Chapter 3 #2
Jack, though. He’s still staring at me as though he needs more. Like he can’t start his day until I give him more. So I go with the truth.
“I think you had a dream. You had goosebumps when I came in, but you didn’t seem scared, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Jack’s gaze has drifted to the window.
He snaps it back to me. “A dream?”
“Maybe. You want breakfast?”
Jack shakes his head. Slowly. Then he clicks his fingers, summoning Fiadh from Mal. “I need to walk her.”
He leaves.
Without breakfast.
I want to die, but I’m used to the sensation of my heart expiring in my chest. Devastation is my baseline. It doesn’t even make me think of the Ankow anymore.
That wind, though.
I chase it into the living room and shut the window.
Mal follows me, still drinking his truly terrible coffee. “You want to tell me what the fuck that was all about?”
Jack’s long legs have already carried him past the harbour wall and to the beach. He sets Fiadh free and the slender lurcher sprints away from him, catching the slipstream of the bitter winter breeze.
He crouches to watch her, something he usually does with some semblance of a smile. But the set of his broad shoulders is tense, and I wish I’d handled him better. That I’d had better words for him after a night that’s left him so rattled.
“Sol.”
“Hmm?”
“Don’t ignore me.”
“I’m not ignoring you.”
“Aye, you are.” Mal tosses a sofa cushion at my head. “What do you do in that bed of his that fucks you both up so much if you’re not actually fucking?”
Mal’s filterless take on life is why I love him so much. Why he’s so good for Skylar. For all of us.
But his question…it hurts, and I don’t have the answer.
At least not one I want to discuss with Jack’s little brother.
Gods. What am I supposed to do? Admit I’ve been in love with my best friend my whole adult life?
And that just when I’d learned to live with it, one mad drunk night—mad, drunk, and hot—changed everything, and then the world literally ended, taking that seismic shift with it?
He doesn’t remember.
Jack, not me or Mal, and it’s a lot. And I’m tired.
Too tired to face a Mal-fuelled inquisition, and I’ve never been more grateful to hear Oscar’s tread on the stairs, even as his handsome face lets me know the second I see it he’s bearing bad news.
“The roof is fine. Our girl is running hot, though, and the oil light is flickering again.”
My heart finds new depths to navigate. “Sensor?”
Oscar shrugs. “Perhaps. But the coolant shouldn’t be so low so fast.”
“Probably the gauge sticking.”
Oscar’s not convinced, and he shouldn’t be—he won’t be for much longer. But his phone beeps, saving me and distracting him, and his usually sunny features twist with exasperation. A phenomenon out of character enough to draw me from the window while Mal takes my place to watch over Jack.
“What’s up?”
“This thing.” Oscar jerks his head at the tiny glucose monitor stuck to his bicep. “It tells lies.”
“How do you know it’s lying?”
“Because I am fine.”
I take his phone and study the red alert on his screen. “It says you’re low.”
“It lies,” Oscar repeats, already tugging his pouch of tricks from his pocket. “One splash of salt water and it thinks I am dead. This is not what I agreed to.”
I suppress a smile. Oscar’s rarely grumpy, but if there’s one thing guaranteed to hack him off, it’s technology.
Especially the kind that keeps him tied to his phone.
“Aras likes you to wear the monitor,” I remind him.
As if he needs a nudge to remember the little boy his entire existence revolves around. “He doesn’t like seeing you bleed.”
Oscar grunts, already pricking his finger and checking his blood sugar the old-fashioned way. “And I do not like to upset him, my friend. But this cannot be the way to reassure him.”
Perhaps it isn’t. And as Oscar shows me a number I know to be as green as Jack’s eyes, I lean further into his way of thinking.
And yet I still fetch a new roll of waterproof tape and help him bind the monitor to his tattooed bicep.
Because that’s what we do, isn’t it? Tape over the cracks and keep going.
Oscar doesn’t stay for a second breakfast. He takes a handful of snacks and heads out to haul in any crab pots that survived last night’s storm.
I go back to considering the fridge while Mal follows me around because he doesn’t like how he feels when he’s waiting for Skylar to come home.
It’s a sweet privilege that he wants to be around me instead of hiding from his emotions on the roof or in the miles and miles he runs most days.
Still hate that even the soulmate love he’s found with Skylar hasn’t healed him, though.
They deserve to be happy and whole. You deserve that too.
Maybe. But I don’t want it without Jack, and that’s why he has to share his best friend status with my busy right hand.
