Chapter 29 Jack
My grand declaration is too much for Sol. His eyes roll and he passes out, for real, and it would probably scare the shit out of me if I didn’t know exactly how it feels to have emotion and physical trauma collide.
I let him sleep, and that’s how the next few days of our lives play out. I get a taste of how it feels for him to see me so incapacitated and I can’t stand it.
But I love him.
I love him.
Enough to take care of him and myself both. I eat and sleep like a pro. And after Sol is moved to a regular ward, I even leave a few times to check on Fiadh in Saltkiss Bay and take in the fact that Folk’s husband and Orla O’Brian are currently running my pub.
It’s an easy reality to live with.
I don’t feel much except bemused gratitude. And I reckon Sol would feel the same if he was up to talking much.
He isn’t.
And it gets me wondering if he’s taking so long to recover because he was so depleted and run down in the first place. A wonder that becomes a reality when Oscar is discharged first and Sol’s funky blood tests mean he has to stay.
“This is hell,” he tells me on his third day on the ward, once Sev and Lisa have left. “How does anyone sleep in this pit?”
I have no idea. Day and night, the ward is loud and chaotic. On the sixth day, Skylar calls time on the whole thing and springs Sol on his way home from work.
It’s afternoon.
I’m in the flat and just rising from taking a nap before visiting hours. I’m not expecting Sol. But I feel no surprise when the front door creaks open and he shuffles in behind Skylar. Only relief. And love.
So much fucking love.
I’m there in a heartbeat. I loop an arm around his waist and guide him to his room. To his space with all the things that make him Sol. Colour and life, the scent of a burned-out incense cone still light in the air.
I can’t remember the last time he slept in his bed. I don’t want to—and I don’t want to remember the fatigue in him now either. The pain and discomfort as he sinks down and buries his face in his hands.
But I know I need to. That I need to understand every atom of what’s happened to him to even come close to paying forward the love and care he’s given me.
I crouch in front of him, hands on his knees. “You want a shower?”
Sol says something unintelligible.
I prise his hands from his face. “What’s that?”
“I might drown in it.”
“Not on my watch.”
Recognition flares in his eyes, of a phrase he’s so often said to me. I try to recall how many times he’s stood under the spray with his clothes on just to hold me up while I wash another seizure from my skin. But I can’t—there are too many, and my brain skids past them all.
I stand, taking Sol with me. And lead him back out of his room and into the bathroom.
He’s quiet as I strip him. Doesn’t look at the yellowed bruises mottling his skin.
I do. And I don’t shy away from how much weight he’s lost either. I face it and kiss his forehead. “You want me to get in with you?”
“You want that, Jackie?”
“Aye. I couldn’t be anywhere else right now.”
Sol nods, slowly, and leans against the sink as I lose my clothes and turn on the shower. The old pipes crank and whine. Steam fills the room and Sol rubs his chest, taking a deep breath that doesn’t rattle for the first time in forever.
“Come here.” I hold out my hand.
He takes it and I tug him under the spray, cupping my hand over the stitched gash in his head. Holding him close as the water rains down on us, praying my equilibrium won’t betray me in a moment he needs me to be whole.
It doesn’t. It stands fast, and I help Sol get clean. Then I take him back to his room, to his bed, and lie down with him in my arms.
We stay like that for a long time. Sol sleeps on and off, I don’t. Instead, I let my thoughts run riot while I’m flat on my back. I let anger, guilt, wonder, and love roll through me, and by the time Sol wakes again, I think I understand.
“It was this, wasn’t it?” I say into the dark. “What you lost when I got hurt. It was never about sex, it was this.”
Sol drags his head from my chest, his hair untangled now I’ve spent all evening picking through it. “Don’t give me too much credit. I’ve wanted you to fuck me as long as I’ve been old enough to understand what it means.”
“How long is that?”
“Forever.”
“I like the sound of that.”
Sol’s brows pull together. Not a frown, but I can see he doesn’t understand what I’m saying. Or, worse, he thinks he might but he can’t believe I mean it.
I need to fix that more than I need my next breath, but a soft knock at the door breaks the moment.
Skylar, and he wants to check Sol over before he goes back to work.
I watch him intently, tracking every minute detail.
It amuses him enough to offer me the stethoscope. “Listen for yourself.”
He’s taking the piss. Obviously. But I want to hear what he’s hearing and understand it. So I listen to Sol’s heart and lungs and believe Skylar when he tells me the rasping sound is easing.
