Chapter 4 #2
Mal rolls his eyes. He’d do anything for me, I know that. But he can’t be trusted around prickly Porth Luck natives hollering for their beer. He’s decked three already, and those are the altercations I know about.
“Go on.” I nudge him. “Fuck off and spend the night with Skylar. I don’t need a babysitter.”
And Mal doesn’t need much encouragement to attach himself to his man. Tonight, though, he hesitates, consternation cinching brows a shade lighter than mine. “What were you and Skylar talking about?”
“You didn’t stop and listen on the stairs?”
“I didn’t know you were down here.”
“Okay…if that’s supposed to make sense, you need to explain it to me like I’m five.”
Mal glares. “Don’t talk shit about yourself.”
“Don’t talk in circles then. My brain doesn’t work like that anymore.”
“Says the twat who never loses a chess game.”
“Sol lets me win.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
Counter-argument surges inside me, but I catch it before it spills out. Mal asked me a question and he wouldn’t bother if the answer didn’t matter to him. “He was helping me with something I don’t want to talk to you about.”
Mal absorbs that, matching the most honesty I can give him with whatever he’s thinking. He doesn’t blink for a moment. Then he fixes me with a stare that would probably have other people stepping back.
Not me, though.
Not Skylar.
Not Sol.
We love Mal as fiercely as he loves us.
“I need you to promise me something,” he says abruptly enough I know at least one of us has drifted.
I move closer to him. “What is it?”
“Skylar. You need to tell me if you see something I don’t. My head’s fucked too, remember?”
From PTSD—a battlefield I recognise. What Skylar fights is different. And mostly unknown to me. I don’t know what triggered his disordered eating. Only that the day I realised he and Mal were in love was the same day I thought Skylar might die in my brother’s arms.
I need to make the promise Mal’s asking of me. But he moves before I can speak, tugging the phone he rarely carries when Skylar’s home from his pocket as a message lights the screen.
He frowns again. Deeper this time. The kind of frown that means something’s shifted somewhere I can’t see. Somewhere a lifetime away from Porth Luck.
“Who is it?”
“Orion.”
The name lands heavy. Orion is Regiment. Part of Mal’s old crew and last I heard—last I remember—deployed overseas. If he’s reaching out, it isn’t for small talk.
“They’re going dark,” Mal says after a beat too long. “Could be months.”
I nod as the implication hits like a fist to the gut.
The memory, old and new, of the quiet my brother will have to live with until his friends make it home.
The quiet we’ve inflicted on Sol too many times to count.
The utter silence I didn’t comprehend until I came home and Mal was still out there, in the desert, in the mountains.
In hostile lands and hellscapes that could take him from me at any moment.
Mal’s still staring at his phone.
I reach for him, a hand to his shoulder that turns into a rough tug until he’s in my arms.
My brother.
I fold him into an embrace I should’ve given him more often when we were younger instead of letting Sol do it for me.
I hold him there, taking the weight of the tension bleeding from him, knowing what it costs to love people who dance with death like it’s their fucking hobby.
“They have each other,” I tell him in place of bullshit he doesn’t need.
“And everything you and Vinnie taught them.”
Mal exhales into my shoulder. “We’re not there.”
“And you were never meant to be, not forever.”
Mal sighs again, a tremor simmering beneath his skin. He doesn’t speak, but he doesn’t need to. I know he’s thinking about his best friend. His partner in crime who never came home.
Fuck, I hate that I can’t spare him this pain.
This fear.
That I can’t make it better.
I draw back so I can see his face. So I can give him the only thing he’s asked me for. “I’ll tell you if I’m worried about Skylar, I promise.”
It’s all I have, and Mal knows it.
I hug him again, longer this time.
Then he leaves me in the cellar with the scent of stale hops and beer-stained wood, and it’s a fucked-up thing that I draw strength from his vulnerability, but I do.
I feel it as I return to the bar with steadier balance and a stronger grip.
With clear thoughts and comprehension capabilities that don’t feel like swimming uphill through the thickest, wettest sand.
It’s a quiet night by Porth Luck’s standards.
I send half the bar staff home early and try not to think about what nights like these mean for our bottom line.
Mal and Skylar don’t need an income from the Joker.
Neither do I, really. I have an army pension and I don’t buy much save clothes to replace the ones that get ruined by constant beer spills.
