Chapter 7 #2
Sol’s still singing, laughter in every note, and the music wraps around me.
Swaddles me in memories, forgotten and realised, in emotions old and new, and I don’t know what to do with any of it.
So I stand with it for as long as I can bear.
And then I go inside. I go to bed, alone, without saying goodnight, to Sol or anyone else while Fiadh curls up on my pillow. She has the answers, I’m sure of it.
But she’s not giving them up tonight.
Or any night for the next week.
I go back to avoiding Sol. To dying a little more inside every time he notices and hurt creases his face before he catches it. To hating myself as he tries so hard to make whatever this is easier for me.
Eventually, he must figure I don’t want him around. He takes the Sirona out by himself and he doesn’t come back.
I find out from Oscar that he’s sailed offshore, chasing the slight spike in crab prices. That he’s hauling the catch to a remote harbour too far away for me to contemplate, where the buyers are more hungry for stock.
“Why did he go alone?”
I don’t mean to growl. But it happens anyway, and Aras, Oscar’s little boy, shrinks behind his father’s legs.
Shit.
Regret bites hard. I search for the faculties to make it right, but Aras spies someone better in the distance and skips off to jump into the arms of a Rebel King biker as they roll up on the lifeguard station building site.
It’s River O’Brian. And his husband, Rubi. His best friend who he married and didn’t ignore until he sailed into the winter fog, never to be seen again.
“Jack, he will be okay.” Oscar slings an arm around my shoulder, watching the bikers take his son for a walk on the beach in the heavy winter gloom. “We have made the trip to St Helier a hundred times.”
“You’re not with him.” I’m growling again. For no other reason than I wish Oscar was somewhere else when Aras needs him here. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
For snapping. For scaring his child. For blaming him for Sol’s decision to sail the Channel alone.
Oscar just pulls me in a little closer. “Do not worry, my friend. Aras knows who you are.”
He speaks with kindness and I hate it. Aras has seen me cry. Seen me shout and break things. He’s seen me broken more times than I can count and it hurts my heart that he always comes back to me and calls me Uncle Jack. A good hurt, maybe. But pain is pain.
I think.
I don’t know.
And this morning, I have no chance of figuring it out.
With things so messy between me and Sol—with Sol gone—my brain abruptly opts out of processing thoughts and emotions, shutting down to protect itself.
Numbness descends on me. A robotic fog I carry for the rest of the day.
That I take to sleep with me when Sol doesn’t come home.
Worry needles my armour, though. It’s not brutally cold outdoors. But it’s damp with drizzle and the wind is high, gales rolling in from the Atlantic, and I wake the next morning with concern weighting my chest like a bruise.
Mal makes me breakfast.
Toast and jam.
I brew him decaf coffee he hates as much as the rest of us and turn away from his best attempt at comfort.
And honestly, he doesn’t try all that hard.
Not with words, anyway. He gets me downstairs to the gym that somehow feels like a sanctuary and a prison rolled into one.
We spar through a military workout when we both know he’d rather be outside with his face turned to the wind.
When I know he’d drink cyanide before he hit me with any real force.
I’m less kind to him. Hoping he’ll be less kind to me. Doesn’t work. But the exercise does me good. I feel strong by the time we head upstairs again, muscles pumped, limbs taut with addictive tension. My head feels lighter too, I can think clearly—about everything except my beautiful best friend.
Come home, Sol. I need you.
It’s afternoon by the time any deity takes pity on me.
The sky is bleeding indigo, evening setting in.
I’m outside, scanning the horizon under the pretext of collecting glasses, and the Sirona crests into view just as the shield my fragile brain threw up this morning starts to slip.
A smudge of white and cornflower-blue against the dark sea, riding the chop with the precarious tilt she’s always had, the engine a rough clatter that has me frowning as it carries her to shore.
But that frown. As Sol nears, it doesn’t last. The sucker punch to my ribs finally fades and warmth floods me, vast and bright, rising in my veins with a giddy joy I can’t pretend is anything but what it is.
Sol.
He’s home.
And I see him. A tall figure on the deck, shoulders squared to the wind, taking everything Mother Nature has to throw at him, his curly hair wild and heavy with rain.
The Sirona angles into the harbour, then breaks off into the narrow slipway leading to the cove. Something lifts inside me again, and it’s too big to define. So I don’t. I let my brain do what it wants—I let it breathe, let it live, and I don’t fight the impulse sweeping over me.
