Chapter 14 Sol
Jack’s a big man, and his balance is unpredictable. But he still moves like a predatory leopard when he doesn’t think too hard about it, and I’m too slow and too human to catch him before he’s gone from his room and halfway down the stairs.
It takes me a second to tuck my dick away and catch him up.
But he blocks my path, keeping me behind him, and like everything this morning, I’m powerless to it.
I can only shadow him as he bypasses the control screens telling us who’s knocking on the Joker’s front door like they own it and rips the damn thing open.
He’s a solid wall of Gallagher. I can’t see past him. But I hear who’s on the other side long before I see them. Smell the Charlie Red, interwoven with the ludicrous stupidity that’s blighted my whole life.
My mum.
Jack steps aside, revealing all five-foot-one of Lisa Bosanko, less than twelve hours since I last saw her, standing on our doorstep with a foil parcel tucked under her thin arm and her face alive with righteous anger.
“Did you punch your father again? Sol, we’ve talked about this.”
“What?”
She repeats herself as I try to blink myself awake, dimly aware of movement behind her.
Of Mal as he retraces his steps to the window he jumped out of to intercept whoever had the nerve to knock on our door before Jack got downstairs.
My ma has no clue she only got this far because he knows her.
That most delivery drivers don’t make it to the door before he boots them back down the road. My ma has no clue about most things.
I scrub a hand down my face. “Who told you I punched Dad?”
“He did.”
“Right.” Of course he did. Of all the lies he tells her, it’s the worst. “When did I do this?”
“Last night.”
I was at sea last night. All night, until I came home to Jack this morning and my entire existence flipped on its head. But Lisa won’t know that. She doesn’t pay enough attention to me or anything else to have the first idea where I am on any given day, or how I feel about it.
My blood still hums with the waking dream I left upstairs, still simmers with awareness of how close Jack is standing to me, a solid presence at my back while I face my mother.
His palm skims my flank and I ache to sink into the touch, but I can’t.
If I lean on him he’ll know something’s wrong, and then I’ll have to tell him, and he’ll have offered me every penny he has before I’ve drawn my next breath.
I’m nowhere close to dressed, but I step away from Jack and into the elements anyway, shutting the door behind me.
Shutting him in—shutting him out. The freezing wind feels like a punishment, the frigid concrete searing my bare feet, all the while I bet my dad is toasty-warm at home, unless the electric got cut off again.
I take Lisa’s arm and guide her away from the Joker. Away from Jack, Mal, and Skylar.
She resists as I steer her back to the road, gravel biting my cold feet. “Don’t manhandle me, young man. It’s bad enough you lay a hand to your father.”
I grit my teeth, swallowing the fury and frustration threatening the madness Jack gifted me this morning.
He kissed me.
He made me come.
And now my mum’s in my face about the very thing only Jack has ever given me respite from.
“You can’t keep doing this.” Well-meant firmness clings to her words. “Your dad’s made mistakes, I know that. But you can’t punish him forever.”
The absurdity of it is almost funny. But I know if I laugh, I’ll never stop, and it’ll break me. “I’m not punishing him. Did he say where I hit him?”
“Sol, it’s obvious where you hit him. He has a black eye.”
“Yeah, okay. I mean where were we when it happened? Cos it didn’t happen here, did it?”
She has to give me that. Has to accept she knows Jack well enough to trust he’d stop me doing something so plainly awful.
Because it is awful. I’ve wanted to thump my dad more times than I can count, but the thought of actually doing it keeps me awake when I’m not worrying about crab prices, cracked engine blocks, and the fear that my best friend will have a seizure bad enough it takes him from me for good.
Lisa’s talking again. Caught between old fears and the reanimated afterglow of Jack’s bruising touch, I barely hear her.
The cold bites deep, but I’m impervious as I chase the hazy recollection of Jack’s perfect kiss.
Of his strong hands roaming my body and the relentless focus in his green eyes as he learned the path to my pleasure and took me apart.
Relearned.
Grief pummels me, sudden and sharp. Grief and guilt. My head spins and I fight to stay upright, latching onto the tail end of my mother’s delusions to tether myself to earth.
“…you need to apologise and put this nonsense behind us.”
“Apologise,” I repeat, numbness seeping in, both real and imagined, as the earth-shaking rumble of an approaching HGV sounds in the distance.
The beer delivery.
Behind me, the gate to the bin yard creaks open, tethering me to the family I chose. “What’s Dad doing today?”
