Chapter 18 Sol
The running.
It becomes a thing. I live in fear of the day Jack can’t go and it falls to me instead.
I don’t own trainers. Don’t own shorts or joggers, or anything remotely breathable that wouldn’t having me looking like I was tripping my nuts off and dancing through the streets. And look, I’d die for Skylar. For Mal. And for Jack, I’d do it twice. But I’d rather bargain with the Ankow than run.
Or pull nets till my hands are bleeding and raw and hand the profits to an amiable loan shark.
Because that’s how the next few weeks of my life play out.
Rinse and repeat. And with radio silence from Mal, it’s beginning to feel like we’ve stepped back in time.
All of us scrapping to survive and burning out in the process.
“Did you lock the gym?”
I shut the fridge, resisting the temptation to dodge Skylar’s sharp gaze. “Yup.”
“Why?”
“So you don’t sneak in there while Jack’s not looking.”
Skylar’s temper rises like a snake about to strike, violence coiling where you can’t see it unless you know him.
I know him. And I feel his fury testing its cage.
See his tight jaw, the muscle ticcing in his cheek.
Sense how he glares past me, measuring what outcome of this conversation he can live with to get what he thinks he needs.
And maybe if we were alone, I’d find myself on the losing side of this stand-off. But Oscar’s here, cooking dinner, and I have Aras in my arms, a literal human shield between me and frustration that’s been building in Skylar all week long.
He backs off and leaves the kitchen.
I wait for a door to slam, but it doesn’t happen.
For whatever unspoken reason, none of us have shut a bedroom door since Mal left.
Not that it makes much difference to Skylar’s brand of self-harm.
An open bedroom door doesn’t stop him losing every meal in the bathroom.
Or working consecutive night shifts on the inexplicable rush of an empty stomach.
I wonder if that’s why he’s worked only days this week when I happen to know he was due a run of nights before Mal went away.
If he’s done something I’ve never known him do before and adjusted his schedule for his own wellbeing.
For Jack, more likely. So he’s not alone when I have to leave tonight to earn the money to pay for my dad’s mistakes. But I cling to the remote possibility Skylar might have done this for himself. Because I need him to be okay as much as I need Oscar’s solid warmth when the rest of us waver.
He’s cooked roast chicken tonight, with braised cabbage and caraway seeds, buckwheat cooked with sautéed onions on the side. Lithuanian comfort food, Kuznatov style. I don’t know if Skylar’s going to eat it, but I’ve picked my battle for one day. This one is all Oscar’s.
I take Aras to the table and help load a plate for him and one for Uncle Jack, hyperaware of every possible sound from downstairs that might mean Jack is on his way up.
But I’m not a soldier. Jack’s filling the kitchen doorway before I even begin to hear him coming, and I’m not sad about it. How can I be when it’s the best surprise on earth? When everything about him, even the parts that tear me up, make me whole?
Gods, I’m messy today, emotion tightening my chest. I hide behind Aras, but Jack knows. His gaze finds me and holds me there for a heartbeat too long, but not long enough. Hot and grounding—I’ve got you—but he hasn’t. He can’t because other people need him too.
Skylar.
Jack breaks our connection and scans the room, clocks Skylar’s absence and raises a dark brow.
I incline my head in the direction of Mal and Skylar’s room and he nods, accepting that Skylar’s home but not here, before he takes his own seat at the table.
Next to Aras, who gives him a cautious wave that hurts my heart.
Jack is as kind and dependable as Oscar.
But that shadow in his brain is a wicked wicked thing, and Aras knows it as well as the rest of us.
The flip side is he knows the very best of Jack too. Knows he has a mischievous side that has him stealing some of the vegetables from Aras’s plate and hiding them on his own while Oscar is busy with the chicken.
Aras giggles and it fills the room with love and light. But then he asks…
“Where’s Mal?”
And his timing is tragic.
Skylar marbleises in the doorway, for whatever reason carrying Mal’s phone, and the silence that expands is truly terrible.
I take a breath to fill it.
Skylar gets there first, unfreezing and venturing further into the room. “Working away. He’ll be back soon.”
Aras accepts the simplified truth and starts in on his dinner. For a little lad, he puts some food away.
Skylar comes to me and deposits Mal’s phone in my hand. “Can you put this somewhere?”
I pocket the device without question, praying I’ll think of somewhere sensible and not immediately forget. Like I used to with my own phone before Jack got hurt.
