Chapter 5 #2
“Not joking.” Mal swipes my untouched beer and takes a careful swig.
A small one. Like Jack, he can’t really drink anymore, and I know he misses it.
Hell, I would. Enough that I wrestle my ale right back and tip half of it down the hatch as he sets up his second shot.
“What’s going on with you and my brother? ”
Golden ale curdles in my stomach.
I set the glass down and try not to squirm under Mal’s merciless scrutiny. “Nothing’s going on.”
“So why’s he stomping around and slamming every door that gets in his way?”
“Maybe so you hear him coming and stop fucking on the couch.”
It’s a low blow, and it gets me nowhere. Mal just stares, waiting me out while I down the rest of my beer and stifle the choking sensation in my throat. In my heart. “I think Jack needs some space from me,” I say eventually.
Mal arches a brow. “Why would you think something so fucking stupid?”
“It’s not stupid. He never gets a break from me. Maybe he needs one.”
“Aye, dead-on. That’s exactly what he needs.”
Mal’s tone is drier than the Sahara Desert. I slide my gaze away from him. Tip it to a ceiling covered in a thousand beer mats and resist the urge to drop my head to the sticky table.
“When did you last sleep?”
With a sigh, I face my interrogator again. “You’re asking me that?”
“It’s a fair question.”
“Based on what?”
“The state of your face.” Mal palms my empty glass and stands. He goes to the bar and thunks it down. Comes back with a pint of water and an expression I know means trouble. “What’s going on?”
“I told you. Nothing.”
“I’m not talking about whatever mess you and Jack have made between yourselves.”
“What are you talking about then?”
“I don’t know yet. But you know you can tell me anything, don’t you? If you’re getting shit from other boats like you were over the summer—”
“It’s not that, I swear.” Gods, no. Petrol bombs and flare guns fill my mind. Fire, smoke, and pain. “Stand down, soldier, it’s nothing like that.”
“So there is something?”
“You know there is. But it’s nothing you can help me with, Mally. All you can do is keep it to yourself, eh? I don’t need Jack and Skylar worrying about me.”
“Should they be worried?”
“No.”
Mal’s unconvinced. But he’s too antsy to stay much longer. Eventually, he reminds me of the bald tyres on the car I can’t bring myself to scrap and leaves me in the Sea Bell.
I drink two more stale pints before I trudge back home.
By then, it’s afternoon and the sky is losing light.
My dad is gone and Skylar’s at work. No idea where Mal’s wound up, and I don’t spare it much thought.
Can’t as I spot Jack standing alone in the beer garden, facing the murky setting sun, and every thought I’ve ever had withers at the sight of him.
Tall.
Strong.
Dark beard covering the jaw I’ve been obsessed with since he grew into it when we were fifteen.
Jack’s green eyes search the horizon for something.
He’s looking for me.
I know it like I know the salt of the sea and I vault the pub wall without stopping to think that he might back away, like he has all week.
As it happens, Jack blinks as I land at his feet. The stone-faced consternation he’s worn like a second skin the past few days isn’t there and relief colours his features instead. “Where’ve you been?”
“Porth Ewan.”
“Why?”
“Fancied some bad beer.”
“Before lunch?”
How does he know? “It was dinner time for me.”
Jack runs his gaze over me, like I’m a squaddie on his watch. No, like I’m his best friend and the drizzle clinging to my clothes and skin offends him. “Come inside.”
Command laces his gravelled voice, more Killinchy than it’s been in years now he’s around Mal so much. Can’t say if it’s conscious or not, but the effect it has on me is the same as it’s always been. I obey without question, on instinct and trail him inside and downstairs to the cellar.
A building this ancient, it should be cold down here. Walls thick with damp. But Jack won’t allow it. The air is warm and dry as we pass the gym I’d happily set on fire to keep Skylar out of it, and that warmth…it settles on my skin like a hug.
Jack reaches the utility room and crouches to sort through a stack of folded clothes.
His.
Mine.
I lean in the doorway, regretting the beer I drank in place of whatever meal Oscar would’ve cooked on the Sirona if he’d come to sea with me last night.
I need a shower. A nap. Some food that isn’t box rations.
I need Jack to face me again so I can drown—so I can heal—in his earnest gaze as he reveals whatever he wants me to wear today.
He finally stands, soft and worn clothes belonging to him and me both clutched in his big hands. Sometimes he’s so insistent on me getting dry he has me strip right here in the cellar, but he jerks his head at the ceiling. “Come upstairs.”
Another command. Another subtle pull low in my gut that’s a different hunger to the empty belly I’ve brought home from the Sea Bell.
I follow him up, back past the gym and through the quiet bar, every sense tuned to the swing of his broad shoulders as he walks ahead of me. To the barely detectable lag in his weaker side and the gentle purpose in every step he takes.
We reach the flat. Mal’s not here. It’s just us in the stillness of the tidy, cosy space, the sharp scent of Ajax in the air telling me one of the Gallagher boys took their turn at the housework.
