21. Jack #2
It’s a doorway I want to yank him through, but I can’t. He needs to sit with this—feel it—and live with the man he is when it’s over…and I’d be an idiot to think he’ll come out of it untouched.
Like Orion.
I embrace Mal again.
He hugs me back and it means the fucking world.
I’m not so keen on the look he gives me when he pulls back. “What?”
“Don’t what me.”
“Why not?” I go back to the dishes, skin crawling like I know what he’s about to say, but I haven’t figured it out yet. “You’re fucking me with eyeball subtext when you know I won’t get it.”
Mal trails me to the sink. “If I ever do that, I don’t mean to.”
Right. Because he forgets that I’m not who I used to be. How the fuck does he think I feel?
Irritation prickles my skin. That untamed fury I hurled at Sol the other day. It’s still in me—it’ll always be in me. But with everyone I care about under one roof for the night, subduing it isn’t as hard.
I drain the dishwater and face Mal. “Just say what you’re thinking. It’s easier that way.”
“Are you and Sol fucking?”
Christ. Leave it to my brother to spit that question with a straight face. That I asked him to is a distant thing to the ringing in my ears and instant heat rushing through my veins.
Fuck. I emptied the sink. I have nothing to do with my hands.
I ball them into fists, hating that Mal clocks every minute movement in everyone he’ll ever meet. “Why are you asking me that?”
Mal snorts. “Because you two in the same room is fucking wildfire.”
“Stop saying fucking.”
“No.” Mal’s already speaking quietly, but he moves closer to me to drop his voice even lower. “Something’s changed, hasn’t it?”
“With what?”
“You and Sol.”
“Me and Sol.” I mean it to be another deflective question. But it doesn’t come out like that and I like how the words feel in my mouth. How they feel in the open, even if it’s just between me and Mal. “What do you mean?”
Mal gives me a moment to figure it out. Then he cocks a brow and gives me a droll stare just like our dad. Until it reminds me he’s already told me what he means and I give him a shove.
“Shut up.”
He laughs, and I love that for him. But I’m distracted by what he said the first time. About wildfire and Sol, and how it makes me feel.
“Do you think anyone else can tell?”
Mal checks the living room again, given I’ve propelled him to the doorway anyway. Then he comes back to me and I can’t gauge the emotion behind the stare he fixes me with. “Tell that you’re fucking?”
“We’re not fucking.”
But unlike me and Sol, these words feel all wrong, and Mal doesn’t like them either.
Something like disbelief flickers in his gaze and he stares harder at me, as if he’s trying to peel back layers for my sake, not his.
“All right then,” he says after a beat. “But whatever you are doing, don’t let all the noise get in the way.
You and Sol have something pure and you always fucking have.
Don’t let anything else take that from you. ”
I wasn’t put on this earth to take sex and relationship advice from my kid brother. But I let it slide. He’s home. What else really matters?
Besides, he slips away after dropping that nugget of wisdom and I clean up the rest of the kitchen alone. Until Sol comes up behind me, and just fucking…stops, and it’s almost as affecting as when we touch.
I brace my hands on the counter and bow my head. “Come closer.”
He obeys and I feel the heat of him before his chest hits my back. Before his arms wind around my ribs and he rests his head between my shoulder blades.
This isn’t a new pose for us, but it’s usually the other way round. Because I lean on Sol and he leans on no one. A reality that has me pushing down the urge to turn in his arms and see his face. For a long moment, I let him be, and it’s…I don’t know. Affirming, maybe?
The old me might’ve known. Might’ve figured out Sol needed this hours ago. Then again, perhaps this version of me is the most aware I’ve ever been and my brother is right.
Don’t let the noise get in the way.
I turn as Sol lifts his head, catching him before he can lean back too far. He’s a little drunk, and he’s always emotional. But there’s more in his bronze-brown eyes tonight.
More than desire.
More than love.
My hand finds the home I’ve claimed wrapped around his jaw. I want to kiss him so much. Haul him against me. But I want more too, and his earlier vow comes back to me.
If that’s something you want, we can talk about it later.
When is later? Is it now, while our found family debate the Christmas movie status of Die Hard? Is it when this night is over and we hover in the hallway, letting who the fuck knows what decide if Sol sleeps in his bed or mine?
I want him in my bed. Tonight and every night. I’ve grown to accept he sees me at my worst, but I want him to see the best of me too, and in the time it’s taken me to think the fucking obvious, someone has rolled off a couch and made tracks towards the kitchen.
It isn’t Mal.
I think it might be Sev and I release Sol in time for my listening skills to prove on point.
Sol is slower to step away, but Sev doesn’t seem to notice. He opens the fridge and grabs a beer. Offers one to Sol and shrugs when Sol waves it off.
Then he’s gone again, but the moment he interrupted lingers thick and heavy between me and Sol, and I realise with the startling clarity that so often throws me, that I don’t want it to end, unless it leads us somewhere better. I realise exactly what I want and how to say it.
But it’s Oscar who interrupts us this time, herding us back to the living room, and it’s hours before I’m alone with Sol again. Hours I spend picturing things I’ve never seen clearly before tonight, while the rest of them play card games I can’t keep up with.
