8. Mal #2
For the second time, I let him , because his hand wrapped around my wrist is a whole other seismic shift.
He tugs me down and I don’t even try to resist.
I don’t want to.
I mean, I need to know what in the ever-loving fuck is going on in this fucking place. And I’ll find out however hard Skylar tries to stand in my way. But right now, I need this feeling more.
His fingers curled around me.
His palm pressed to my pulse point.
The droll look he gives me before he lets go. “Sol’s fine. Just some bruising from hitting a crate when he fell.”
“When he “slipped”?”
“Yeah.”
“Why’s he lying about it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you fucking ask?”
“ No , because checking he wasn’t seriously hurt was my priority. And it’ll always be my priority. Getting in his face isn’t going to help me with that.”
He’s right. I know he’s right. Skylar’s a medic— like Orion . But that’s his role in Sol’s life, not mine. That I don’t have a clue what my role is anywhere right now is beside the fucking point.
I let it go.
For now .
Skylar goes back to the TV.
I go back to fighting the urge to stare at him and try to tune out the world news headlines.
Burning war zones make me think of Vinnie.
Of how I wasn’t conscious enough to bring his body home when I’d always promised him I would.
They make me miss him. Because I’m fucking this up, all of it, and I know he’d tell me how to fix it.
Skylar changes the channel. It jars me. How messed up is it that the damn TV blowing up in my face would startle me less?
More messed up than I want to think about. A vintage comedy fills the screen. I force my attention to it, but the figures blur, the sound a low hum of nothing, and I realise I’m sinking into the couch.
Instinct has me fighting it, and frustration curls my hands into fists. I don’t need to be battle ready. Whatever shit Sol’s got going on, it can wait till morning. He’s safe in his bed. Jack is too. So why the hell can’t I turn my brain off?
Skylar’s hand finds my forearm. His thumb skates over my skin. “Take off your boots.”
“Hmm?”
“Your boots. You don’t need to sleep in them here.”
“I’m not fucking sleeping.”
“I know.”
He knows .
As in, he sees more to my words than I actually said. And the thing is…he’s not wrong. So what’s the point in pretending otherwise?
I toe off my boots. This place is pretty neat for an all-male household. I think about getting up to tuck them away. But Skylar’s still holding my arm and I can’t make myself move.
So I leave the boots and go back to the push and pull between becoming one with the couch and staying awake forever.
The couch starts to win. I sink lower, and eventually my head tips sideways, using my arm as a pillow.
“There you go.”
Skylar .
His voice is distant. I lose the warmth cocooning my forearm, and I fucking mourn it.
More than that, a weird sense of panic overcomes me without that magical touch.
I breathe slow and deliberate, like I can trick my brain into relaxing, but it’s not happening.
Not without him and the heat dancing between us like static.
My eyes fly open and I sit up, seeking him out before I think to wonder what I expect from him when I find him.
He’s not there and my mind is busy again in an instant.
No stillness, no rest. I’m alone and I hate it.
I miss my friends. I miss sleeping with a loaded gun under a scrunched-up flak jacket, and just like that, I’m on alert again, coiled tight even though I don’t move.
I don’t breathe , until Skylar comes back with a pillow and drapes it on the arm of the couch.
“For your neck.”
“My neck’s fine.”
“Smother yourself with it then.”
In the dim light of the room, it’s hard to tell if he’s joking, but I don’t mind.
Harsh humour suits me. I find comfort in it as much as I do the fresh rain and eucalyptus saturating the pillow he’s brought me from his own fucking bed, even if I’m annoying him enough right now for him to wish I was six feet under.
He sits down again, closer this time, kicking his feet over the other end of the couch. His arm lands mere inches from mine and goosebumps prickle my skin. The good kind—the warm kind, and the hyper-vigilance plaguing me begins to fade.
Quiet becomes peace.
I surrender, and what I thought was pain becomes the sweetest fucking ache.
I fall asleep on the couch with Skylar.
Not with him. But knowing he’s there. Knowing he’s gone the second I wake up. That everyone is. Because it’s the morning and I’ve slept longer than I have in…fuck, I don’t even know.
My eyes are still closed.
I open them and take in the living room.
The couch I’ve sacked out on and the pillow saving my neck from the mother of all cricks.
The note on the coffee table is in handwriting I don’t recognise, but I fucking know isn’t Skylar’s.
Breakfast in the fridge.
Definitely not Skylar. But it’s not Jack’s either, and I doubt it’s Sol’s. Fella reads like a professor, but he doesn’t write that well.
