Chapter 14 Sol #3
My eyes fly open, but it’s too late to stop the red-hot recollection of every slide and twist of his rough palm.
Every press of his lips to mine and the sweet, sweet pressure of his arm to my throat.
Panic melds with arousal in a perfect squall and my heart beats so fast I have to wonder if I’ll survive this trip down memory lane.
Sweat coats my skin.
I get out of the car into the heavier rain and tilt my face to the sky, searching for guidance from whatever god or spirit can see me. But none comes, because I already know what I have to do.
Tell him.
I need to go home.
I need to find my dad—
No.
I need to go home.
My phone has barely a breath of battery left. Just enough to send a rescue text and hope I’ve timed it right before the screen goes black.
I’m in for a long walk if I’ve got it wrong, on narrow country roads with no pavements, no street lights.
Black water in ditches that already feel like death.
And it’s dangerous to wait in the car. At least, that’s what I tell myself as I remain at the mercy of the rain.
As it soaks me to the bone and I picture the extra disappointment in Jack’s green eyes when I finally make it home.
Fear squeezes my heart again. Fear that he won’t forgive me for keeping this layer of truth from him.
Fear that he will, which makes no sense, but I am so so tired I can’t find the sense in anything right now.
I can’t find the why, even though the reasons I’ve kept my mouth shut all these years still stand.
He didn’t know his own name.
Back then. When he woke up. He knew mine, but I could tell the second his lost stare found me that he didn’t know much else. That he didn’t remember and he was too fragile and vulnerable for anything more than what I gave him: friendship.
Safe. Familiar.
Predictable.
And then later, when he might’ve been able to hear it, there were other things to survive, the slow art of living to relearn, and the simplest reason of all—to put down roots.
I’ve been in love with Jack my whole life, but aside from that wild night, he never seemed to want me back.
I believed I’d die with that night in my heart. A secret that didn’t matter.
Except, now it does. Because everything has shifted, and I’m standing in the rain with a dead car and a heart that knows love doesn’t weather half-truths forever.
A car pulls up behind mine.
A Golf GT. Black, of course. Tyres that aren’t bald and an engine that purrs like a dream.
Skylar gets out, hood up to the rain and comes to where I’m standing. “You think we can jump it?”
“Maybe.”
His gaze shifts to my delinquent car and I wait for him to move to his own to fetch the jump leads he carries like any responsible citizen who knows their way around an engine. Then he snaps it back to me and his grey eyes sharpen. “When did you last sleep?”
“On the water.”
“Last night?”
No. The night before. But I’m not in the mood for Skylar to remind me that I shouldn’t be driving when I’m this tired. So I say nothing and endure his scrutiny. Look away as he delivers his verdict.
“I’m not starting that shit-can if you haven’t slept in a hundred fucking days. We’ll come for it tomorrow.”
Skylar’s even harder to argue with than Mal. He reaches into my car and swipes the keys. Then he goes back to his own and slides behind the wheel.
I’m slow to follow, still at one with the rain. By the time I reach Skylar’s car, he’s scowling like his lover.
“You look like shit,” he tells me, his northern accent thickening with the harsh words.
I ignore him and shut my eyes, breathing a slow inhale of the sun-warmed eucalyptus scent Skylar carries no matter how cold he tries to be.
We’re old friends.
He’s tearing into me because he cares.
“Sol.”
“What?”
“What are you doing out here?”
“Looking for my dad.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think?”
Skylar rolls his car out of the lay-by and onto the country lane. He drives faster than me and fatigue has me nauseous before we reach the main road. Unless I really was sick earlier and not just a hot mess.
And he doesn’t answer my question. He turns his music up instead. Metalcore. I don’t usually mind it, but it grates on me as Skylar guns it down the A road, driving like an outlaw biker instead of an A&E nurse. Which tells me he’s annoyed, even if I couldn’t gauge it from side-eyeing his profile.
“Sorry I got my wet clothes on your seats.”
Skylar cuts me another savage scowl. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Give a shit about how I’m feeling when you’re the one who needs it.”
“Needs what?”
Skylar has a temper. His job has taught him to contain it. But I know him. Know the twitch in his jaw and the flex in fingers more inked than mine as he grips the steering wheel too tight, fighting the urge to punch it.
It’s a while before he sighs. “You’re the most impossible fucker I’ve ever met.”
I tear my gaze from the black night sky. “You’ve met Mal, right?”
“Fuck off.”