They probably think I’m tired.
I’m not.
I’m wide awake, and eventually, I remember Sol’s Christmas present.
I slip away while he’s beating Sev at brag.
While Skylar’s trying to pick up durak from Oscar.
I tell myself it’s a coincidence I’ve waited until Mal’s passed out on the couch.
Then decide it doesn’t matter. He knows I bought Sol a leather bracelet with pewter charms from the summer craft markets because he was with me when I got it, and when I stashed it in the one place in the Joker Sol never goes.
The gym.
It’s still locked, but Sol is terrible at hiding things. The key is on the doorframe—which lets me know Skylar could’ve got in here if he really wanted to. And that he didn’t.
A good feeling that I carry to the weight rack where I stashed Sol’s present months ago.
It’s habit to check the bar. To scan the dark wood and shadows for ghosts. At first, nothing seems out of place. Then my gaze lands on the charity box and I stare and stare and stare at it, willing whatever I’ve forgotten to come back to me.
Takes a while. Eventually, I remember it was stolen. That the RNLI lost out on the twenty quid or whatever that was in there. That’s still in there, I realise, as I pick the thing up and feel the weight of it.
It’s not unusual for me to be confused. To be deprived of vital information that makes things make sense.
And sometimes it doesn’t even matter that I can’t think of a rational explanation, just knowing one exists out there somewhere is enough.
But this…it makes no sense at all. I’ve worked every day of the last six.
Even if I haven’t noticed someone returning the box, I’d have heard about it.
I think so anyway, but it starts to bend my brain in all the wrong ways. So I turn my back on it and head back upstairs, seeking solace in Sol’s incense-laced room. In the colour and life that’s in here even when he’s not.
His bed is made for once. I slide the paper-wrapped bracelet under his pillow without thinking too hard about when he’ll get round to finding it.
Hit and run. But as I turn to leave, the wall opposite catches my attention the same way the charity box did downstairs.
But my mind is so full I can’t see what I’m looking at.
What I’m missing. All I see is empty space where a new thought should be and I can’t fucking stand it.
I leave Sol’s room and go back to the living room. Mal and Skylar are gone. Sev is lounging on the floor, poking at his phone, and Oscar is sprawled on the couch with Fiadh in the crook of his elbow.
Aras went to Norfolk, remember? With his mam.
“Stay,” I tell Oscar. “You and Sol are heading out early anyway.”
Oscar smiles. “Thank you, my friend. Sol already asked me and this couch is not half bad.”
“That’s the gin you made me fetch talking,” Sev says without looking up. “The lumpy bits don’t get you until the witching hour. Sol’s in the shower.”
The last part’s for me, even though I didn’t ask. “The shower?”
“Tipped Kraken down himself.” Sev finally spares me a glance. “You need anything, Jack?”
Yes.
My body thrums with so much fucking need. But that isn’t a conversation I want with anyone but Sol, so I say goodnight and leave Sev and Oscar to their living room slumber party.
The hallway lights are off. Sev and Oscar talk quietly over the low hum of the TV and I swear to god, the slow thump of my brother’s bed against his bedroom wall somehow reaches me.
Fuck that. I unhook the hallway door from the wall latch and ease it as shut as it ever gets, sealing out the rest of the flat until I’m left with only the hush of Christmas Eve, the distant roll of the ocean, and the shower running in the bathroom as though it holds the secrets to eternal life.
Sol hasn’t closed the bathroom door properly. Steam filters through the gap and creeps along the ceiling as I watch it, feeling the bindings snapped tight around my composure slip away, one by one.
Mal’s voice is still in my head.
Shut out all the noise.
I can’t do that on my own. I need Sol. I need the conversations we haven’t had. The things I don’t remember. The things I do. I need the way Sol looks at me sometimes like he’s dying inside and something inside me holds the cure.
And that need has me drifting closer to the bathroom. Reeled in by Sol’s absent humming and the blurred shape of him behind the shower screen. The line of his inked back. The arch of his neck as he rinses his hair.
I brace on the doorframe, steam still pooling around me, hands curling into fists as every ounce of tenderness I feel for my best friend fights with a scorching urge inside me. A soul-deep instinct that wants every piece of him he’ll give me.
More.
Fuck, that word has done a number on me for weeks now. But as the water shuts off and sudden quiet fills the space, I do what Mal said and push everything aside. Shove it off a fucking cliff in time for Sol to slide the shower door open and find me waiting on him.
He knows.
I see it in his dark, heavy-lidded eyes.
In the deliberate step he takes past the towel rail and into my orbit.
I meet him halfway. The tiles are cool beneath my feet, the air hot in my lungs. My pulse is a hammer in my veins as I grip his jaw with deeper intent than I ever have before. “How drunk are you?”
He shrugs, gaze simmering with everything I feel. “Just the right amount, Jackie. If you’re worrying about consent.”
I’m not. No noise, remember? I’m not worried about anything. We are skin and light and breath, and I claim Sol’s lush mouth in a rough kiss. Then I pull back to press my forehead to his. “Get in my fucking bed.”