Skylar leaves, shutting the door behind him.
Sol goes back to dozing on my chest and I find myself still thinking about the guilt-laced epiphany I had before Skylar came to check Sol hasn’t developed pneumonia in the last eight hours. How Sol lost this level of comfort from me because I forgot I was capable of giving it.
It’s a tough pill to swallow. One that has me wanting to wake him up so we can have the conversation that’s been hanging over us since before the ocean nearly took him from me.
But I don’t wake him. I get some sleep of my own and the next time I’m aware of how right he feels in my arms, it’s morning.
It’s a new day, and I’m going to spend it with Sol.
I do spend that day with Sol, and every day after for as long as he needs to be in bed.
I’ve never seen him sleep so much.
Then one day, he wakes up and he’s done with it, and I know it’s only a matter of time before I catch him dipping his feet in the ocean.
First, though, he wants to see Oscar, and sensing he needs some space, I let him take Fiadh with him now she’s back from her jaunt to Saltkiss Bay and stay behind to reacquaint myself with the Joker.
The Rebel Kings have kept the cellar in perfect order.
Lines are clean, barrels tapped. But there are new beers to connect and stock sheets to check, even though I know I won’t find a single digit out of place.
They’re good people.
Especially whichever one of them saw fit to smuggle the Bosanko concertina into the flat upstairs and hang it back on the wall.
Unless it was Mal.
I should ask him. But for whatever reason, I already know I won’t. I don’t care how the concertina found its way home. Just that it did, and that Sol does too, a few hours later.
The pub is open by then. I’m fighting with a cantankerous ale pump as Sol comes up behind me and presses his face between my shoulders.
I feel the chill of winter on him, but I carry on with what I’m doing, letting him have his moment, before I give in to the need to touch him, and reach back to rub his hip. “All right?”
Sol sighs. “Yeah. Just knackered.”
And sad. I feel it in every ounce of that heavy breath. “Go rest upstairs.”
“I don’t want to go to bed, Jackie. That ceiling is driving me crazy.”
“Lie on the sofa then.”
“And do what?”
“Watch TV?”
Sol grunts, and I almost laugh.
“Okay, how about this?” I turn to face him. “Go watch that Windjammers DVD you keep under your bed until the evening shift comes in. Then I’ll come join you, eh?”
“You want to watch TV, love?”
“I want to be with you. I don’t care what else is going on.”
The pub is quiet anyway, but as I hold Sol’s gaze and he holds mine we might as well be on our own planet.
He takes a slow breath. “I want that too.”
It’s early evening when I get off work. Mal has committed to loitering downstairs until I come back down to close the pub, and even offers to do it for me.
“I’ve done it before. No one died.”
All right then. I take him up on the offer and go upstairs.
I half expect to find Sol flaked out, but he’s up and about, pushing a broom around the flat.
Absolutely not. I confiscate it. Immediately. Then I realise he’s made dinner and I’m already losing the battle to keep him resting.
We sit and eat, the conversations we need to have hanging thick enough in the air that we’re both finished pretty quick, and that shunt I need in my brain to get this done—it finally happens.
I lean back in my seat. “Let’s talk.”
Wariness flickers in Sol’s deep eyes. He glances at the sink, as if the dishes might be his escape, but I pre-empt that shit by tugging him out of his chair and steering him towards his bedroom.
Towards his bed, and the tiny package under his pillow I forgot about until this exact second.
I retrieve it and hand it to him. “Merry Christmas.”
Sol blinks, turning the package over in his hands as if he’s caught a bit of me and can’t remember what it means. Then it clicks and he spins around, vanishing into my room.
A moment later, he’s back with a brown paper parcel of his own. One that’s stupidly similar to the one I’ve given him. “Back at you.”
We open the gifts.
Leather. Pewter charms.
Matching bracelets.
Christ.
For a long beat we stare at them. Then Sol laughs, soft and incredulous, and for the first time in a week, I feel like I have all of him back.
“Thought you didn’t like Mary Mad Scarf?”
“I don’t.” Sol fastens the bracelet he bought from the same stall I did last summer. “She chucks her coffee cups over the sea wall.”
“Why’d you give her your money then?”
“Didn’t. I stole it.”
“Liar.”
Sol meets my gaze for a charged second. “All right. I thought it was something you might actually wear, and maybe we could put that medical ID tag on it Skylar’s always bugging you to get.”
“Aye. Maybe.”
Sol snorts. “Worth a try. Looks good on you anyway.”