Chapter 4
There’s sea glass in my room. A pewter dish of it on my bedside table, fragments of blue, green, and amber. Broken pieces that shine with the morning sun when we’re lucky enough to get some.
I woke up to them a few days ago.
Sol left them for me. To brighten my day, perhaps, but he’s a deeper thinker than that.
I gather a few in my hand and roll the cool, worn edges through my fingers, wreckage made smooth by the tide.
Yet they still feel alive somehow. As if they’ve held on through the worst storms, and if Sol’s told me anything a hundred times, it’s that storms are life, and they shape us like they shape the earth.
The last piece drops into the dish. One of the renegade amber shards, so dark it’s almost bronze.
Like Sol’s eyes. Which gets me thinking about his face.
His hair. His inked skin. An adventure in imagination I don’t have time for right now.
I’m working—I came upstairs to check on Fiadh.
But like every time I’ve entered my bedroom this week, the sea glass reeled me in, and now I’m finding it hard to unstick my feet from the floor when all my brain wants to do is think about Sol.
He’s your happy place.
I hear the words in Skylar’s northern accent. But I can’t remember him ever saying them. Can’t remember how I came to care about him so much either. Just that I do.
Fiadh is curled up on my bed, her dainty paws tucked under her chin, leaning against my pillow like she owns it. It isn’t cold in the flat—the windows are closed, Mal’s out—but I park a blanket around her anyway. “You all right, gal?”
The silver dog regards me with eyes so wise I know she’s the reason I got my brother back from a crisis-fuelled walkabout over the summer.
That he came home to love Skylar better instead of breaking everything, including himself.
We owe this sweet hound a lot, a thought that completes as she sighs and goes back to sleep, and I take my cue to go back to work.
I step out of my room, leaving the door ajar behind me.
My senses are dulled, my brain a shadowed mess, but enough combat instinct remains that I know something’s different before I can name it.
Heavier air—charged air. The Joker creaks and groans like it always does over the bustle of the pub downstairs.
But a pulse simmers beneath all that, a shift in atmosphere humming at the base of my cracked skull.
It’s not cracked anymore. Healed, remember?
Doesn’t feel like it. Not in moments like these when I can’t decipher what my gut is trying to tell me.
What’s making my skin crawl as I pause on the landing, eyes adjusting to the dim light, and listen, as timbers shift and pipes clank, and a steady rhythm that shouldn’t be there has violence rising in my blood.
Glass on the carpet.
Smoke in the air.
Flames licking Skylar’s bed.
A memory—a real one—of a petrol bomb that blew through Skylar’s bedroom window this summer for reasons and motives I’m yet to understand.
I’ll never forget it and I turn towards the sound with every nerve wired as I consider my nearest weapon.
But as I freeze in the dark, my heart in my throat, the noise sharpens.
That rhythm becomes a low thump, a breath caught on the edge of a moan, and I get it.
Mal.
Skylar.
Christ. I rub my lips, torn between laughter and cringing myself through the floor. Sol warned you about this. That I needed to be louder, so they knew I was here. But I hadn’t counted on Mal being so into whatever that he wouldn’t notice my presence. And I’m going to fucking kill him later.
Maybe.
As much as I hate this moment, I can’t deny I feel something from it. Not arousal—Jesus, no—but the energy of it, raw and alive, hums in the air. A pulse that makes me too aware of the space around the deepest voids in my life.
You’ll never have that.
Late nights made of sweat and skin.
Lazy morning sex.
I force myself into motion and creep out of the flat, shutting the door behind me as if I’m sealing a stolen memory into a vault.
Because whatever’s going down between my brother and Skylar tonight, it doesn’t belong to me.
But jumbled as it is, the part of me that wishes it did grows louder.
So loud it follows me downstairs and into the belly of the Joker.
So fucking loud I don’t dare look for Sol.
I hide in the cellar instead, stacking barrels, shifting crates, blowing through the jobs I’m supposed to do tomorrow. Physical work and I like it. Feels good to move my body. To feel strong in ways I know I am when the mess in my brain isn’t too fucked-up to let me.
Shadows on the right.
Weakness on the left.
Some days I remember all the medical jargon that explains it.
Most days I don’t give a shit. I am what I am.
And whatever’s happened to me, I can still hear a fly sneeze on the other side of the world.
Can still assign footsteps to the individual before they come up on me.
Or maybe my heart just knows it isn’t Sol.