Skylar looks as though he might leave again, but Jack glances up, they lock eyes, and Skylar takes a seat with a brittle sigh.
Oscar brings him a plate of plain chicken and sets the rest of the dishes on the table. Then he sits in what I’ve come to think of as Mal’s seat, and I realise it’s where he always sat before Mal came home. Because he knew how much Skylar needed the unobtrusive closeness of a friend.
Mealtime hush falls over the table. Me and Oscar talk, about fish and the songs we might sing later when Aras has gone to his mum’s for the night, and how the tides might behave when we set sail a few hours later.
Jack is quiet. Skylar, utterly silent, but we get by, we survive, even if it is hard to imagine we ever lived these lives of ours without Mal.
Skylar eats only chicken. When he doesn’t bolt after, I take a chance and slide him a bowl of the white ice-cream he’ll eat sometimes. It earns me another sigh, but it goes down the hatch, and he doesn’t leave the table.
He’s still there when Oscar takes Aras to his ma’s, and when Jack goes back downstairs. When I’m done with the dishes and considering the Kraken bottle.
Skylar doesn’t drink spirits. I grab him a beer from the fridge and take it to the table with the rum.
“You want a glass with that?” he says, dry as all hell.
I shrug and swig from the bottle. Jack and Mal don’t drink rum either—anymore—so the only shared germs I have to worry about are with my own blood, with Sev, and he hasn’t shown his face in Porth Luck since the summer.
It’s Christmas soon and it’s the first year I’ve decorated the Joker without him.
I miss him, which gives me something else to be caught in my feelings about. I fall into my seat, texting one-handed while Skylar relieves me of the beer.
He pops the cap and takes a single swallow before pushing it away. “I shouldn’t be this fucking dependant on him.”
Him. Mal. I set my phone down. “We’re all dependant on something.”
“What’s your poison, Sol?”
Lots of things, and Skylar knows each and every one of them, so I take the question for the deflection it is. “When are you back on nights?”
“I’m not.”
The rum bottle is halfway to my mouth again.
I set it down. “Something happen?”
Skylar shakes his head. “No, I just…I don’t know. I feel like I need to sit with how much I miss him to get through it. Or I’ll be someone different by the time he comes home.”
“He could come home tomorrow. Tonight, even.”
“What if it’s months?”
Counterargument bubbles up my throat, but dies as I realise I don’t really have one. I asked Jack the same question the last time we spent any significant time together—the morning we lay in his bed after Mal left—and his answer was unsparing enough that I blocked it out.
If it was straightforward, they wouldn’t need Mal. And following those threads instead of steaming in, it takes time, Sol. Time that gets people home alive instead of in pine boxes.
It’s the worst thing—the absolute worst—how right Jack was.
And how calm he was when he said it. Despite the shock of Mal leaving, the words came out of him clean and coherent, how they used to before, like the injury to his brain had never happened, and I hate that I felt steadied by it. That I still do.
I drink more rum.
Skylar watches me with the eyes of an old friend. A friend who’s done dancing around two things that must be truly obvious to him by now. My dad. Me and Jack. But he says nothing for the longest time, and neither do I.
Eventually, we roll downstairs.
I roll.
Skylar never did drink that beer, so he’s sober as a judge as we venture into the carnage of a rowdy Friday night in Porth Luck.
The bar is stacked. Bodies jammed together as festive lights twinkle in the beams above the trays of cider-spiked mince pies we’ll lay out every day until we close on Christmas Eve.
I duck behind it to help out, while Skylar takes his customary perch on it, so he can see out over the crowd without being jostled enough to lamp someone, or getting fondled to death by the few women among the hordes of bladdered fishermen.
Drunk bartending isn’t as easy as it looks. I spill beer down myself. On my shirt, on my shoes.
Jack laughs.
I feel it more than I hear it. Then I spin around and he’s behind me, sleeves rolled up, eyes bright with timeless amusement, the angles of his face gilded by the firelight catching him just right.
Quiet rolls over me—the stunned kind, as all noise and motion around us fades, muffled by the live wire between us. And his hot stare, it isn’t careful. Isn’t soft.
It’s charged.
Deliberate.
Like he’s remembering what we were doing every night before Mal left.
Ten days of beautiful madness, smothered in the end by real life.
By open bedroom doors and the nights I’ve slept alone since, restraint snarled beneath my ribs like a second soul, heavy and untouched.
Until now, as I see every long night of yearning and want carved into Jack’s face.
He takes a step towards me and my pulse stutters.
I rub my chest.