5. Skylar #2
I lean back on the sand, closing my eyes, listening to the waves beat the shoreline, light spray misting my face.
Even with the accordion murdering my eardrums, it’s so peaceful it’s hard to believe the same waves claimed a girl’s life today.
Even harder to contemplate she might’ve survived if the lifeguard base hadn’t burned down six months ago—an arson attack that might not’ve happened if the bikers had stayed.
Disquiet rattles my mood. My eyes flash open and I don’t feel alone anymore. Until I do, as if whoever’s attention I claimed is already gone. It’s a weird feeling and my gaze slides to the empty beer bottle. It’s been a while since I last drank. Maybe this is another reason I shouldn’t.
It’s definitely a reason to quit this day, go inside, and pretend the sound of my tatty Vans crunching over the gravel doesn’t set my teeth on edge.
I dodge Jack and Sol and duck upstairs.
The windows are still open. I shut them one by one until I get to the narrow corridor where my own room is.
Where Mal’s room is. And that’s when I spot him.
On the roof looking out over the whole pub, long arms resting on his bent knees, a beer dangling from one hand while he flexes the other, clenching it into a fist, over and over.
He has scarred hands—I noticed them that night, and again the other morning. The marks on his knuckles, the ring finger curved at an odd angle.
Old injuries.
Years.
Decades.
He’s thirty-one and he’s been a soldier since he was sixteen. Which makes me wonder about the rest of his body beyond what I already know, and it’s a slippery slope that has me forcing myself into motion. To pass his open bedroom door and continue to my own.
I slip inside, finding sanctuary in the familiar four walls.
Three bone-white, the other painted black by whoever lived here before.
That’s where my bed is, pressed up against the coal dark wall, grey sheets Sol says match my eyes, but he’s full of that whimsical shit, especially when he’s drunk.
And he’s definitely drunk tonight, I hear it in the laughter filtering up from the garden, and I hope he’s happy. Sol doesn’t deserve to be sad.
Neither do you, boyo.
I push that voice away. Not because I hate it. Because I don’t, and my life would be easier if I did. Maybe. Either way, pushing an old friend aside leaves room for other things and I realise I’m hungry.
The urge to ignore it comes as naturally to me as breathing.
To go straight to sleep, or worse, downstairs to the cellar gym to burn through the last meal I ate until I’m empty and raw inside.
But I’m not as lacking as I was a week ago.
I go to the kitchen and make a sandwich like anyone else, and eat it standing at the counter while I scroll on my phone to stop myself peeping at Mal as he sits on the roof.
I have three hook-up apps on my phone and six acquaintances-with-benefits I can text.
I thumb through the numbers, the sandwich heavy in my stomach no matter how tight my head is screwed on.
None appeal to me. Same on the apps as I navigate faceless profiles and dick pics.
But I still feel like fucking someone’s brains out and the first lick of agitation ripples through me.
Why can’t anything be easy? Why am I even looking?
I don’t want a stranger in my bed and my inclination to get back in my car simmers below sea level.
But it’s what I do when I’m coming off the back of a mental storm. Winding up in someone’s arms smack bang in the eye of it is something that’s never happened before Mal. The thought of it happening again—not with him, with someone else…
No .
I push off the counter and walk away from that train of thought.
I go to my room. Like the door at my back, the window’s shut.
Probably locked. But I see Mal’s silhouette on the sloping tiles and I can’t tear my gaze from it.
I can’t sleep knowing he’s out there, and the frustration I’ve brought from the kitchen flares again.
I’m beginning to regret telling Jack I was okay with his brother in my space. Clearly I’m not. And it’s more annoying than Mal. Though, if he’s going to lurk on the roof all night that might change.
A pebble hits my window.
Tension floods me, but I force it down into the depths of my gut, where the food I’ve eaten still sits, waiting for its moment to ruin my day.
It’s him .
Mal.
And he’s throwing stones at my window.
The irony.
The cheek .
I’m not a fucking dog. If he wants my attention, he’ll have to do better than that.
Or so I think, but I find myself drifting to the window anyway. I open it as another pebble pings my way and whips inside, landing on my bed.
I lean out.
Mal’s still on the roof, obviously, but he’s minus the beer bottle now. It’s empty beside him with two others and it bothers me enough to draw me onto the uneven asphalt.
Gravel bites into my bare feet.
It’s silent, so I don’t mind it. I fall into a crouch in front of him in the small space and meet his blistering stare for the first time in a week, and only the third time in our entire lives.
Feels like more.
“You want my window wide open too?”
Mal appraises me through those thick, long lashes, sparks of light from the festoon bulbs in the garden glittering in his green eyes. “I thought you’d fallen asleep by the door. You stood there for ages.”
“How’d you know that?”
“Your shadow stopped dancing.”
He smiles a little, almost a smirk.
It’s fucking delicious and I press my feet harder against the stones to stop me smirking right back. Note the beer bottles again and match them to what I know about alcohol consumption and the pill bottle in the bathroom.
I know too much.
Jack made me look it up.
And now I hate him as much as anyone could ever hate a man like Jack Gallagher.
“I’m not much for dancing.” A sudden gust from the sea leaves goosebumps on my arms. “You’ll be disappointed if that’s what you dragged me out here for.”
“I didn’t drag you, Skylar.”
Heh. That’s what he thinks. But I’m not admitting it, or that the way his deep and lyrical voice wraps around my name makes me die a little inside, and it’s a good death.
The best. One I want to consume me over and over again until I’m nothing but a husk on this roof.
“Whatever. You wanna tell me why you’re really rattling my window? ”
For a glorious heartbeat, Mal’s smirk intensifies. Then it fades. “I wanted to apologise for being a dick the other day. I’m a blunt fucker. Speak without thinking. Sorry you got the brunt of that.”
