Chapter 3 #3
Jack’s still frowning, but the front door reroutes his attention. Mal moves around like a ghost. Skylar’s more human. I hear him coming, and of course Mal’s right behind him, a little older, taller, and wider.
Our housemates slip into the kitchen like they’ve been here all along.
Skylar eyes the food, indecision on his face, night-shift fatigue lining his features.
Mal eyes me, like the bloodhound he is, and I wonder what he’s seeing.
The boy’s clever. Intuitive. Even more perceptive than Oscar.
Does he know Jack’s worried about him? Does he know my body is still singing with unspent need for his brother?
Wow.
That’s not a good sentence. An internal grimace rocks me and I release Jack’s hands to open the plate cupboard. Grab four—always, always four, even if one goes empty.
Jack dishes up, Mal first, remembering what his brother likes without thinking too hard about it. I wonder if he realises his brother is the one constant in his fractured memory. Past, present, future, I can’t think of a single thing he’s ever forgotten about Mal.
Skylar’s more complex, in every sense. But Jack doesn’t falter as he arranges eggs and bacon on a second plate, no veggies, shifting a little so Skylar can see everything he’s doing, before he slides it to the end of the counter.
Close enough to reach.
Far enough to ignore.
Like my phone.
And however clumsy Jack believes himself to be, he’s good at this delicate dance with Skylar.
Wordless instinct, subtle caretaking. Enough soft nuance that Skylar takes the plate and sits at the table without that horrid pause he sometimes has to fight.
As if he’s waiting for a sign from the Gods that it’s safe.
I don’t know what that sign is.
Jack. Me. Mal.
But as Skylar picks up a fork and starts eating, it doesn’t matter.
Jack nudges me. “You feel like you’re somewhere else.”
“I’m right here.”
“Are you?” He angles his head to study me with deeper intent. “You’re so quiet. Are you okay?”
A yawn ripples through me, catching me off guard. But the timing is perfect. I go with it, stretching before I take the plate he’s made for me, more bacon than eggs, extra mushrooms, because he knows I’ll be sneaking extra spinach on his. “I’m tired. Bucca Dhu kept me up.”
At the table, Mal grunts at the mention of the sea spirit I was raised to believe is the storm god of Cornish waters, before he’s cut off by what sounds like an elbow to the ribs.
Skylar’s elbow.
Jack ignores them, laser focused on me. “You didn’t want to dance in the rain again?”
“Maybe if I’d sunk a little more cider.”
He gives me the same look he’s been giving me our entire lives every time I’ve picked Luckstable Lightning over ale and let it pickle my inhibitions.
Amusement and affection softened by something warmer.
The look that melts the years away until we’re teenagers again, him laughing on the shoreline as I stagger barefoot through shallow waves, slurring songs at the stars, both of us so young we thought those nights would last forever.
For a beat it feels like they did. His laughter echoes in my head, as vivid as his green eyes, and I catch myself smiling, even as his careful gaze seems to land on the gaping wound that’s never fully healed.
The one I can’t quantify, even to him, especially on days like this when I’m not quite sure where the pieces of us both have all gone.
My phone shatters the moment.
The ringtone isn’t loud, but the intrusion is sudden enough to startle Jack. He freezes with his hand half raised and reaching for me, his gaze flickering toward the sound as if he can’t place it, and his mouth moves before he catches up, confusion creasing his face, one word a whisper on his lips.
“Sol?”
“I’m here.”
Jack nods, but his gaze goes distant and he’s not in the room anymore. He’s gone, though his absence is less violent than it used to be. Not a crash to the floor, but a slow drift upstream until I can call him back. A stutter in his rhythm, a glitch.
“Jack?”
He doesn’t respond. I call him again, claiming both his hands, squeezing his spasming fingers as someone gets up and silences my phone.
Skylar.
As someone leaves the room.
Mal.
Boy hates it when this happens to Jack. Though it descends on us most days, he’s not used to it yet, and he wasn’t here when this short circuit in his brother was so much worse.
He doesn’t know.
No. Of course he does. Mal knows most things. But I can’t spare him much bandwidth right now. I trust Skylar to take care of him while I take care of his brother. Of Jack, as he chokes on an inhale and his hands twitch in mine as if he’s trying to remember what they’re meant for.
I rub my thumbs over his pulse point, feeling his heart rate steadying. “Jack,” I call one last time, breathing the words I always do when he’s gone. “Come back, love. We miss you.”
