20. Sol
I’d never wish ill health on anyone, least of all a child. But it’s just as well Aras is sick and needs his dad. The Sirona breaks down at sea on my third day of solo runs and I’m so grateful Oscar isn’t here to see it I can’t even be that vexed about it.
Or maybe I’m losing the will to live.
It’s the day before Christmas Eve. The Joker is as busy as it gets in winter and I haven’t found a moment to talk to Jack about anything beyond beer deliveries and leaking roofs.
If we’re not working, we’re asleep. In the same bed—his—and I cherish every moment of that, awake and asleep.
In my dreams, when I’m lucky enough to remember them.
Yet a sense of wrongness hangs over me.
Over everything.
Sev isn’t speaking to me. My dad still hasn’t shown up in Saltkiss Bay.
And I still haven’t told Jack about the stupid perfect drunken night that lives in my soul like a second heart.
Add-in that crab prices have crashed through the earth’s core and I’m so done I don’t even care I’m adrift in the ocean with no back-up battery to save me.
I lie on the deck and let the rain pelt my face, eyes shut, body listing with the waves. I’ve slept like this so many times it’s hard to believe I’m awake, but the crabs in the hold keep skittering, claws clacking and scraping loud enough to drag me back each time I start to drift.
Crabs that’ll barely cover the fuel it took to haul them. If I ever get home to sell them, that is. A prospect that seems less and less likely as I lie in the rain, waiting for a sign beyond the yearning ache in my chest that I need to get up.
Jack needs you.
So does my mum. But I haven’t been to see her.
Haven’t looked for my dad or paid out any more to the Kings or random loan sharks.
Haven’t done any of it and I’m terrified.
The part of me that said such awful things about my dad to Cam O’Brian…
what if it’s growing bigger? What if it’s winning?
What if the apathy I’m starting to feel is the price for every stolen night with Jack?
His weight on my bones, his mouth at my throat, and his fingers…
I can’t finish the thought. Can’t tame the memory of that night enough to survive the HD replay. Least, I think I can’t, then it hits me anyway, hot and sharp, and I throw an arm over my face, shouting a wretched groan into the wind. This would be a hell of a lot easier if Jack was bad at sex.
Or even just a little bit less than devastating.
Ruinous.
The kind of good that has me leaving all rational thought on the deck as a sacrifice to the sea and being a little slower to retrieve it each and every time.
You need to tell him.
About that night, and that I’m head-over-heels in love with him.
Facts that haven’t changed—facts that won’t change.
And yet every time I open my stupid mouth, fate intervenes.
So maybe I’ll stay out here. Let the sea have me for a while.
Let the cold and the grey eclipse the racket in my head until there’s nothing left of me but the salt on my skin.
In the end, though, the gulls get bored of circling and one finally lands close enough to scream the sign I’ve been waiting on right into my skull.
Go home, Sol.
Fine. I wrench my eyes open and roll to my feet. Spend an hour wrestling with the engine, then another two nursing the Sirona home.
It’s dark when I reach the harbour and I’m so late my phone has been pinging with messages since I sailed back into range.
Oscar.
Skylar.
Oscar again.
I reply to them both with a proof of life thumbs up emoji and steer the Sirona to the quay where the crab buyer waits. Sell my catch for peanuts and sail on to the cove, come alongside and shut off the engine.
Sudden quiet swamps my senses.
Stillness.
I’m hyperaware of eyes on me—Jack and Mal would be proud—and I glance around to find the friendly loan shark heading my way.
I mutter a curse, mooring the Sirona until it occurs to me too late he might’ve come for her.
As it happens, he hasn’t. But he needs something to keep his bosses happy until the new year, and I need him gone before Jack comes outside and tosses him into the sea.
“Wait here.”
I sneak through the abandoned kitchens and into the Joker, for once grateful Jack rarely checks the security screens. Upstairs, I unhook my grandad’s vintage concertina from my bedroom wall and cart it downstairs to pay the growing interest on Dav’s illegal debt. “It’s never going to end, is it?”