He means it, I can tell. But his confession makes no sense. “I thought you were trained to think.”
“That’s the theory.” Mal extends one of his long legs, his tanned calf coming to rest inches from my foot. “But this place…being around Jack and Sol. I feel fifteen again and not much like a fucking soldier.”
“You don’t need to apologise for that.”
“No? Well, I’m doing it anyway. It’d make Vinnie happy.”
“Who’s Vinnie?”
Mal shakes his head and looks away, returning his focus to the ocean. But not before I see the grief there and I know in my heart that Vinnie is dead.
It’s a cue I could take to go back inside.
To leave Mal to his thoughts now he’s said what he wanted to say.
But my conscience stays me, and I tell myself it’s because he’s drinking on the roof.
That he could fall—or jump—and Jack would never get over it.
But the truth is, the hurt in his gaze proves impossible to turn my back on.
So I don’t.
I sit beside him instead and we watch the waves in silence for a while, ignoring the Friday night carnage directly below us.
Mal’s simmering presence is as addictive as I remember from that dodgy bar. His body heat inches from my skin, leaving me torn between leaning closer and shoving him off the roof.
“You’re a contradiction.”
The words rumble from him, startling me out of a daze, my head tipped back against the wall, heavy eyes half closed when I’ve never slept outside in my life.
I spare Mal a glance. “Contradiction, eh? How’s that?”
Slowly, like I’m a feral cat, Mal lifts an arm and taps two fingers to my temple. “When I look at you, I see a thousand things going on up there, but being around you is like a fucking Valium to me.”
“What we project isn’t who we are.”
“Right.” Mal’s hand drops. “But you do that shit on purpose.”
“Do I?”
“Yeah.”
He stares me down with zero doubt and it’s another cue to get the hell away from him. Or at least lean into the deflection I’m so good at. But I don’t want to prove him right. So I stay and shrug. “You don’t know me.”
“You don’t know me ,” he counters. “But I bet it didn’t take you long to figure out I’m an idiot who runs his fucking mouth.”
“And you think I’m the opposite?”
“Aren’t you?” That smirk returns. And somehow, he’s closer. Facing me more, wetting his lips again, an unconscious tic that has me taking a shallow inhale as words seem to drip from his lush mouth. “You ever say the first thing that’s on your mind?”
Recklessness steals over me. “Ask me and find out.”
Challenge flares in Mal’s deep stare.
He likes this .
Complex conversation.
I like it too—the light in his eyes eclipsing the dark. The intelligence that’s as hot as the scruff on his unshaven jaw, and the arch of his neck as he inclines his head in thought.
“All right then. What are you thinking about right now? No fucking cheating.”
That’s easy. And dangerous. But if it keeps him looking at me like this instead of at the sea with a gaze too broken for me to bear, I don’t give a shit.
My body gets the memo.
A stray lock of ash brown hair falls into Mal’s face. I catch it with my finger and tuck it behind his ear, hooked on the slow grin curving his lips. “I’m thinking , that I should probably remind myself that I’m never going to fuck you.”
There it is. The only truth I’m going to give him. No avoidance. No deflection. And he doesn’t blink—on some level, I knew he wouldn’t. He just leans forward, and so do I, and we’re closer than we were that sun-drenched morning at Saltkiss Bay.
My back is to the pub wall. Somewhere along the way, I’ve missed Mal rotating his body to face me, obscuring my view of the ocean, the Joker and the town sprawling out beyond, as if he’s shielding me from the real world.
He roots a hand to the wall by my head, closer still, rakish mischief lighting his eyes. “Whatever reminder you give yourself, you’ve proved my point.”
I don’t move. I don’t breathe. “Oh yeah? How’s that?”
“You’re saying we’re never going to fuck, and yet?—”
An earsplitting roar shatters the night. A thunderclap of sound shredding the quiet, jolting me from Mal, like a fist to my chest.
Motorbikes .
The realisation is a second, more visceral hit. One minute I’m seconds from kissing Mal, the next I’m consumed by the growl of the clattering engines, the scent of singed rubber, and a rush of adrenaline that sickens me to the pit of my weak stomach.
My back thuds against the wall.
Mal doesn’t notice. He rises to get a better look at who’s coming, steps towards the edge of the roof, like he’s going to spring right off.
Then his hand shoots out, steadying himself on the chimney stack.
He’s dizzy .
The booze. Standing up so fast. All the things that brought me out here in the first place. I watch the world waver beneath his feet. His hard blink as his pulse stumbles, blood pressure shifting.
It’s fleeting, but sharp enough to stop me melting away as I come upright, the bikes still snarling loud enough to swallow the night.
They reach the fork in the road that leads nowhere but the pub—the garden, and small car park around the back. I make myself face the riders, but I know who they are before the first boot hits the pavement.
No cuts. No patches and insignia plastered to their clothes like combat medals.
Not like the old days.
They’re not like the old days, but their presence rattles me anyway—always does, and it’s hard to look at them without wishing I was dead.
Mal starts moving again, stepping towards them.
Easy. Steady. Balance restored from whatever blip stalled him.
He hops down a level, landing like a cat, agile and strong, and it’s my moment to leave.
To abandon the madness we’ve found out here tonight and throw a wall up to whatever fucked-up reason these bikes have come here tonight for him .
But an age-old instinct has me looking beyond Mal to where the hogs have rumbled to a stop. To the leader as he reaches for his helmet, tattooed fingers curling to raise it.
There’s a split second before our eyes meet.
Then I’m gone.
Back in my room before I see his face. Window shut. Hands pressed over my ears, forcing silence on the dull roar in my head.
It’s a while before I find the smooth round stone in my bed.