His eyes refocus.
“I’m here,” I tell him again.
Jack squeezes my hands. Nodding, blinking hard, before he frowns at me like I’ve just reeled him back from the moon.
Like he’s annoyed, before that fades too.
And honestly, it wouldn’t matter if it didn’t.
Because this is what it means to love him.
Digging my heels in no matter how far he drifts.
Not letting go. Forever and always, I’ll never let go.
The absence seizure ebbs away, leaving Jack bewildered but as whole as he’s ever going to be. I coax him to the table with his breakfast. Mal and Skylar don’t come back, but Fiadh rises from her bed to lay her fine-boned head on his knee as he eats.
I smile at them, but my stomach is ash. I feel more like Skylar than myself. But for Jack, I eat every scrap of food on my plate. I drink more powdered lies in place of good coffee, and I stay with him for as long as he needs me to.
It’s opening time downstairs when I have to leave him to see the Sirona back in.
From the garden, I spy her in the distance, a dark smudge under the lingering storm clouds, Oscar piloting her to the mouth of the narrow cove with deft hands.
Handling her like a lover, though he’s as celibate as me these days.
Should be poetry in motion to watch.
Our girl is as beautiful as the day I sold everything I owned to buy her back from the Dog Crow Motorcycle Club—bitter rivals of the Rebel Kings.
But a sound, a subtle, grinding sputter, binds my muscles.
An echo from the rocks, maybe, but my gut knows the truth.
The familiar dread that one bad day could take her from me, and like so many things, how much of myself I’d lose with her.
Oscar hasn’t noticed the sputter yet. He eases the Sirona to her mooring spot and waves to me, grinning through his beard, his tall frame relaxed as the seagulls welcome him home.
I’m halfway to the dock when that warmth crowds my back again.
Jack.
He reaches my side and physically turns me to face him, thrusting my phone at me. “Dav keeps calling.”
My dad.
I know he keeps calling. Along with death and taxes, and the splintered feeling inside me, my father is a constant I can’t escape. It’s why, once I spied Oscar on the horizon, I left my phone on a table inside, hoping someone would steal it.
Crush it. Drown it.
I shove the thing in my pocket.
Jack frowns. “What if it’s important?”
“It isn’t. I talked to Lisa this morning.”
My mum. Salt of the earth, but such a fool for my dad there’ll always be a part of me that doesn’t want to talk to her either.
Jack’s hand slips from my shoulder. I ache from the loss of it. Steel myself for Jack to go back inside when he looks so much better beneath the crisp blue skies the storm has left behind.
But he doesn’t move. If anything, he seems to shift closer and it’s instinct to meet him in the middle. To bring us chest to chest as if I’m his lover, not the platonic soulmate he needs.
He’s bigger than me. Wider. If he wanted, he could swallow me whole, a turn of phrase that has my heart cannibalising itself all over again.
“You shouldn’t leave your phone lying around,” he rumbles. “Someone might need you.”
“I’m right here.”
“I don’t mean me, Sol. I always need you.”
“Yeah?”
Jack nods and plucks the tea-towel from his back pocket to rub at a damp spot on my shirt. “That dream last night…I don’t remember it, but I hope it was about you. Everything’s better when you’re there.”
He’s killing me.
Such a beautiful death.
And the worst thing about it, as how close we are seems to dawn on him in slow waves, is he has no damn idea.
Jack stops scrubbing spilled beer from my clothes and steps back as if burned by whatever thoughts crowd his brain, wiping his palms on his faded jeans. Setting space between us like a brick wall I know will crumble before I take my next breath.
He turns to go.
Changes his mind and comes back, grabbing my hands again. “Don’t go out on the boat without saying goodbye.”
“You know I won’t.”
Never have. I’m a fourth generation fisherman; I know better than to sail away without acknowledging the love we leave behind. And Jack knows me better than that. Which means he’s fretting about something else and he’s not going to tell me what anytime soon, if ever.
He drops my hands and goes back inside with Fiadh at his heels.
The Sirona docks.
Oscar leaps from the deck, landing on the small jetty with more grace than his Viking-sized frame deserves.
He gives me a look.
Because he knows me too. He knows everything about everything whether he wants to or not, because I’ve been drunk or marooned at sea with him far too many times for our friendship to be anything else.
My phone rings in my pocket again. With a sigh, I answer it, and my dad’s voice filters down the line.
“Son, I need to talk to you.”