Blond hair appears in my peripheral. Skin stained with more ink than me and Sol combined. Eyes like the pewter dish in my room. Skylar leans in the doorway, appraising me with more subtlety than my brother can ever manage. “Spring cleaning?”
“It’s winter.”
“Right. And Sol already sorted the beer delivery this morning. He do it wrong?”
I shrug. “Maybe. What do you think?”
Skylar snorts. “All looks the same to me. Did you eat dinner?”
“Aye. Did you?”
A question I wouldn’t usually ask, but if Skylar’s come down here to check up on me, he can take his own medicine.
Or deflect me. Which is all the answer I need, before he thrusts a crumpled paper bag at me and I forget I ever asked. There’s money in the bag, spilling out in battered and scrunched up notes. About a grand, maybe. A little less, a little more. “What’s this?”
“Yours, apparently. It was in the microwave, so I swiped it before Mal saw it and here we are.” Skylar’s lips upturn in a dry half-smile. “Unless you want to talk to him about it?”
“Fuck, no.” I set a barrel down and eye the money, ignoring the bite mark on Skylar’s neck and the royal mess my brother’s made of his hair. “I don’t need that aggravation in my life.”
“He could help.”
“All I need is Sol to stop bankrupting himself to pay a debt I don’t care about.”
“Mal might’ve better luck persuading him than you’ve had.”
“No, he’ll just be ruder about it and make Sol upset. I don’t want that.”
“What do you want, then? I’ve been banking this cash for you ever since I caught you with a pile of it under your mattress, and I’ll do it forever if that’s what you want, but I don’t feel like it is.”
It isn’t. I want Sol to keep his hard-earned money and stop worrying about the chunk I gave his mum a hundred years ago.
It wasn’t a loan. Even if Skylar wasn’t my witness, I remember pulling those funds and handing my best friend an envelope that made him cry.
I always remember Sol’s tears. Probably because it’s been a lifetime since I made him laugh.
A hand lands on my shoulder. Not warm like Sol’s, but not as cold as it used to be.
Skylar.
I’m rarely alone with him these days. If he’s home, my brother’s attached to him like velcro, and I love how wrapped up in each other they are. How they move around each other like the sun and the fucking moon. How weak my friend’s demons are in the face of how content he is.
And freshly fucked.
Jesus.
I tip my gaze to the ceiling, for once glad I carry enough mental fragility that Skylar will think I’m angsting over the pile of money Sol’s left in the fucking microwave, where his mam used to hide the tax credits from his father, instead of having an actual conversation.
“Can you bank it for me? I’ll figure it out with Sol one day, I promise. ”
“Why are you two so bad at talking about money? You talk about everything else.”
“Do we?”
“Don’t you?” Skylar rolls up the bag, securing the tatty notes before tucking it in his pocket. “You’re basically married at this point.”
I jerk my head too fast and endure the shunt it brings. “What does that mean?”
Skylar opens his mouth to answer, but Mal appears behind him, peering over his lover’s head with a stare that feels like a loaded weapon.
He looks freshly fucked too.
I turn away from them and go back to shifting barrels around.
Skylar leaves.
Mal doesn’t. He takes a barrel from me, bearing its weight with ease, though he pounds too many miles to carry much muscle. “What’s up with you?”
“Nothing.”
“Sure about that? You’re acting like the dog died.”
“Don’t say that.” A shudder passes through me. “Wash your fucking mouth out.”
“Want me to touch wood?”
The sated haze in his eyes tells me he’s had enough wood for one day and I’d glare at him if I was awake enough. But the truth is, I’m tired. In my head, not my body. I feel like I’ve been chasing thoughts for days and days and I still don’t know my own fucking mind.
Tell him.
Mal.
“Sometimes,” I say, slowly enough I have a chance of making sense, “so many things bother me I can’t discern one from the other. So I’m just…bothered, and I don’t know why.”
My brother has many strengths. Thinking before he speaks isn’t one of them, so I appreciate the frown creasing his face. A face that’s younger than mine, but has seen all the same terrible and wonderful things Regiment life had to offer.
I wish we could jump together again.
Out of an aircraft at fifteen thousand feet. The roar and the rush until we hit that note of perfect silence. It was just work to me back then. Part of the job. For Mal, it was freedom. The kind he won’t find here, and I know he misses it.
“You could write it down, maybe? The shit that rattles you?”
I reclaim my thoughts and shake my head. “Tried that. It’s even more confusing to read thoughts I don’t remember having. Don’t worry about it, okay? I just need a nap.”
“Then go have one.”
“You gonna pull pints for me, brother?”