Glasses forgotten, I hop the drystone wall my brother repaired over the summer. Jog down the shingle-covered path, my boots steady and sure on the wet stone as the Sirona nudges her way home.
She makes land.
Sol ties her in and looks up in the same moment I reach him, but he doesn’t see me coming. Doesn’t have a clue I’m about to sweep him off his sea legs and into my arms.
We collide. I grab him around the waist and haul him clean off his feet, my face finding a home in his salty neck, my heart in the unfiltered amusement of his startled grunt.
I spin him before I remember my own tenuous balance. Then I set him down and lean back enough to see him. “I’m sorry.”
A frown threatens his bemused happiness. “For what?”
“I don’t know. But I am.”
Sol takes a measured breath, as if he’s trying to catch a feeling that’s run away from him. “You don’t need to be sorry for a single damn thing. Life is complicated, Jackie. And it doesn’t stop when we don’t understand things.”
We. Is that true? Is Sol as confused and dizzy with this as I am? And what is this? I hold him a little tighter and measure the effect on my body—on my skin, my pulse, and my ability to think of anything that isn’t his flesh and bone in my arms. “I feel like I’m waking up all over again.”
A rocketing gust of wind lifts the unruly curls from where they hang in Sol’s eyes.
Bronze-brown orbs blaze at me, and I know the meaning of my blurted words isn’t lost on him.
I woke up twice from a major head injury.
The first time, all I knew for certain was that he wasn’t there.
The second, I knew he was. Right now, I know he’s here still, and yet it’s not enough.
I want more.
I need more.
But what about him? What does he need? “Sol—”
His phone rings in his pocket. My brain contracts at the sudden sound, but I stay in the moment as he curses and silences the thing. “Sorry.”
“You can answer it.”
“I could drop it in the sea too, love.”
Love. I’m holding him so tight against me, on the jetty in the fading daylight, where the afternoon drinkers can see how entwined we are. “You’d never pollute the ocean like that.”
Over his shoulder, I see the bags and bags of sea litter he’s collected while he’s been gone. Plastic debris he’ll drive eight miles for recycling before he comes inside and gets out of his damp clothes.
And of course, I want to strip him where he stands.
Wrap him up warm and dry. A compulsion that isn’t new, or even old.
It just is and it always has been. But what is that feeling that hovers below it, above it, and everywhere in between?
What is this need I have to map every inch of his tattooed skin with my scarred hands? With my clumsy mouth?
I drop my head to his shoulder and groan.
Sol rubs my back, solid and strong, as if he hasn’t spent forty-eight hours piloting a boat alone on the winter sea.
The thought drives me upright again, a jerk of my head that’s almost too fast, but Sol grips the back of my skull, tempering the movement. It buys me precious seconds to stare at his mouth as though I’ve never seen it before.
Then he lets go and withdraws a little, putting some space between us. “I need to make a run to the tip. Wanna come?”
Yes. A thousand times yes. But I can’t. I have no bar staff until six o’clock and even then, it’s fifty-fifty whether I’ll be able to leave them to it for a bit.
Sol sees my answer before I say it.
He nods and drops his hands on my shoulders, treating me to a stare as deep as the Mariana Trench before he seems to shake himself free of it. “I need to see my mum too. I’ll find you later?”
“You won’t have to look that hard.”
Meaning, I’ll be behind the bar, like I always am.
Or in the cellar hefting barrels. Or alone in my bed if his mam waylays him like she always does.
But thinking about Lisa Bosanko puts someone else on my mind—puts Dav on my mind, and I realise too late that I haven’t told Sol about his father casing the Sirona.
It’s too late now. Sol’s already back on the boat, loading his arms with bags of trash to stuff in his beat-up old car. I move to help him, but a local hollers my name from inside. They’re dry and I need to get back to work.
Can’t lie, it’s in me to tell the old git to fuck off and stay with Sol anyway. But the locals keep the lights on at the Joker. Without them, I’d have no meaningful occupation, and Sol’d be without the second income stream we’re fighting so hard to grow.
With a last yearning look at his back, I trudge indoors and spend the rest of the evening trying to remember all the things I need to say to Sol when he comes home.
It’s not that different to how the morning played out, but with the warmth of his embrace still seared on my soul, it’s less fucking fraught.