Chapter 18 Sol #2
He tracks the movement, eyes darkening like it offends him, and something reckless unspools between us.
The fishermen are singing tonight. A shanty swells, raucous and loud, as Jack narrows the distance between us.
He has a pint glass in his hand, full of dark ale. He reaches around me to place it on the bar, still holding my gaze, and his lips nearly brush my cheek he’s that close.
“Kitchen. Now.”
I don’t need telling twice. It ruins me that he tells me once. That my body responds before the rest of me and I find myself alone in the cool dark space of the Joker’s long-abandoned kitchen.
Actually, it’s cold, but I don’t have much time to feel it before the door behind me opens and closes. Before strong hands grab me and crowd me against it.
Before Jack is on me as if he’s tumbling me to a bed in a place so far from here it’s hard to believe it was ever real.
I close my eyes, pretending I taste rum and Guinness on his lips. Pretending his claiming kiss will last forever and this crazed moment will never end. I kiss him back without restraint and Jack growls into my mouth, pressing harder against me. Grinding against me, stealing every sound I make.
We’ve done this before.
Upstairs.
Somewhere else, way back when.
But this…it feels different.
So different, I break away to look at him. To see his face in the murky light of the cold room. To utter words I haven’t thought of yet. To lose myself in the swirl of arousal I see in his face. Untamed desire that matches the riot going on in my veins.
“I want you.” Jack speaks before I can. “I don’t know what any of this means or where it’s going to take us, and I’m fucking sorry I’m not better at this—that I haven’t been better—but there’s nothing about you I don’t want. Even the shit I’ve never done before.”
He means sex.
I think.
But the heady combination of rum and Jack overwhelms me and I can’t think beyond how much I need whatever he wants to give me.
I tell him the truth. “I want that too.”
Without warning, Jack spins me around, moulding his body to my back, his thick, hard length where I need it most. “I think I’ve dreamed about it like this, but I can’t remember if you’ve ever told me what you like…with other people.”
Other people.
Other men.
I can’t forget the nights I spent in Cam O’Brian’s bed, but only because, for as long as it lasted, that long, hot summer was the closest I’d ever been to how I’d felt about Jack for years by then.
So many years.
Too many to live without the raw need in his touch as he grips my hip and the back of my neck. As I tell him another truth. “No one else matters.”
Jack breathes another rough sound, unchecked and wild, and that clatter in my pulse becomes a speeding gallop.
One that has me bowing my head and bracing my forearm on the door.
He’s not going to fuck me in this cold, dark kitchen.
Whichever version of Jack this is, I know he’s not going to do that. But, gods, I’d let him—
A sharp thud against the door makes me jump out of my skin. In a flash, Jack has me away from it and behind him, shielding me with his body as someone—the newest bar girl, maybe—calls his name.
Jack plants a hand on the door. “Yeah?”
“Uh, sorry. Someone stole the charity box and Oscar said to get you.”
The air deadens.
Jack exhales, forcing all that coiled intensity back under control. “I’m coming.”
I wish he was.
That we were.
But even with the promise of later in the simmering glance he sends over his shoulder, a promise that curls low and hot in my belly, I know whatever almost just happened in this kitchen, for now, at least, it’s over.
I trail Jack upstairs, fully expecting to find him holding my dad by the scruff of the neck, the stolen charity box at his feet.
As it happens, he’s alone by the time I reach the tourist bar on the other side of the Joker, frowning at the broken chain where the box began its day. “It was here earlier. I saw someone scrunch a fiver into it.”
“Maybe someone else did too.”
Jack’s eyes flash to mine as Skylar emerges from the cellar, wiping his hands, but he doesn’t voice the thoughts that clearly match the predictable nightmare in my head. Doesn’t name my dad or mention the security footage we could easily check.
He turns to Skylar. “You don’t have to change barrels.”
Skylar gives him a dry look. “I wouldn’t have if either of you were here. What happened to the charity box?”
“Some out-of-town wanker nicked it,” Jack lies so smoothly I’m almost sick in my mouth. “Fuck-all in it, though.”
If Skylar knows he’s talking shit, he doesn’t let on. He just nods and jerks his head at the ceiling. “I’m going to bed.”
I glance at the time, trying to figure out if enough has passed for whatever dinner he ate to be safe. But if I ever knew the maths, I’ve forgotten it, and a feisty glare from Skylar keeps me quiet.
He lets Jack hug him. Then he comes to me and draws me into a rare embrace that goes on longer than I expect, and runs deeper, as if he needs the contact more than he needs to be self-contained.
He misses Mal.