The loan shark winces and I almost feel bad for him. “Not without a lump sum payment. You think you might swing it? After Christmas and that? Save me keep coming back.”
I shake my head, tilting my face to the sky and the murky clouds hiding the stars. “Never going to happen. If you’re gonna shank me or take my livelihood away, you might as well do it now.”
He thinks I’m joking and he leaves with the concertina and a piece of my family we’ll never get back.
It should hurt. But I just sigh and bury myself in the engine hatch until I’ve done enough of a patch job that I can sail again tomorrow—maybe, if I wake up feeling skint enough to be that reckless.
By then, I’ve dodged Oscar twice and the eerie quiet I came home to has been eclipsed by the wall of raucous noise blasting out of the Joker.
Live music.
Shouting.
Singing.
The kind of chaos a tired man can get lost in, but I don’t have that luxury. I should’ve come inside hours ago, a fact underlined the moment I lay eyes on Jack across the jam-packed bar.
He’s serving, shoulders broad, jaw set, like he could hold the place up if the leaking roof gave up the ghost for good. But his eyes are wrong. As if he’s taking every thump of bass directly to his brain, and I’m in motion before I make a conscious decision.
I slip behind the bar. Behind Jack and my chest presses against his back as I pitch my voice low where he can hear me over the din. “Take a break, love.”
Jack tilts his neck to find me, but his gaze is too jittery to hold mine for long. “I’m okay.”
“You don’t have to be. I’m here.”
It’s in him to argue, but he doesn’t. Which tells me how hard he’s struggling. That he’s been clinging to shore for way too long and I’ve just offered him solid ground.
“Go on.” I kiss his cheek, not caring who sees. “Lie down for a while.”
“I’ll come back in a bit.”
“You don’t have to,” I repeat.
“Aye, but I want to be where you are.”
“You’re killing me, Gallagher.”
Jack almost smiles, but now I’m here, his brain has had enough, and he needs out of this carnage before he drops.
He retreats and goes upstairs. I ache to go with him.
To stay with him every minute his TBI leaves him this vulnerable.
But I have to settle for checking on him every half hour, trusting that the deep and near instant sleep he’s found on the sofa is everything he needs as the evening bleeds into the kind of night that never ends.
We make a ton of money, but the clean-up is brutal. I have no idea how late it is by the time I stagger upstairs.
Jack is still on the couch, arm tucked under a cushion, red light from a nearby lamp casting a glow over his face. He hasn’t moved in hours, but a blanket lies over his legs now, and I know better than to think he put it here himself.
Skylar.
He should be at work. But…he’s not. He’s on the other couch, curled in on himself, hood pulled over his face as he sleeps, like he’s trying to disappear, and the sight of him twists my gut.
Skylar never sleeps anywhere but his bed. Never naps on the couch or dozes off in front of the TV. He’s too wired, too much lone wolf in him, so either the world has ended or he’s missing Mal so hard he can’t bear to be alone tonight, and I take that hit in my stomach too.
Can’t leave them.
So I take a shower, lay myself down, and go to sleep on the floor.
Wake at dawn to Skylar stirring and I realise it’s been years since I’ve seen him this unguarded.
That I’ve forgotten how fleeting it is before he scans his surroundings as if it’s him who spent decades in the military.
Though my romantic heart likes to think he’s looking for Mal more than danger these days.
And lucky him, he just finds me.
He stares, unblinking. Then he sits up a little and makes room for me on the couch. “Get off the fucking floor.”
Skylar ordering me about is a world away from Jack doing it. But it’s cold and my neck hurts, so I do as I’m told, rise from the floorboards, and sink onto the sofa.
I expect Skylar to retreat to the other end of the couch, but he lies back down, dumping his head in my lap, and closes his eyes again.
And, gods, I’m not ready for that. Damn, I can’t be crying before coffee on Christmas Eve.
Softly, I place a cautious hand on his head, mussing his hair a little. “All right down there?”
