Chapter 19 Jack #2
I move to the coffee wagon, aware of Folk at my side, matching me step for step. I buy Sol the real stuff he gave up for my sake, and a vanilla something for Skylar. A tea for Folk without asking him. Because somehow I’m so fucking sure that’s what he drinks.
Milk. No sugar.
Because we never had any.
“Did I talk about Sol, way back when?”
Folk sips his tea, not waiting for it to cool down, soldiers don’t have time for that. “Enough that I knew who he was when I first started knocking around down here without anyone having to tell me.”
“Because I told you what he looked like?”
“It was more than that.”
“How?”
Folk smiles and it suits him. Honestly, he’s hot—on a distant level, I know that.
But I feel as little for it as I do Skylar’s pretty hair and moody eyes.
Cam O’Brian’s ink and leather. “You told me he was magnetic. That he was like gravity to you. And that he was your anchor to the world. Then you laughed about ocean metaphors and went into one about watching him swim in some lagoon when you were young.”
“Did I tell you I loved him?”
“You didn’t have to.” Folk eyes me over the rim of his paper cup. “Something up between you two?”
He doesn’t mean my dick. And it wouldn’t matter if he did. I’m never going to talk about Sol that way, with Folk or anyone else. “We’re, uh, I don’t know. Evolving, maybe? I don’t fucking know.”
“Okay. How do you feel about the things you are sure of?”
“That’s the stuff that hasn’t changed.” Folk waits me out, giving me space to expand the thought. “I don’t feel differently about him. What’s happening now just seems like it’s been there—or should’ve been there—all along.”
“Have you told Sol that?”
“No.”
Folk doesn’t tell me I should.
Or that I shouldn’t.
He drinks his tea and walks me home like he did a few weeks ago.
Easy. Quiet. It’s only when we’re about to climb the beach steps that he puts a hand on my shoulder.
“You know, if it feels like it should’ve been there all along, it probably was.
” His fingers drum like punctuation. “But maybe looking for the old version of it isn’t what either of you need. ”
“What do we need then?”
“Same as anyone.” Folk lets his hand slide away. “Just love each other, hold on, and let whatever else wash up where it wants.”
Wash up. Like the sea. And I remember then, with unsettling clarity, that Folk is an ocean soul too. I don’t know what it means for him, beyond his SBS roots, but it makes me wonder if he has more in common with Sol than with me, and as ever, I feel like I’m missing something when he leaves.
Just me and Fiadh again, I climb the steps with my guardian angel at my feet and walk straight into the path of another.
Skylar.
He’s wearing Mal’s oldest t-shirt, no coat, and his hair is all over the place. Like he rolled out of bed and straight outside. “Fuck. There you are.” He grabs my arm—the one holding Fiadh’s lead, not the drinks. “Where’ve you been?”
I know that tone. The look on his face. The relief in his pewter eyes that he’s found me upright and walking and not face down in wet sand.
Unbidden, irritation boils up to meet it. “I went out.”
“Can see that.” Skylar runs his gaze over me. Through me. Whatever. “You feel like telling someone next time?”
No. I feel like punching him. Letting him punch me back. Unlike Sol and Mal, I’m pretty sure he would. But Skylar doesn’t deserve the sudden sharp edge to my mood. No one does. So I thrust the drinks at him and walk away.
I’m in the cellar when Sol comes to find me. I can tell he’s been out looking for me too, in the opposite direction to Skylar. “Don’t fucking say it.”
He raises his hands, already surrendering. “I wasn’t going to say anything except thanks for the coffee. I needed it this morning.”
“You can have it every fucking morning. You don’t need to drink sawdust for my sake.”
Sol pauses in the doorway, absorbing the aggression I can’t control. The stupid, meaningless fury that has Oscar taking his kid somewhere else instead of a place I want him to think of as home. The kind of place Sol’s parents gave me and Mal before Dav went off the rails and stayed there.
I toss a barrel. It lands with a clatter that makes Sol flinch and it should remind me how tired he is.
How overburdened with everyone else’s fucking problems. But I can’t contain the ugly fire in my veins.
It’s like a demon inside me has slipped its binds, mean and sharp, and it won’t die until I’ve fucked something up.
Heat burns behind my eyes.
I reach for another barrel with taut hands and they’re ugly too.
Fuck. Fuck. I blow out a breath and curl them into fists. Make myself face Sol and the patient love in his weary gaze almost ruins me. How many times have I done this to him? Thrown rage and nothing in his face when he needs so much more? When he needs so much better? “Why do you do it?”