Hardly news, but feeling that emotion trembling beneath his cool skin is too much for me. “You want me to come upstairs with you? I have some time before we go.”
Me and Oscar. To sea until dawn, chasing a big catch for a buyer who pays cash but will only take volume. Cash I need to pay Oscar, to pay the bank now the loan shark is gone, and maybe even replace the back-up battery we’ve been without far too long now.
“It’s fine,” Skylar says. “I need to sleep, I’m in at six.”
I know that. It’s why I’m heading out at midnight, so I’ll be home before he leaves and Jack won’t be alone. But the lines between what I know and what I want are so blurred I can’t tell which way is up.
No more rum.
Skylar goes upstairs. Jack hovers, as if he has something to say, but the Joker is too busy for a real conversation, and too soon, he’s pulled from me, and I’m dragged into a noisy sing-along that does nothing to keep me from the rum.
By the time me and Oscar board the Sirona at midnight, I’m bladdered enough that I need a nap.
And not just because of the parts of myself I’ve drunk numb.
It’s for the parts of me that can never be numb.
The parts screaming as the tide takes me from Jack and the only way to silence them is to bury my head under an old tarp and sleep away the hour it takes us to reach the crabbing ground.
Then it’s all hands, even drunk ones, on deck. We work through the night and I’m horribly sober and hungover when Oscar decides for me it’s time to head home.
He pilots while I lean against him, sipping the first real coffee I’ve had in months. And by real, I mean the powdered instant Oscar drinks because his parents drink it, and he has people he misses too.
“You are okay, my friend?”
The question is measured, an invitation, not a demand, and maybe I could tell Oscar every single thing that’s on my mind. But my phone finds a signal as I take a breath, and the name on the screen has me pulling away from him and shouting my frustration to the stars.
Lisa.
I swear to the gods it’s only that she never calls this early that has me swiping up and pressing the cracked device to my ear.
“Sol?” My mum’s voice comes breathy and tinny, the offshore signal we’ve sailed into still patchy and thin. “They’re here.”
The ocean keeps rolling, the Sirona’s engine enjoying a rare good day and humming like a dream. I step away from Oscar and close my eyes. “Who’s they?”
“Bailiffs. The bank are taking the house.”
“What?” Cold settles in my bones, as thick and heavy as the dawn air. “Now? I thought there was more time—”
“Well, there isn’t now, is there?” Lisa snaps, a shriek, almost. “I thought you were sorting it.”
Because she doesn’t know about the men I paid first—the ones who don’t send letters, or men at dawn with iPads and lanyards. Hell, she didn’t know about this last time I spoke to her. Or maybe she did and she honestly thought I could turn water into wine. “Mum…”
The line crackles, dead air silencing the call.
I wait for it to come back, leaning hard against the gunwale, avoiding Oscar’s gaze as he gets a read on me anyway and increases our speed, motoring the Sirona home with enough of a clip to have me wincing for the cracked engine block.
The line crackles again and I catch the tail end of whatever Lisa’s tried to say to me while she’s been gone.
“—boys can’t keep disappearing when things get difficult. You know I can’t handle your dad on my own, and now there’s bailiffs at the door, Sol. What am I supposed to do?”
Boys.
Me.
Sev.
But mainly me, and the unfairness of it—all of it—is so absurd I nearly laugh. But I’m too sick and tired and hungover to set it free. “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I say, because what else is there? “Don’t open the door. Just hang on, okay? I’m coming.”
The call ends. I don’t know if she hangs up first or I do.
Just that I’m left with salt on my lips as Porth Luck comes into view, yearning for the home where the man I’ve loved my whole life might already be awake and waiting for me and the house that’ll be torn apart by noon unless I give the bank the Sirona instead.
I’m not going to do that.
I won’t—I can’t.
But after I’ve cashed out our haul, I borrow Oscar’s car all the same and drive to my parents’ house. Spend every hour of daylight arguing with bailiffs until it’s over, and then I pack my mum’s stuff into a couple of IKEA bags and take her to her sister’s clifftop cottage in Saltkiss Bay.
I don’t know where my dad is. I need to talk to Sev. But I drive home instead. Return Oscar’s car and walk back to find him working behind the bar.
Jack’s gone to bed.
Oscar urges me to do the same and for once, I listen. Because more than sleep, more than air, I need to be where Jack is. I need to feel his skin against mine, even if he’s not awake to tell me he wants it. That he wants me.
He told you already.
A fact I hold onto as I shower a hellish twenty-four hours from my skin and leave my clothes in the bathroom. As I slip, barely dressed, into Jack’s room, close the door behind me, and crawl into bed with my best friend.