Chapter 7
Sol doesn’t go far that day or that night. But my ability to string a cohesive sentence together floats away with the tide.
I blame the eye-shaking episode that had me clinging to him like a fucking child all night.
Know it’s a lie. I can speak behind the bar just fine.
Speak to Mal when he comes to tell me he hasn’t slept without a nightmare since his friends were redeployed.
To Oscar as he eases his big body around my bulk and drops cash in the till to pay for the iced gin he drinks instead of ale these days—a switch that happened last summer when I wasn’t paying attention.
“You look well, my friend.”
Nice of him to say. Not sure it’s true. But I’ll take it. Because it is nice. Like how Oscar’s hip brushing mine feels good. Feels human, and absolutely nothing like the kaleidoscope of sensation—of emotion—that detonates in me every time Sol and I touch.
By accident.
With purpose.
Barely at all, and I can’t make sense of it.
I’ve been around men my whole adult life. Naked, sweating, bleeding. I’ve been around Sol my whole life, and I’ve never felt anything like I do these days. Like I do now, as we glance up at the same time, lock eyes across the bar, and something hot and bright punches a new rhythm through my pulse.
Wild curly hair. Glittery brown eyes. He’s so fucking beautiful. He’s always been so fucking beautiful. I know this—I know it. So why can’t I find the hinge on this door? The one we’ve swung open to whatever this is?
When did it start?
Where does it end?
Sol breaks my stare, distracted by the band leader of the local folk group singing tonight. Crowdy-crawns and rich harmonies. Sea myths and legends he’s lived by since the day he was born.
I love him.
Christ, of course I do. He’s my best friend. But what about the rest of it?
I’m not done talking about this.
Fuck.
What the hell did I say that for?
I have no idea, and thankfully the Joker is busy enough that I don’t have the head space to try and find one.
I pull pints with the singular focus I need to get through the shift.
Heft barrels and boxes. Break up a scrap in the car park, a task that comes easier to me than most. Because I remember how it feels to fight.
What I don’t remember?
How it feels to fuck. To slide inside a woman’s body and hold her against me until she’s shaking and moaning in my arms. To make her come—and to want to do it. I can’t remember wanting anyone. Anyone but Sol…if that’s what this is.
It’s late when he and Oscar join the folk band.
When they sing. Oscar has an earth-deep voice, the kind that makes the wooden beams in the ceiling hum along with him.
Sol, though…he sings like candlelight. Rough-cut baritone, warmed by salt and waves, shaped by years of hollering over storms and wind.
Made for the old harbour songs he knows so well.
Music that hits me in the spine, even though he’s singing about trees tonight instead of the ocean.
Melodies that shiver through me as if he’s hooked his fingers into my chest and he’s pulling me closer.
The song is a lament, one Oscar doesn’t know.
And so his bass fades out, leaving Sol and the subtle power in his voice, and every fucking hair on my arms stands up.
My throat tightens and the room blurs at the edges, but it’s not my brain misfiring—it’s something else.
It’s everything else and I find myself too warm and full of the thing I can’t name.
I need out, but I have nowhere to go. So I keep pulling pints, and Sol keeps singing with his back to me—not looking at me.
Thank Christ.
I look at him, though. Shady glances, as if I’m peeping through a keyhole at something not meant for me.
I track the rise and fall of his shoulders and the tilt of his neck.
I feel every breath like they’re my own, and as the song fades out, and other voices climb over his, shifting the mood, I’m so fucking done I walk out halfway through a beer order.
Someone follows me.
It’s not Sol, so I don’t give much of a fuck. Until I realise it’s Skylar and he’s trailed me all the way to the water in the tiny cove that belongs to the pub. The minuscule slice of beach that even my damaged brain knew meant the world to Sol when we bought it.
“I don’t need parenting.”
Skylar reaches my side, shorter and narrower than me—than all of us, and yet somehow he’s the most imposing. At least when Mal isn’t wanting to slot every local who annoys him. “I know that. Just don’t fancy assaulting my eardrums with accordions just yet.”
Right. Because he’s been at work and we only schedule the Porth Luck folk band to play when he’s not here.
Skylar puts up with the slow pace of Cornish life, and the feudal bullshit that isn’t much different to the rules of an outlaw motorcycle gang, but he draws the line at accordions. We all have limits, eh?