All right then. I turn back to the window.
Skylar thumps my arm, catching the bruise on my shoulder from the bulkhead.
I swallow a wince.
“Mal’s not as difficult as he wants the rest of us to think,” Skylar says.
“That doesn’t make him easy.”
“Doesn’t make you easy, either. Something going on you want to talk about?”
“Like what?”
“You need to scrub what from your fucking lexicon. How long have we been friends?”
I count the years. From the flat we shared when I was an idiot working on trawlers to pay off Dav’s debt to Jack, to where we find ourselves now.
Voice the number and Skylar almost smiles.
But he doesn’t, because he’s still annoyed, and as we slow for a red light, Porth Luck twinkling in the distance, the same emotion barrels through me.
Fear turns to the kind of anger that eats a man alive and I yank the handbrake, reaching for the door handle with my other hand.
“Just because you fixed your life, doesn’t mean it’s so easy for me to fix mine. ”
“Sol—”
“Leave me alone.” I echo the words Jack murdered me with a few weeks back. Before he asked me to help him believe sexual pleasure wouldn’t kill him. Before he kissed me. Before he shattered me into a thousand pieces I’ve yet to scrape from the ceiling.
I lurch from Skylar’s car and leave him at the lights and he doesn’t come after me. Can’t, actually. Unless he wants to plough through the sea wall and pursue me across wet sand.
He’d do it if he still had a bike. If he’d stayed in the life he was born into and walked the same path as Cam and Saint. But Skylar…he altered his destiny. I don’t know how. He’s never told me and I’ve never asked.
Shame.
Maybe if I did, he could show me how to alter mine.
I traverse the sand to the foamy edge of the incoming tide.
It washes over my boots and I let it. I’m already wet and carrying enough reason to piss Jack off.
Saltwater in my shoes is nothing. On my hands, on my skin, it’s everything.
It’s who I am, and I take a moment with the ocean, wishing I was drunk enough to enjoy it.
Wishing time would stand still, except that would mean I’d never be with Jack again, and however angry I might make him tonight, the call to go to him is so strong I almost stumble as I come upright and turn my back on the ocean.
The pub is still open.
No live music tonight, but a local has a banjo out the back and the singing is loud enough to welcome me home.
I slip through the crowd to the back bar. So drawn to Jack I feel it in every cell of my body, my nerves already anticipating the warmth of his touch, even though he’s too busy serving to notice me yet.
It’s my turn to clean the flat. I should go upstairs and ditch my wet clothes for some of Jack’s. Dig through the half dozen bottles of Ajax to find the Dettol my nan used to bath me in.
But Jack.
He glances up in the same moment I find I can’t look away, and whatever emotion I expect to see in him, the smile that lights his face is the reason I was goddamn born.
I smile back. For the split second he has before someone else claims his attention. Then I’m bereft and I can’t bear to stay.
Upstairs, I shower and change my clothes, swapping my wet gear for sweats that were once Jack’s, but Mal wears more these days.
Means they smell of cedar wood instead of oak and musk, but I can live with that.
I push a broom around, smothering yawns in the crook of my elbow.
Mop the floors and clean the kitchen. I’m fettling the bathroom I share with Jack when I hear someone come home.
Skylar.
He goes straight to bed. Alone. Which makes me wonder where Mal is.
Then worry that maybe Skylar needs some company.
Some dinner and backup while he eats it.
Then I hear voices from beyond his closed bedroom door and realise Mal was here all along, and I stop worrying.
If there’s one thing those two are good at it’s looking after each other.
Me and Jack are good at that too. And apparently we’re good at hand-jobs. Kissing. Curling up in bed together for reasons beyond the aftermath of seizures and bad dreams. But then, we’ve always been good at that.
It’s late.
I toss the cleaning supplies in the cupboard and stamp into some random shoes by the front door. Go downstairs to check the alarm system.
Jack’s already set it.
It’s fine, as far as I can tell. Truth be told, I’m not great with it either, but knowing Mal will check it remotely goes a long way to me not sparing it too much thought.
Jack.
Where is he?
I find him in the front bar where we serve the tourists their fancy craft beers and cheap prosecco. He’s on the customer side, on a stool, bent over the till drawer, frowning as he studies a scrap of paper scrawled in the hand of a five-year-old.
Or, you know, me.
He hears me coming. For a hot second, his gaze scrapes my bare torso. Then he’s frowning again. “What does this say?”