A heavy sigh escapes me as I chuck bacon in pans and crack eggs. Breakfast for the five thousand when Jack’s already told me he doesn’t want any and whatever time Skylar comes home, he probably won’t eat it either.
What a life.
It’s mornings like these I miss my own brother. Sev’s a tough crowd, but it doesn’t matter how much I piss him off, he’ll always eat before he rips me a new one.
That’s not what Jack did.
Course it isn’t. Jack’s never angry with me, only himself, and it’s so unfair my hand shakes as I poke at the eggs. My eyes burn and my chest aches and I wish I had the capacity to hate the men Jack protected when he stepped in front of that mortar round.
Gods, I’m in my feelings today. Feelings that hurt, and they shouldn’t. I’ve had years to get over what Jack did. To learn to live with it. But those moments when his eyes haze over against a world he doesn’t recognise, they don’t get any easier.
Mal leaves the kitchen.
A few seconds later, I hear a car pull up outside and I know without looking that it’s Skylar.
Look anyway, though, because I’m a sucker for the pure romance of Mal bounding down the steps like an overjoyed spaniel.
For the magic of Skylar’s dry laugh as he’s swept off his feet by a tornado of Gallagher affection.
I lean on the sink by the window and watch it play out, sound muffled by the old glass.
Pretty sure I’ll feel the need to be somewhere else when they come inside, but I’ll take it to bear witness to the home they’ve found in each other.
A love that’s not a cure, but a reason to keep breathing.
“Sol?”
Jack’s presence at my back seeps into me like warm honey. He doesn’t touch me, but he doesn’t need to.
“What’s up?”
His voice rakes my skin, deep and rough. “Let me do it.”
The breakfast.
I move aside without argument.
Fiadh pads to her cosy bed under the table, sand clinging to her silver fur, and Jack steps up to the stove, sleeves rolled up his tattooed forearms.
Unless it’s jam on toast, he’s less interested in nourishment beyond fuel than me, but he never does anything half-arsed, and I’m here for it.
Gives me a moment to study him while he’s busy.
While he’s not watching me back, daring me to notice that he moves slower these days, one side of his body weaker than the other.
His dark brow furrows and the little crease between his eyes deepens as he dials in to check the flame beneath the egg pan and rescue the bacon from the heat with a focus that has me thinking of a different time, a different place, and a different bed to the one we woke up in this morning.
Teach me, Sol. I want to fucking learn.
Gods, make it stop.
Gods, make it stay.
I retune to Jack’s current mood. He doesn’t seem angry anymore. Or even tired. Just…absorbed. If I didn’t know where that earnest concentration came from, it’d be all kinds of cute.
Trouble is, I do know. It’s what’s left behind.
The ashes of everything he’s lost. And watching him like this makes that thing inside me ache with love and sadness.
It reminds me how his voice cracked when he called my name last night and every night before it, and the melancholy that forever simmers under my skin finds a way to the surface.
I turn away before Jack can see it. Mess with the sink and fix my gaze on the window, fighting the recurring sting in my eyes.
Anything to give him my back so he doesn’t catch this look on my face and worry.
Or worse, think every hurt I bear is his fault.
Jack’s my world. He’s the blood in my veins and the air in my lungs.
He’s every emotion I’ve ever had, and sometimes loving him tears me apart because I can’t fix what broke him.
I can’t make him remember. And so I stand here with the solid warmth of him at my back, and for a moment, it has to be enough.
“Is Mal allowed to eat this?”
Jack’s voice shakes me out of a heavy daze.
He’s finished cooking. Bacon. Eggs. Mushrooms cooked with olive oil and Oscar’s favourite: spinach. It’s the bacon he’s frowning at, his brother on his mind.
“Mal’s healthy.” I tell him the truth. “Nothing here is going to hurt him.”
I’m being literal. Talking about the food and reaching for my limited knowledge of Mal’s dodgy ticker.
Truth be told, Jack knows more about it than I do.
But as his frown returns and his hands bunch and flex at his sides, I know he’s thinking about more than breakfast, and that he’s doing it hard enough to give himself a headache.
I take his hands, derailing the restless clenching.
“Mal’s good. If he wasn’t, he’d tell someone.
He promised you.” More than once. And I almost believed him.
But Mal’s not the kind of man you can coddle.
Like Skylar. Like Jack. So we watch and we wait, and we’re steadfast for the people we love when they need us.