I head for the bathroom, and it’s Jack’s turn to follow me, something he’s done a million times over our lifetime together, but it feels different today. As if the perfectly timed shift we’ve nurtured over the years is more deliberate.
The decency I don’t want.
That I’ve never wanted.
I turn on the shower and drag wool thick as rope over my head. Ditch it on the floor with a t-shirt I’ve been wearing since Jack joined the paras. Okay. Maybe not that long. But it’s old all the same.
Jack scoops up the shirt as I unbutton the weatherproof trousers I live in on the boat, colour faded from too much salt and rain.
I crouch to grab the jumper. Our hands brush, but Jack doesn’t seem to notice.
He’s staring at my thighs, at the fabric that pulls taut across them, catching the muscle I’ve built without ever setting foot in a gym.
Or maybe he’s just staring, looking through me, like he does multiple times a day when absence seizures take him.
The moment passes.
We rise together.
Jack takes the wool jumper from me and steps out, and I figure we’re done. That he trusts me to take the rest of my clothes off and shower myself warm.
But…he comes back as I’m peeling the grey trousers down my legs and fills the doorway, watching me, fixating on the frayed material as if he’s a victim of the same bewitching punch of heat as me. As if it’s starting to make sense to him.
Stop seeing things that aren’t there.
My pulse misfires. Savage frustration rips me apart, but I swallow it and kick the trousers away.
It leaves me in my underwear, a scenario so frequent it feels like it happens every day. But again, this time feels different, heavier, and I wonder if that’s how it’s going to be now. If something has shifted too far from reality and we’ll never get it back.
Grief-laden anxiety grips me. I can’t even say what’s changed. Only that it has and I hate and love how Jack’s looking at me right now. How I want him to look at me, when really, he needs me to get warm. So I can get dry and he can go back to his life.
I slide my hands to my waistband. Jack tracks the motion.
Barely. But it happens, and my skin tingles, my throat tight, and gods how I wish he had a single clue what he does to me.
That he craved the hitch in my breath and the zip in my blood.
The heat that’ll pool in my dick if I don’t catch it in time.
Look away.
I need him to.
I’ll die when he does.
“Sol.”
My own stare has hazed out.
I wrestle it back and realise Jack has moved beyond the doorway.
That he’s closer, and in the cramped bathroom it means every breath I take is his oak and musk scent.
It means the warmth touching my bare shoulders isn’t mine—it’s his—and I’m losing the will to recover even an illusion of self-control.
That’s not fair.
It’s not. I’ve spent a lifetime locking this down. Endless days and nights soul-to-soul with him, through the good times, the bad, and the times so brutal and awful I thought each breath would be his last.
Storms and terrors.
And yet somehow we’re still here.
Somehow I’m basically naked with Jack Gallagher bearing down on me and I have to find yet another way to survive.
Don’t say my name again.
Gods, please don’t say my name.
He doesn’t. He stops in front of me and slowly raises his arm, a subtle tremor in the hand he presses to my chest, palm splayed over my racing heart. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
Jack’s thumb traces a line of ink, a faint brush along a shadowy sea sprite. “For being weird.”
“You’re not weird, Jackie.”
His gaze flashes from my skin to my eyes and we’re back where I imagined we were that night in the kitchen. “I feel weird.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.” His thumb stills and I steel myself for the gut-wrenching sensation of him reclaiming his hand.
But that doesn’t happen either.
A heartbeat passes.
Two.
Then he speaks. “I hate it when you’re cold.”
“I’m not cold.”
“You are sometimes, and you don’t know it, and I fucking hate it.”
I believe him. But I can’t grasp the context.
Jack was born a straight talker. It’s the Gallagher way.
But like everything, the route from his thoughts to his mouth got derailed when he was hurt and sometimes I don’t know if he’s trying to tell me something momentous, or it’s just how his brain spits the world out today.
Like right now.
I hate it when you’re cold.
It’s a shift from his aversion to all things damp. And what does he mean? My skin? My clothes? The actual temperature, or the fact that he doesn’t sleep well when I go to sea in the winter?
“You should get in the shower.” He drags the words through broken glass. Like Saint Malone when his throat shuts down and he fights like a gladiator to tell you what he needs.
Jack’s a warrior too. And being cared for by him is so sacred I almost weep, which at least stops me popping wood.
But it’s a barbed silver-lining in a cloud of agony.
I don’t care about my dick. About the wrenching heat clawing at my insides.
The untapped want that’ll surely kill me one of these days.
I care that he’s staring at me like he’s broken something.
That on some level, even if he doesn’t know it, he’s afraid—an emotion I swore to the gods I’d flay myself alive before I let him suffer it again.
We move in the same moment.
Jack slides his hand down my torso and over my ribs before it slips away, but I don’t give in to the ricochet of his touch. I pull him closer, wrap my arms around him, and I hug him and hug him and hug him until some of the tension binding his frame gives way. “You’re all right, love. I promise.”