alive.
Alone.
Sensing the jumble in my head, Sol rises from his bed, feet whispering over the floorboards. He comes to my side, warm and steady, and skates a palm down my forearm.
Another light touch.
Another pulse in the dark.
“You need help sleeping tonight?”
By help, he means the pills that make me fall off the edge of the world and take days to come back. A world that turns black in ways I can’t stand, as though the dreams I can’t reach and the years I’ve lost are the same haunted void.
I shake my head. “I’m fine.”
Sol studies me a second longer. Then he goes back to his bed, leaving me loitering in the doorway unsure which way is onward and which is back.
It’s so tempting to watch him stretch out.
To track the shape of him under the lamp light, and the rise and fall of his bare shoulders.
Sol’s every breath and movement has always fascinated me.
Before, now, and every time I woke up in a hospital bed to the grounding sight of him leaning over me, his hand wrapped so tight around mine.
That enduring grip.
Some days it was my only tangible connection to the world. Others, it scared me how much I needed it.
It scares me now.
I back out of Sol’s room and return to my own, closing the door behind me to four bland walls and the echo of his touch running through me like a charge from the earth’s core. A bed that feels all wrong as I sit on the edge of it, elbows on my knees, replaying every moment we’ve shared today.
His hand on my arm.
My back.
My face—
Fuck. My body reacts too fast for my brain to catch up, and I feel it before I can stop it.
Heat.
Pressure.
Blood in all the wrong places.
Pulse in my ears, I lie down, dragging the covers over the hardness at my waist. Ignoring it.
Fixating on it. Fuck, I want to touch it, but I can’t.
If there’s one thing worse than wanking over my best friend, it’s the thought of him finding me mid-seizure with my dick in my hand and his name on my lips, and I just fucking can’t.
And so I stare at the ceiling. Breathe through every tiny noise of Sol moving around his room before he turns the radio off and the flat is deadly quiet until Mal comes home.
He’s not okay. I know it because Fiadh stays with him instead of scratching at my door to get in. But I’m too worked up to go to my brother. Too aroused to leave my bed without tripping over my dick.
I’m too messy to be alive.
Falling asleep feels like death.
But he’s there.
Sol.
And I call for him, again. Always again. In the dark as the storm rages on, I call for him like the sea calls the drowned.