Chapter 4 #3
Until I find him. Inside, which should bring added relief as drizzle begins to haze the windows.
But he’s not alone. He’s leaning against the dresser at the far end of the bar with a glass of liquid amber in his hand and a woman in his orbit.
Cheeks flushed, eyes bright in the low light of the Joker.
He’s laughing, talking, living, and my stomach curls in on itself, ugly and mean, wrenching with an emotion I haven’t earned. An emotion that feels like jealousy.
I turn away.
Turn back a few seconds later as Sol’s Kraken-soaked chuckle fills the air, warm and resonant. Because he’s enjoying the woman’s company. Enjoying her, maybe, and I scramble to figure out if I know her, from the present or the past.
Has he fucked her before?
The possibility shakes me. And it shouldn’t. Sol likes women. He likes men. He likes sex.
Right?
My brain crowds with memories from too long ago for me to place.
From years and years before my fat head took the impact of a mortar round.
Sol used to hook up a lot. Way more than me.
Probably because he was better at it, so it should feel normal to watch him lean closer to this woman with her blonde hair and creamy tits.
But my stomach betrays me again, twisting as my thoughts spin from their usual meander to something sharper, and a searing reality hits me like a boulder to the skull.
He doesn’t hook up anymore.
A nonsensical thought, and I know there’s every chance I’m wrong—that I’m just missing shit, like I always do. That maybe I’m choosing to miss it. But…
I’m not fucking wrong. I know it as much as I know Skylar never hooked up again after Mal came home—
And they fell in love.
It’s a lot for my damaged brain to handle at once.
A hailstorm of emotion. I rub my chest, frowning a crater into my face.
Someone calls my name, but it’s not Sol, so I don’t respond.
I push through. Go back to work. Force every tangible thought from my mind.
Block anything that isn’t counting money, wiping up beer, and locking doors. And it almost works.
But Sol. He’s a drumbeat in my veins. A rhythm I can’t escape, even if I wanted to. And I don’t. I just want—I just need—
Him.
My brain whispers it as I lock the last door and climb the stairs to the flat. Guilt stabs my belly again. Sol’s tactile, emotional, and warm. Vibrant. Human. It feels so wrong to know he’s been without the closeness he’s always craved.
The brush of skin.
The heat of breathless laughter.
It feels so wrong that relief dances inside me and I fucking hate myself.
I shut the front door with more force than I intend, my weaker arm giving way. The slam echoes—to me at least, and I cringe in the silence it leaves behind.
The charged silence. Swear to all fuck, I smell sex in the air, and though I know it’s not Sol and the woman from downstairs, agitation propels me to the kitchen instead of my bed.
Or maybe it’s the sound of Sol growling into his phone. Or the clumsy thunk as he curses and tosses it on the kitchen counter.
The phone skitters and clatters to the floor.
Sol doesn’t seem to notice. Or care. He slumps forward, burying his lovely face in the hands he works to the bone, and I stop thinking about sex. I stop thinking about the woman downstairs and the unfair weight I add to his life. I stop thinking about anything except him.
Sol’s my anchor to the world. He brought me back to life when my body wanted to die and I’m so fucking drawn to my best friend I don’t make a conscious decision to go him.
I don’t need to. I’m by his side in a flash.
Least, it feels like a flash to me, the way time blurs around him, then drops from my awareness as if it were never there at all.
As if we could fall into the sea for all I’d notice.
He’d notice.
I ease Sol’s face from his hands, palms wrapping around his jaw, thumbs brushing his cheeks. And I stare—I stare hard, words slipping through my fingers as I search for clues in the uneven way he’s breathing and the reddened haze in his eyes.
He’s drunk. Another realisation that tears me up. Sol only cuts loose like this, only relaxes, when Skylar’s home for the night—because he doesn’t let himself have anything anymore.
Because of me.
It’s a moment where I should let my hands slip from his face, but as his gaze tilts to mine, I don’t move.
He does.
I think.
He leans, a bare fraction of movement, but it’s an infinitesimal shift that sends my pulse crashing in my ears. A sliver of a second where I feel his breath on my mouth and we’re so close we could kiss. And Sol…
His gaze flicks to my mouth.
I’m fucking sure of it.
But this heartbeat in time. This lightning flash. It doesn’t last. He inhales and the spell breaks. We part like surf rolling back from the shore and space opens between us.
My hands drop.
Sol shifts another few inches and the soft retreat deadens the air.
I scrub a palm down my face, glad Sol’s not looking at me. That he’s fixated on a spot on the floorboards as I breathe too fast and hard for something that didn’t just happen. “Why don’t you hook up anymore?”
Fuck.
I blurt the question like it’s nothing.
Sol’s head jerks like a puppet-master has yanked his fucking strings. “What?”
Regret swamps me.
Panic.
But I can’t catch the words as they fall and stuff them back in. They’re out there, sprawled between us like roadkill, and if I thought my heart was beating fast before my perception of speed was fucking pathetic.
“I—” Stop talking, idiot.
I clamp my mouth shut.
Back up on clumsy legs and hit the doorframe.
And look, Sol’s drunk. But he’s still got my six. I’ve forgotten so much, but I can’t recall a time since my life was forever changed that I haven’t looked for him in the dark and the blinding light, and found him right there.
Right here.
He steadies me.
I give my rogue eye a vicious rub, but it’s not the juddering in my vision that has a groan burning up my windpipe.
A tortured sound that takes everything I have to smother.
It’s how Sol’s touch skates from my skin like a ghost. How he steps back with the kind of dazed confusion etched on his face that usually belongs to me.
“Are you okay?”
No. No. And he knows it, of course he does. The question is a courtesy. So what in the ever-loving-fuck was mine?
Go to bed.
For me, it’s a fabled get-out clause.
With everyone but Sol.
Because he’ll follow and climb into my bed with me.
He’ll hold me through every shiver and twitch.
Through every pained moment my brain misfires so hard I lose another piece of myself before it’s over.
He’ll take it, he’ll choose it, because he’s too busy keeping me upright to remember he’s supposed to be living his own fucking life.
Lazy fishing trips where he isn’t racing the tide to scrape enough cash together to pay Oscar and keep the Sirona afloat. Sweaty, rowdy gigs in pubs that aren’t ours. Hook-ups around heady beach bonfires while the stars gleam over the ocean.
You took that from him. A brutal truth eclipsing whatever part of me drifts towards uncharted territory and drives me to widen the distance between us.
“Jack—”
I turn away from him. “Leave me alone.”