Or blood and other things when seizures send me to the deck.
Sol, though.
Sol.
His name is an echo in my cavernous brain.
I shut the till, suddenly so aware of him it’s a shot of adrenaline to my veins.
Need him.
A whisper in my heart as my gaze jumps ahead and I spot the mop of dark curls beyond the beer garden.
He’s on the boat, wearing grey weatherproof trousers that cling to his legs and a green woollen jumper that brings out the bronze flecks in his eyes.
Not that I can see his eyes from here. Just the tension in the rest of him.
Uncharacteristic agitation that has me halfway to the door before I’m waylaid by a beer fiend.
Lots of them actually.
The ukulele club has finished playing in the tourist bar and all twelve of them want a drink.
By the time I come up for air, Sol is crouched at the stern of the Sirona, the boat he’s loved since he was seventeen.
The vessel he’s fought his whole life since to keep.
Half vanished through the hatch that leads to the engine bay, his shoulders flex as he wrestles with something, leaning his full weight into it before he gives up and a flash of motion sends whatever tool he’s using clattering down the deck.
I’m too far away to hear the impact, but it startles me all the same. Sol’s had plenty to be angry about in his life, but it’s a rare day he loses his temper. So rare I forget he has one and it has nothing to do with my banjaxed brain.
Something’s wrong.
Like the current has shifted against the wind and no one can feel it yet. No one but him, and maybe me.
Fuck the bar.
I slip from behind it while someone’s still talking to me. Leave them in the hands of one of the seasonal bar staff who’s stuck around for the bleak winter. I head for the garden door, but it opens before I reach it and someone says my name.
It’s not Sol. For a protracted second, that’s all I know. Then I take in the tawny hair and blue eyes of a man with the same rangy build as my brother, and recognition sets in.
Folk Whitlock.
Another Rebel King.
There are a lot of them around these days while they fulfil their contract with the town council to rebuild the burned out lifeguard base here, and the lifeboat station up the road in Porth Ewan.
Bikers. Builders. Fighters. I’m not sure where Whitlock falls on the spectrum.
Just that he was from my world long before he climbed on the back of a Harley.
He’s a soldier. And a friend, maybe. I’m not sure. There’s something about Folk Whitlock that always jars my brain. Something that feels like more than I know. But doesn’t everything?
I return to the bar, aware of Folk behind me. Open a fridge and retrieve a beer bottle before I turn back to him. “This one? Fuck. No. You don’t drink…right?”
Folk smiles a little and folds his body onto a bar stool, flexing his hands with a barely perceptible wince. “Not for a long time. Good memory, though.”
I choke on a wry chuckle. “Doubt it. Are you looking for Mal? He’s upstairs.”
It makes sense that he would be. Folk has been Mal’s veteran support since my brother was medically discharged from the Regiment.
From way back when I panicked before Mal came home that I couldn’t be what he needed.
I’m over that now. I’ve learned that Mal just needs me.
But he needs other people too, especially tonight, and Folk Whitlock is one of them.
“I was here anyway,” Folk supplies while I fish a bottle of water from the other fridge. “Security check on the site.”
The lifeguard station. “You’ve had trouble there?”
“Not yet.” Folk accepts the water with a nod, his gaze lingering on my forearm for a moment.
At the paras tattoo?
I’m not sure. So I let it go—let it slip from my mind as if it was never there at all. “That might change when you get to the water supply. We had all our copper pipes nicked last year.”
“By who?”
“Someone who needed them more, I guess.”
Folk smiles. “That’s a magnanimous way of looking at it. They teach you that in the Regiment?”
“In my squadron maybe. Not sure about Mal’s. You want me to get him?”
“No, let him be. I really was just passing.” Folk eases from his stool. “Take care, Jack.”
He’s gone then, taking his water with him.
And it feels weird. I feel weird. Folk’s been around since my brother came home.
He took one of Fiadh’s pups—Ariel—for his little girl, and I like his company.
It’s easy in ways it always is around soldiers who’ve fought the same wars I have, though he probably remembers them better.
But whenever Folk leaves, something flickers inside me.
A place half-remembered. A name on the tip of my tongue.
It’s a tiny thing. Insignificant, and nothing compared to the hammer blows I get around Sol lately.
Yet, that flicker gnaws at my awareness enough I grip the bar to ground myself, searching for Sol.
Always, always searching for Sol.