23. Jack
Information overload is brutal. It hits as Sol and the Sirona fade into the distance. Deepens as Sev tells me Oscar is already onboard and my brain shudders as I learn Oscar walked her before dawn and discovered all the parts Sol has stripped and sold to bail out Dav.
He asks about the concertina.
I have nothing for him.
Sev grinds a cigarette into an ashtray on a picnic table. “Always figured he’d sell a kidney before he hawked that.”
“What?”
“I heard you rowing about it last night. So did Oscar. I thought he went outside to get away from all the shagging going on, but I guess not.”
I try to remember the conversation Sol’s talking about. It wasn’t a row. And we weren’t in bed. But my brain gets hooked on three words.
All the shagging.
Because I fucked Sol last night and until I opened my eyes this morning, it was the most moored and whole I’ve felt in years.
We hooked up before you got hurt.
My head spins harder.
I go inside and upstairs with Sev trailing behind me, trying to piece together the world I’ve woken up to. Take my medication and make coffee on autopilot.
Every part of me aches for Sol.
I leave the coffee and go to my room, as if my empty bed still holds a piece of him, but all I find are rumpled sheets and a lube bottle that’s pretty much empty now.
Dazed, I put it away.
Go back to Sev in the living room. “Oscar asked the Kings to round up Dav?”
Sev sets his phone aside. “I think so.”
“You think?”
“He didn’t tell me. But it makes sense. And…I keep trying to be angry about it, and I’m just fucking not.”
“But you’re angry with Sol?”
“I don’t want to be.” Sev rubs his eyes, looking far younger than twenty-seven or however old he is these days. “He just drives me crazy sometimes. He’s so good at piling shit on himself without anyone seeing, and I fucking hate my parents for letting this happen again.”
Frustration gets the better of Sev. He hurls his phone at the other couch and I feel bad for him, I do. But it isn’t Sol who deserves his rage. And I fucking tell him so.
I think.
My voice is distant.
Disconnected.
My overactive eyeball vibrates in the socket and suddenly it’s me who wants to slam doors and throw shit at the walls.
I go back to the kitchen. Fetch the abandoned coffee and give it to Sev. He says something, but I don’t hear him. My surroundings haze out and I fall into the kind of deep thought I’ll need help coming back from.
We hooked up before you got hurt.
What does that even mean? I sift beyond last night and phantom laughter fills my head.
Warm.
Drunk.
Happy.
I feel Sol holding my face when all I can remember is me holding his last night. I hear my name on his lips, taste the salt of him in my mouth, but as fast as it dawns on me that maybe my dreams and memories have blurred together, it’s all gone again, spinning away to become something else.
No.
To become nothing.
Blank space between my ears. Nothing but grey in my vision and the wrong voice wrapped around my name.
“Jack.” Cool hands grip my arms. “Jack. Look at me a sec.”
Skylar.
He presses his thumbs into my pulse points.
Firm.
Grounding.
Reality shifts and the flat shade hazing my vision becomes the pewter of his disarming gaze.
“There you go,” he murmurs as I find my focus. “Breathe for a minute. Shut everything else out.”
How do I tell him I already have? That I don’t have a choice when my brain gets overwhelmed and boots my entire life overboard?
I’m not sure.
So I don’t.
I let the fog thin in its own time and come to on the sofa to an empty living room.
No Sev.
No Mal.
No Sol.
Just an ache in my head and heart that tells me this is real life and not whatever my subconscious tried to replace it with.
“I think I remember.”
“Yeah?” Skylar peers at me. “What’s that then? Something good?”
An answer bubbles up my throat, but I catch it before it spills out.
I can’t talk to Skylar about this. Can’t talk to anyone except Sol, and he’s not here.
He sailed away with hurt in his eyes and the anger he loathes so much shaking his limbs, and I hate that I wasn’t fast or strong enough to stop him.
Skylar sees all that land on my face. “He’ll be back.”
“Hmm?”
“Sol. But I can try and call Oscar if you want.”
Oscar.
Right.
The living room solidifies for real and I spot Sol’s phone on the coffee table. Someone’s brought it in and all I know for sure is that it wasn’t me. “Where’s Mal?”
“Took Sev and Fiadh for a walk.” Skylar assesses me again. Sees the clarity returning and sits back a little, wearing Mal’s faded blue t-shirt over sweats.
He’s not dressed for work.
“Binned it off,” he says before I can ask. “Marc found me cover.”
“Because Mal came home?”
Skylar shrugs. “We’ll go with that, eh?”
