Chapter 3
The fierce storm breaks at dawn. The call to it fades and I watch Jack for signs of life. He’s an early riser when he’s feeling good.
This morning, though, he’s out for the count, head pillowed on my chest, muscled arm slung over my abdomen, and it’s the best and worst thing I’ve ever known.
Love that I’m able to comfort him.
Hate that my dick thinks it’s something it’s not.
I’m so hard. Like, I don’t know how the rest of my body is surviving the sheer quantity of blood pooled in my groin. How I’m still breathing around the arousal knotted in my chest. I’ve never known, and it’s been years. How can something so good hurt so much?
Because you love him.
Jack.
Gods, I love him. I’ve always loved him. Before a traumatic brain injury took pieces of him—took memories—he’ll never get back. And after, now what’s left of him knows to call my name in the night and I’ll be there.
I am here.
Beside me, on top of me, Jack shifts, starting to wake up. I need out of this bed before I poke his eye out, but whatever my traitorous body is doing, I can’t leave my best friend until I know he’s okay.
Jack takes a deeper breath, an endless pull of air that expands his chest and presses him closer to me. If I leaned down, I could kiss the top of his head. But I don’t do it, this time, at least. Can’t say I’m always that strong. Or that I even want to be.
And however moral I’m feeling anytime Jack needs me enough to want my arms around him, I never ignore the crease between his brows.
I smooth it as he stirs a little more, a soft groan wrenching from his throat, lashes fluttering as he fights to open his eyes, then stops, listening, to the fading rain, the hiss of the ancient heating pipes, and maybe to my heart thumping beneath his ear.
Knowing you’re alive is better than morphine.
I don’t know about that. I’ve seen Jack endure the worst physical pain the gods have to offer. It’s madness to believe it could ever be me who stands against it. But of all the memories we’ve made in this harsh new existence, I quite like that one.
Jack’s eyes finally crack open, a slow blink that lets me see his sage-green eyes, deep voice rumbling from his chest, rough with sleep. “You’re here.”
The scars on my soul flinch. “Course I am. Where else would I be?”
Lots of places. Out with the boat. Downstairs. Off grid on a deep sea trawler for weeks on end while my best friend lies in a coma, a thought that kills the wood I’ve been sporting all night. That kills me enough that Jack’s tired eyes widen a touch. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, love. How are you feeling?”
Jack frowns. Like he’s missing something. Like being awake is too much for him to handle right now. But beneath the sheets, his foot flexes, toes brushing my calf as if he’s checking I’m real, and the light touch burns through me, stupid and ecstatic, sending raw heat to my groin all over again.
Gods, I’m going to burst into flames.
I grind my teeth, thinking sad thoughts, trying not to move or breathe him in too deep.
Jack stays quiet and I think he might get up. But as we lie together so still in the hazy early morning, his body grows loose again, and he goes back to sleep.
I don’t. Haven’t caught a wink since he called my name at the witching hour, ripping me from my bed for the third time in a long week of storms and stress.
But I don’t mind the scratchy fatigue stinging my eyes.
The drag in my limbs. It’s worth it to be here as whatever had its claws in Jack last night finally lets go.
It gives me more time to stare at him.
To feel him.
He’s heavier in my arms like this.
Softer.
His hair is longer than I’ve ever seen it too, curling at his ears in ways I know he won’t tolerate for long.
Drifting, I rake idle fingers through it, sifting the dark strands, no silver flecks, not like the short beard on his jaw.
I long to stroke that too, but I contain myself—just, thoughts meandering between the past and the present and back again, but as ever, it does me no good.
I need to get up. Check my phone. Check the boat for damage after another storm.
I need to check on Mal and Skylar. Oscar.
And Sev, my unruly little brother miles away in a city I’ve never set foot in.
They matter to me, all of them. But these warm and quiet moments with my best friend…
it’s so easy to pretend there’s nothing else out there, and only the knowledge he’ll be worried about the pub roof the second he truly wakes up drives me to cut this one short.
Yawning, I ease myself from beneath him, a master by now at slipping out without waking him. Hate it, though. And my body protests too, pulse hammering, stomach in my feet, nerves prickling my skin with too many emotions to quantify except the barbed reality that leaving him kills me.
With my soul mortally wounded, I stagger to the bathroom we share and rub one out with gritted teeth, resenting the coarse pleasure ripping through me. The necessary release. The images in my head I need to forget.