“I don’t know where Mal is,” I tell him.
“I’m not looking for Mal.”
I turn my head. “No?”
“No.” Skylar crouches to pick a stone from a shale patch on the beach. Pockets it instead of skimming it over the waves. “Following him around like a puppy isn’t good for me.”
Tonight, I understand that more than I want to. But I’ve never seen Skylar simp after my brother, so whatever’s going on must be in his head, and way above any pay grade I’m fit for. And yet, I try. I have to. I love my friend and I love my brother. “Does loving Mal scare you?”
Skylar rises from the sand, hood pulled up against the whole world, his pewter-grey eyes glittering in the dark. “Some days.”
“Why?”
For a long moment, I don’t think he’ll answer.
Skylar walks the line between pack and lone wolf so well sometimes I forget even Mal doesn’t know most of what goes on behind that hood.
But the thing about love is that it changes you, recoding your DNA while you sleep, while you’re busy with other things, and no one’s immune to that. Not even Skylar Buchanan.
“Because I can’t pretend I wasn’t in bits before he found me,” he says in the end, “and there’s a fucked up part of me that resents him for loving me so well I don’t know how to be without him anymore.”
“Do you need to know?”
Skylar fires a scowl at the night mist creeping in from the ocean. But it’s soft at the edges. He doesn’t want to resent Mal’s love. “One of us has to die first. And selfishly, I hope it’s me.”
It’s as close as he’s ever got to admitting he and my brother are a forever thing. And he leaves me to puzzle out why he felt the need to follow me onto the beach to tell me. To give up trying fairly quick, because I’m not sure it matters.
I crouch by the water and let a frigid wave run over my fingers, more Sol than myself in this moment, though he’d be in up to his knees by now, impervious to the bone-shaking cold.
Because he’s warm warm warm and I didn’t know how to live without him before.
When I took him on every deployment with me, every station, every mission. Every firefight.
He’s my best friend. My heart swells, brave in the face of the devil twisting my gut. Because it knows, of course it does, Sol’s far more than that. I want—
Movement in my peripheral derails wherever that thought was going. The air shifts and not in the way that lets me know someone I love is close by.
No.
This prickle at the back of my neck is different, sharper, colder, and my senses snap into place before I remember they don’t work properly anymore, instincts burned too deep to lose.
I’m moving before I choose to. Breath quiet, cold forgotten, footsteps silent on the crunching sand, the shallow cove compressing to a map of shadows and sound.
Someone’s here.
Someone who’s trying to hide their footfalls, but I hear boots on the shingle, the rustle of an old coat, and I swear to fuck I scent guilt on the air as I ghost to where the Sirona is moored, the moon at my back, protect them a drumbeat in my chest.
Sol.
Skylar.
Mal.
Though it crosses my mind it could be him creeping around—my brother. I’m never sure what he gets up to when no one’s looking.
It’s not Mal.
I believe the voice echoing in my fragile skull. Another instinct I can’t ignore. And then I see the hunched figure board Sol’s boat and recognition tumbles through me.
Sol’s dad.
Fuck. Relief wars with dread. I carry a lot of affection for Daveth Bosanko.
Can’t count the times he and Lisa fed me and Mal when our own dad was too drunk to care.
But a lot of years have passed since then.
Years that have left Sol burned and hollowed by every fire he’s had to put out, and as I watch Dav paw through Sol’s things, the dread in my belly morphs into anger.
I want to kill him. Seize his shoulders, launch him from the boat into the abyss and leave him to drown.
But in the dark, I ease to a stop, thwarted by age-old knowledge that Sol would drown himself before he saw his father hurt, even with the lines of love and duty so blurred I don’t know how he feels anymore.
About Dav.
About me.
Dav works the latch on the bait locker. Searches the cabinets where Sol and Oscar keep a few personal things. He even opens the engine hatch, but his conscience seems to get the better of him. Or maybe he hears Sol’s voice carrying in the wind as a rowdy shanty pours out of the Joker.
Either way, the hatch falls shut and Dav backs off, frustration binding his frame, lanky limbs nothing like Sol and everything like Sev, the younger son he’s ignored since the day he was born.
What happened to you, Dav?
I know the answer to that.
Addiction—same as my dad. But any sympathy I had for either man expired years ago.
Dav fucks off, vanishing into the night.
I ease back from the Sirona and face the pub again.