I take the note to the kitchen and open the fridge. It’s not my first rodeo with an action that should be mundane, but the top shelf of the thing still freaks me out.
Yogurt.
Protein shakes.
Cream cheese.
The way they’re deliberately jumbled, as if whoever put them there doesn’t even want themselves to know how stark their presence is.
White food .
A shiver slinks down my spine, and not the hot kind I usually get around Skylar. The kind that wipes my brain of functional thought. No. This is something different and it’s an effort to tear my gaze from the vanilla ghouls leering at me from that top shelf.
Thankfully, when I do, I find another note to distract me. Signed this time, from Oscar with a big fat kiss at the end.
Better today than tomorrow, Oscar X
The note is on top of a mackerel sandwich, and as I slide it from the fridge and glance around the kitchen, I see the evidence of whoever made it.
A clean pan by the sink, breadcrumbs on the chopping board.
The scent of cooking lingers in the air and it bends my brain a little.
I’m used to sleeping amongst chaos. In the field, on base, and crammed into a roaring aircraft with another bloke using my balls as a pillow.
But here…until last night, every fucking sound has kept me awake, so it makes no fucking sense to me that I’ve slept through Oscar and whoever else going about their morning around me.
Unless Skylar’s cured me of an insomnia I’d come to accept was permanent.
I’m almost convinced, but despite the sorcery he’s inflicted on me since we met, I don’t believe in magic.
I believe in Skylar’s broken gaze the night we met and my own misery.
I believe in the harm a man can do with a fucking machine gun.
I don’t believe Skylar’s the cool, easy motherfucker he wants the rest of the world to see, and the kitchen starts to piss me off.
Brooding, I take the sandwich to the living room and eat it on the couch still rumpled from the coma I fell into at his unspoken bidding. Can’t deny, it’s fucking good. But I’m restless when I’m done, the need to move creeping over my skin like ants on roller-skates.
The shower smells like Skylar and his blue shower gel.
Like clockwork, my dick notices, standing to attention in one snatched breath, but I ignore it and drench myself in cold water, chasing any endorphin I can find that doesn’t end in me picturing my housemate doing unspeakable things to me.
That doesn’t end in regret we didn’t fuck all our troubles away that night before I found out who he was.
Other way round.
Aye. But thinking about it does nothing to calm the thrum in my blood. I need out of this room—out of this fucking house. This town. Whatever. I just need out , and for the entire time I’ve been here, that’s meant a run too basic to calm me the fuck down.
But that’s not happening today. My chest is too tight, my breath too short, and however hard I’ve tried to ignore this shit since it became my new normal, having a heart attack at the side of the road in Porth-fucking-Luck isn’t on my bucket list.
It doesn’t leave me many options, but as I’m dressing in the clothes someone’s dried and retrieved from the cellar for me, I spy Sol in the distance, mooching up the road by the harbour wall, and I’m waiting for him by the time he reaches his moored boat in the Joker’s private cove.
His damaged boat, beyond the dent in the hull Oscar mentioned a few weeks back. “Hit another fucking iceberg?”
Sol jumps, fists raised to defend himself. Then he sees me and relaxes. “Christ, Mally. You trying to kill me?”
“Nope. Looks like someone is, though.”
Sol snorts and hops onto his boat to join me, agile as a fucking goat, even with his sore ribs. Not slipping even a little bit on the sea water clinging to the deck. “What are you doing out here? You hate boats.”
“Do I?”
“You used to,” he amends. “When I told my old man you were coming home, he wouldn’t stop talking about that time you puked on his feet on a crab run.”
“Amazing. He still gambling?”
Sol flinches. “Not so much these days.”
“Why’s that?”
“Your brother paid his stump and guilt is a good motivator, even for an addict like my dad.”
“Jack paid his debts?”
“Yeah.” Sol’s eyes haze with emotion. “I didn’t have the money and my mum was going to lose the house. Jack fronted the cash before he got deployed that last time. I took a job on a trawler to pay him back…it’s where I was when he got hurt.”
I match that with what Skylar’s already told me about a fucked-up time I don’t want to remember. My own guilt is razor wire around my heart, but I push it away, saving it for the next time I’m alone in the dark with nothing to do but hate myself. “No debts since?”
“Only small ones. Kings wrote most of theirs off when the club went legit, and I got him banned from the betting shops. It’s only the card games I need to worry about now.” Sol’s gaze flicks to the pub behind us. “Buying this place helped with that.”