Skylar says nothing for a long moment.
Then he sighs. “I’m sorry I’ve given you something else to fret about.”
“I’m not fretting.”
He snorts. “Did you have a life lobotomy when I wasn’t looking?”
“Lots of things happen when I’m not looking. Doesn’t mean they’re your fault instead of mine.”
Skylar shifts a little to look at me. In the murky light of another cold morning, he looks younger than I’m used to.
As if being without Mal has stripped him down to who he was before they loved each other.
“You’re a stubborn idiot, but you were made that way.
The rest of it is someone else fucking things up or fate doing you over. ”
My gaze drifts to where Jack is still asleep. “I’m not the one who got the raw deal from fate.”
“Yes, you are. He made a choice and he’s living with the consequences. You didn’t get a say in any of it.”
Skylar’s said some version of that before. So has Jack. And they both believe it—but I don’t. Jack stepped in front of that mortar on instinct, and we don’t get to choose who we are.
Not Jack.
Not me.
Not even Skylar as he does the unthinkable and goes back to sleep still using me as a pillow.
I hardly dare move.
So I don’t. I keep my hands where they are, loose on his head and shoulder, so he knows where I am when he wakes up, and fluctuate between staring at the ceiling and staring at Jack on the opposite sofa. Tracking the faint twitches that run through him as he starts to wake up.
Slow.
Incremental.
Cell by cell.
Piecing himself back together before he’ll risk opening his eyes.
He takes a deep breath, listening to his body, listening to the world around him, fighting the pull of the strange and liminal place his brain sometimes wants him to stay.
I’ve never been sure if he knows he does this—the listening part.
Or if he’s always done it and all that’s changed is that it’s overt now.
Gods, I love him.
So much I almost die right here on this couch.
Maybe I would without the weight of Skylar’s head on my thigh. Without the slow rise and fall of him as he sleeps, slack-limbed and trusting, just little old me between him and a world that’s making him afraid to be alone.
He’s coming back.
Mal.
But what if he doesn’t? An unspeakable horror that hits me as Jack opens his eyes for real, blinking in and out of focus before he gets a hold on it and finds me.
For a long moment, he stares.
At me and whatever my face is doing.
At Skylar.
Then he tilts his head a little. Something happened?
“No, love,” I say softly. “Everyone’s just tired, eh?”
Of life. Of love that hurts. And it’s in this moment more than ever, that I feel the weight of all the things I need to say to him. Of the conversation we promised each other days ago.
We should have it now.
Skylar’s asleep. Jack’s awake. It’s a good time. Before another busy day drags us under and we keep existing around the truth. Beyond the past. We’ve done this before. Some of it, anyway. But the details have become less important.
Tell him.
Words form on my tongue and my heart starts to pound.
It’s impossible that Jack hears, but his eyes search mine, as if he knows I’m standing on a cliff edge, and he shifts, sitting up and I see it—he’s about to say something too.
Something that charges the air as it manifests, like the sea before a storm breaks.
I clamp my mouth shut, holding my breath. Jack’s green eyes bore into me, steady despite the lingering fog he woke up with, and—
The front door opens.
A sudden scrape of metal and wood that carves through our connection like the sharpest knife.
I jump out of my skin, startling Skylar awake in the same moment Jack surges to his feet, the instinct that nearly took him from us carrying him halfway to the hallway before I even manage a breath.
“Jackie. Wait.”
He ignores me, pressing on, barefoot on the floorboards, favouring his stronger side just a fraction, but it doesn’t matter to him.
Protect first.
Pay later.
It’s how we got here.
I scramble to rise. Skylar does too and we roll to our feet as a figure appears in front of Jack, reaching the doorway before him.
Tall.
Rangy.
Messy hair and rumpled clothes carrying the scent of cold air and something metallic from a land far away from here.
For a tempestuous heartbeat I can’t make it make sense. Then Jack takes another step, light catches the face of the man beyond him, and the relief that hits me is so profound it’s almost pain.
Mal.
He’s home.