Lisa stops ranting and blinks at me, her big eyes round with thick liner and spidery lashes. “He’s got some work on at the old Letherby Farm.”
Yeah, right. That farm’s been abandoned since the old man died last year.
There’s no work going there, legitimate or otherwise.
But I keep that to myself. Take the fruitcake parcel from my mum and promise to be a better son.
I’ve aged a thousand years by the time she leaves, and the temptation to board the Sirona and power out to sea is so strong only the lack of fuel in the tank stops me.
That and the tingling presence behind me.
Jack.
He’s in the yard, waving the beer lorry in, but his gaze is on me, his face folded into the kind of frown that’s never good, and the guilt I felt before my ma even left comes roaring back.
I can’t fathom what’s happened between us, and knowing my dad has messed up so bad someone’s seen fit to deck him in the face, I can’t grasp the headspace to figure it out.
He kissed me.
Yeah, brain. You said.
The beer lorry parks and the driver shuts the engine off. The sudden quiet is deafening and Jack hasn’t looked away from me.
Go to him.
Gods, I want to. But I’m half naked and torn in a dozen directions. Nothing about me is going to soothe him right now.
“Your phone’s blowing up.”
I jump a mile. Mal pushes the device against my chest. “Sev’s called you ten times this morning.”
My heart flips. Sev only calls me to chew me out about business things I’ve failed to do for the Joker or check the latest family crisis hasn’t finished me off.
Since Mal’s been home, the first scenario has happened less and less.
Bills get paid, taxes get filed. The second one, though.
It never ends, and if there’s one person who knows it as much as me, it’s my kid brother who ran all the way to London to escape it.
My phone rings in Mal’s hand.
I take it and silence the call without looking at the screen.
Mal gives me a look. “Cold?”
“Shut up.”
“Suit yourself.” He shrugs and walks away, leaving me with my hyperactive phone, and I’m forever grateful he goes straight to Jack to help him with the beer delivery.
I trudge back inside and drag myself into the shower.
I’m sentimental enough that I hate washing what Jack and I did this morning from my skin.
It’s only sweat, but the thought of it sliding down the drain hurts my heart.
When I get out, my phone is still ringing.
My dad this time, and I ignore him too in favour of placing a call of my own.
Cam O’Brian picks up on the third ring. Voice gravelled and rough with sleep. I’ve woken him up, but I don’t care.
“Did you thump my dad?”
A pause expands. The click of a lighter as Cam lights one of the smokes he’s been trying to quit since his twenties. “Why are you asking me that?”
“Someone did. My ma says he has a black eye.”
“So he probably deserved it.”
“So it was you?”
“Boyo, if I’d decked your dad he’d have no bones left in his fucking face.”
I flinch. “Don’t say that.”
“You asked.”
“No, I asked if you did it. Not how badly you’d maim him if you had.”
“Because you already know,” Cam counters. “You think I’m gonna go to the trouble of hunting your old man down just to give him a little tap?”
“You said you’d give him a couple of days to make it right. It’s been a couple of days.”
“Those days were for you.” Impatience bleeds down the line.
“So you could make better decisions than running all over town trying to fix something that’s always going to be fucking broken unless Dav wants to move heaven and earth to change it.
I was never going to go after him for a couple of grand. Not unless you want—”
“I don’t.”
“Fine. So what the fuck do you want from me?”
Wish I knew.
But I don’t, so I hang up on Cam without answering the question and press my fist to my lips, frustration searing my veins.
My phone rings in my hand and something feral snaps loose in my chest. A throttled shout claws its way out and I bunch my muscles to hurl the phone at the wall—to give Skylar’s dent from the summer some company.
To make the sheer noise in my head a tangible force of destruction—
Strong fingers close around my wrist. Sure of their path. The phone still vibrating as Jack’s hand curls fully, warm and immovable, stopping me dead. “Don’t. It’ll haunt you later.”
He’s not wrong.
I drag in a stressed breath, one that burns on the way down, my pulse booming in my ears, and without the pleasure Jack gave me this morning to soften the impact—that hurts too.
“I didn’t hear you coming.” I rarely do, but I like to tell Jack.
In case he’s got to thinking he’s anything less than a solid wall of sheer muscle with tread as light as a piskie.
A six-four piskie who tosses my rowdy phone onto my bed and crowds my space, anchoring me in body heat and pure man.
Damn.