“Do what?” Sol speaks softly, like I’m a caged animal.
Anger spikes again, but I swallow it. “Why do you stay with me?”
“Stay with you?”
Barrel forgotten, I advance on him, taking advantage of the inches I have on him in every direction. “I’m fucking awful to you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I am.” I loom over him. “You’re a mess over what your dad has done to your family and all I’m doing is giving you more to worry about.”
Sol’s eyes, already bloodshot from stress and lack of real sleep, shine with unshed tears. “That’s not what this is.”
“What is it then?”
“It’s us, Jackie. This is who we are and we love each other anyway.”
I know he loves me. How can I not when I’d be dead without him?
But it’s more than that. More than the years we were friends before I became this.
More than the heady inferno we’ve found in my bed this past…
I don’t know. However long it’s been, whatever’s been and gone, we’re more than all of it.
I know that—I know it, so why is the image in my head, the map of who we are, why is it so incomplete?
And why the fuck-damn hell can’t I just say that, instead of glowering at my best friend, the love of my life, like a school bully?
I don’t know the answers to any of those questions.
Or how to ask them. And Sol knows the monsters inside me well enough to gauge I’m not fit for a real conversation right now.
But as the natural moment for us to part ways comes and goes, he doesn’t move.
He takes a few breaths that seem to go nowhere and the sense he has something on his mind is potent enough that even my brittle brain can’t miss it.
The fucked-up fury in me ebbs, edges blurring and finally pushed aside by the primal need to be as close to Sol as possible.
I set my hands on his shoulders, using his solid warmth to tether me. “I’m sorry.”
Sol shakes his head without uttering the words he usually does.
Shh, Jackie. I have you.
I can’t remember if he’s called me Jackie since we were kids. If Mally came first or after. Hate that. Love that it’s only him who would ever dare. That it’s only him so close to us.
“Jack?”
No. Don’t say my name like that.
I find a hard blink from somewhere. “Yeah?”
“Why didn’t you come last night? Are you still afraid of it?”
A laugh bubbles out of me, unchecked and free; a mood one-eighty that takes us both by surprise. “I haven’t been scared since the first time. Being with you made me forget I ever was.”
It’s a simple truth, but Sol’s expression is anything but, and a flare of anxiety cuts me deep.
“It wasn’t important,” I try again, my brain working as hard as it can without melting down to see where I’ve fucked up. “I was too locked in to you to even think about it, and…I liked feeling like that.”
Sol’s gaze doesn’t soften. If anything, it sparks with sharper emotion, and my pulse starts to skid. Flashing lights. Floor shifting beneath me—
He kisses me, warm and sweet, steering me from the edge of a cliff. I make a gruff sound and kiss him back, but I’m gentle too, and it’s so fucking good, as it ends, I find the words I need to say. “You were enough, Sol. You’re always enough. I don’t care about anything else.”
Emotion rolls through Sol’s open gaze like weather off the sea. His eyes glass for a second, as if he’s feeling something that hurts and heals at the same time. Something bright and dark and dangerous. Something fragile.
Like me.
No.
In Sol’s arms, with him in mine and his kiss forever imprinted on me, I’m not fucking weak. I’m awake and alive with everything he is to me and what it means.
Tell him you love him.
No. That’s not right either. He knows I love him. This is something else—something I reach for with both hands, but can’t define.
“I have to go.” Sol presses his lips to my temple. “Aras got sick so Oscar can’t do the whiting run.”
My heart sinks, letting me know how much I’d been counting on Sol staying close without realising. And it must show on my face when Sol draws back to leave. I see real pain in his eyes too and it hurts us both.
“You missing Mally, eh?”
Not what I was thinking, but he’s not wrong either. I nod, slowly, letting my brother’s prolonged absence sink in and merge with everything else I’m feeling, and…it’s a lot.
I reach blindly for Sol, like I always do when I feel so much about so many things I don’t know what to do with any of it.
“Hey.” He steps into my arms again, a perfect fit, like he never left. “I know things are weird at the moment, but it’s not in your head. It’s in mine too, and when I get back, we’ll talk, okay? There’s some stuff I need to tell you, then we’ll figure all this out. But, Jack?”
Sol holds my face in his hands.
I’m lost in him. “Yeah?”
“I love you. Whatever we’re meant to be to each other, that’s never going to change.”