Shame burns me alive.
I come with my fist pressed so hard to the tiles it’s still throbbing as I shake out my hair, drag some clothes on, and do the walk of shame from the bathroom.
Jack hasn’t moved. I pull his door shut and retrieve my phone from the spot I always keep it when I spend the night in his room. Close enough that I’ll hear it. Far enough that he might not.
As it happens, I’ve been so wrapped up in Jack the past few hours I haven’t registered the slew of messages buzzing through.
I don’t register them now—not before I study a sequence of numbers I’m still learning to understand.
The smooth green line with the tiny bump telling me Oscar’s had his breakfast already.
His message lets me know he’s on his way to give the boat a once-over.
I ask him to check the pub roof too, Oscar’s closer to Jack in how meticulous he is.
Then I reply to a message from my mum and pocket my phone, a flurry of activity that carries me through the flat above the Joker and to the living space where I find Mal sleeping on the couch with Fiadh, the dog he shares with Jack, curled in the crook of his elbow.
Windows wide open.
Sea breeze rendering the best efforts of the old radiators worse than useless.
Yet I hesitate to shut the windows and crank the heat. Mal’s been knee-deep in PTSD since he came home to us, and even though our summer of madness is long over, when Skylar’s not here to distract him, the boy needs to breathe.
I leave him be and skulk into the kitchen, reaching on autopilot for the coffee tin. The decaf dust we all live on rather than risk Jack ingesting the wrong one. Mal too, though I’d never dare say it to his face.
“Did you sleepwalk in here?”
I jump a mile, hand flying to my chest. “Damn, Mally. Stop sneaking up on me.”
From the doorway, Fiadh at his feet, Mal sends me an edgy half grin that might seem cold to anyone who doesn’t know him. To me, as he falls into his favourite seat at the kitchen table, he just looks tired; he doesn’t sleep much when Skylar’s not here and it dulls his light.
I pass him my coffee and open the fridge instead, gaze sliding to the window to check the time while noting Oscar is already on the Sirona, walking the deck, checking the hull.
Skylar’s night shift should be over by now, but there’s no telling when he’ll be home.
If he’ll want to eat or go straight to bed—
A bolshy gust of wind blasts through the open windows in the living room, slamming the kitchen door shut. The sudden bang should startle me all over again, but I’m not shocked that the earth reacts to me thinking about Skylar going to sleep hungry.
I shut the fridge. “We need to banish the Ankow.”
Mal sips his coffee, observing me with a gaze far less fascinated by mythology than Jack pretends to be for my sake. Still, though. Mal’s been in my life since we were both little kids. Whether he wants to or not, he knows the Cornish yarns as well as I do. “You can’t banish your freaky death god.”
“The Ankow isn’t a god,” I correct him, my mind already on Jack, my feet already carrying me to the door. “It’s a warning—”
The kitchen door opens.
Jack.
Sleepy still, but his Gallagher-green eyes are wide and searching until they land on me. “Did something happen?”
“Just the wind.” I go to him and slide an arm around his waist to guide him into the room.
Jack resists. “No, not that. In the night.”
“Storm woke us up.” I tread softly. Jack doesn’t always like to know he’s been distressed enough to call my name. “Then we went back to sleep.”
“That’s it?” A frown threatens his rugged features. “Nothing else?”
“Not unless you remember something I don’t.”
Mal snorts, taking my careless words for a bad joke. Jack’s consternation deepens and I know I need to fix it fast. Before whatever rattled him in the night comes roaring back and does far worse to him than wake him up.
His meds are in the drawer by the kettle, sorted into a planner so anyone and everyone can keep track of them if he’s having the kind of week where he can’t.
I retrieve the coloured box. Palm the mandatory anti-seizure drugs and point at the remaining huddle of meds he doesn’t always want. “Need these?”
“No.”
“Sure?”
Irritated, Jack takes the seizure meds from me and dry swallows them, ignoring the water bottle I offer him, looking anywhere but at me for a few loaded seconds.
And then he does look at me, and his searching stare flays me wide open.
Except…I don’t know why. Nothing happened last night that we haven’t lived through a thousand times.
Unless he was more awake than I thought and my dick print scared him. It’s happened before; to both of us.
Morning wood.
Night wood.
Nap on the couch wood.
We never talk about it and I can’t see that changing this morning.