I absorb that. Match it with waking up…yesterday, maybe?—to see him asleep on the couch, seeking comfort in Sol. “Works for me. Can I get up?”
“Probably. You didn’t have a seizure.”
“I know.” I haul myself from the couch and move to the window, scanning the horizon for the cornflower blue of the Sirona, but I find nothing but endless ocean. “What time is it?”
“Half three.”
My brother’s voice startles me. I’ve missed him coming back and pulling a shift as my minder. I hear a shower running, which explains where Skylar is.
“Where’s Sev?”
“Gone to check on Lisa.”
“Did you know?”
Mal is pretending to study the open chess game. So I can’t accuse him of staring at me too hard. “Know what?”
“That the Kings were going to take Dav. Did Saint tell you?”
“I haven’t spoken to Saint.” Mal picks up a bishop. Puts it down again and shifts a knight instead. Helping out Sol. “But even if I had, I wouldn’t be bitching him out for what went down. This needed to happen.”
“I thought they’d kill him before they did something like this.”
“Really?”
“No,” I concede and turn my back on the window. “I was always scared Dav would get Sol killed first.”
Mal’s gaze flickers.
I see it—I see it. But I don’t have the brain power to pull on that thread and I won’t have until Sol comes home. “He told me something last night.”
“Sol?”
“Aye.”
“About the loan on the Sirona?”
“No, something else. But if you fucking knew about that, you should tell me now before I find out from someone else.”
“I didn’t know about the loan on the boat.” Mal swaps a couple of pawns before he shows me the regret in his gaze. “I might’ve if I hadn’t been so in my head about other shit, though. I’m sorry, Jack. I want to be better than that for you—for all of you.”
Better than a man who dropped everything to fly across the world and help his friends. And then came home to this fucking mess. “Sol told me we hooked up before I got hurt.”
My brother is sharp. I feel like a breeze block beside him most days. But I’ve caught him off guard with this. Surprise creases his face and he pushes away from the chess board, overtly giving me his full attention.
I don’t like it.
I go back to the window and check the sea again.
Scan the cove, the harbour, and the finished lifeguard base.
A defibrillator the Kings paid for is built into the sea wall.
It has me looping back to Dav’s forced rehab stint and the sheer bewilderment on Sol’s face before he’d run from the anger coursing through him, sparing everyone else his emotions.
Has me lurching to recall why he kept whatever happened between us all these years ago from me and trying to recall if he told me why.
But I can’t do it, and it pisses me off.
“Hey.” Mal fills the space beside me. “Catch yourself on.”
I smile at that. Can’t help it. Mal doesn’t remember much about living in Killinchy with our mam and dad, but I do, and I love that it’s something we share. Love to hear it seep into him, unguarded and free. “I am calm.”
Mal snorts. “You look like you want to deck someone.”
“I’d never hit Sol.”
“Don’t give him that face then or he’ll never believe you.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
Mal shuts up, and I find I don’t like that either. I don’t want to tell him shit about me and Sol, but he’s right about the boiling point inside me. I am angry. And I do want to hit something, a roiling rush of feeling that has my hands flexing until a rattle distracts me.
A med bottle.
Mal upends it and palms a pill into his mouth.
It jars me. “Were you okay while you were gone?”
Mal nods as he dry swallows the pill, shooting me a droll look as I press his forgotten mug into his hands. “I’d have been grand even if I wasn’t. Had a medic with me the whole time.”
“Regiment?”
“Good as—holy shite, what’s going on with those fucking clouds?”
Mal backs up and moves towards the door. He’s too fast for me to grasp what he means. And so I follow blind as he darts down the stairs and outside.
Cold air hits me, my surroundings everything I expect them to be. The harbour, the sea wall, the salty breeze. Everything is the same.
Except…it isn’t.
Too quiet.
As if the gulls have dropped out of the sky, and the wind…it smells wrong. Metallic. Heavy. As if it’s bleeding from a wound we can’t yet see.
The clouds.
I take another cue from my brother and spin around to face the horizon. A black seam bisects the sky. A visible rain shaft hovers beneath, dragging against the sea, and the water is thick and bruised and wrong.
Fuck.
Sol.
He’s out there. A realisation Mal echoes with a low growl that rattles my nerves as the wind drops to nothing, a cursed reprieve.
For half a second, everything is profoundly still.
Then thunder rolls over the bay, deep and close, and the first blast of wind hits the harbour hard enough to make the boats strain the ropes.
A savage gust that tears across the water, sharp with bone-deep certainty. A warning that a freak storm is coming.
Beautiful.
Violent.
And the Sirona is directly in its path.