10. Mal
Sol and I part at the top of the stairs. He banks left, pausing at Jack’s open door, before he disappears into the bathroom they share.
I go right with every intention of hitting the shower before I spend the rest of the night staring at the ceiling, but another open door pulls me up short.
Skylar’s.
It’s never open, even when he’s home. Even when he’s not.
But it’s open now, and the sight of it has me frozen in the hallway like I’m fourteen again and creeping into my dad’s old flat up the road.
Except, back then, my pulse didn’t jump into my throat, cutting off my air supply while my heart did that equilibrium-stealing back flip it’s only ever done around him .
Skylar.
It’s how I know he’s home. That he’s awake. And despite the tug I feel to go to him, I’m probably the last person he wants to see.
Go to bed.
Or at least to the shower. But the two steps it takes me to reach the bathroom fast become four.
Five.
Six.
I breach Skylar’s doorway. He’s on his bed, AirPods in his ears, the white of them stark against the dark hood that slips down as he sits up a little to pin me with a stare I can’t read.
He doesn’t say anything.
Neither do I.
But my body betrays me again and I step into his room uninvited, padding across his carpet.
I crouch by the bed and pluck an earphone from his ear. Fit it to my own, accepting he might deck me for my trouble.
But he doesn’t do that either. He watches me absorb the angry music thrashing down the tiny speaker with those pewter eyes and his lips stay firmly closed.
“Metal?” I cock my head. “You don’t seem the type.”
“What type is that?”
His gravelly northern voice gets to me. I don’t know where he’s from. I don’t know anything about him except what he lets me see, and I sense the trap in his flat question. In his dull stare. I’m about to fuck up and we both know it.
“I don’t know. Like a biker, maybe. But Whitlock doesn’t seem much for all that either.”
Skylar’s gaze darkens. My heart thuds a distorted beat, waiting for whatever nightmare lurks inside him to spill out.
But those forever seconds don’t last. He draws a breath and wipes his face clean of any emotion that isn’t vague irritation.
“What do I care about Folk Whitlock? And why the fuck are you in my room?”
Truthfully, I don’t know. I’m tired, my brain is overfull of rival fisherman ramming Sol’s boat, and Skylar does something to me I haven’t learned to live with yet.
I take the little white earphone out and pass it back without answering the question. Our fingers brush and a different shockwave rattles me, spurring me into action before I regain enough faculties to just fucking stop .
His hands, his arms, the exposed skin of his neck…
He’s fucking freezing .
“Why are you so cold?”
Skylar arches a brow. “Why’s your hand on my throat?”
Because it belongs there. And it’s not the unvetted thought that throws me for a loop, I’m used to it around Skylar. It’s Vinnie’s laugh—the belly chuckle that filled a room. A chopper. A ditch. Whatever fucked-up place we found ourselves—if he laughed, we all did.
Laughing at you now, brother .
Lucky him. I take a sledgehammer to his ghost, a metaphorical one, and focus on the cool skin beneath my palm. The flat stare drilling a hole in the side of my head.
Skylar .
I’m as obsessed with him as I am terrified of Vinnie forcing his way into my conscience, and I’m not boneheaded enough to believe the two phenomena aren’t connected. I just can’t handle them both at once.
Awkward silence doesn’t worry me. I let Skylar eviscerate me with his eyes while I use his unexplained body temp to calm myself down. And it works, until my hand slides from Skylar’s neck, I move to stand—to escape how it feels to lose that contact—and black spots dance in my vision.
I root a fist to the carpet, cursing the deafening whoosh in my ears, fury my only company for however long it takes my blood pressure to reset its stupid fucking self. However long it takes me to realise the sole reason I haven’t toppled over is Skylar gripping my elbow.
It should annoy me more that I’m not alone right now to deal with this shit in peace. But despite the cold fire of his touch tonight, there’s warmth in that gesture too. Whether he likes it or not, Skylar’s a natural caregiver, even for me.
The roaring in my ears fades. It leaves me with that bolstering touch and I don’t pull away from it. I don’t want to. So I let it sit to see what he’ll do, and eventually, he just fucking sighs.
“You wanna take a seat?”
“Where?”
He lets go of my elbow and shifts back, making room for me on his bed. “Right here. Before you keel over.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re a liar, a worse one than your brother.”
“Jack doesn’t lie.”
“Nah, he just grunts. Now take a fucking seat.”
I get a kick out of the faint aggression lacing the words. Of the fleeting glimpse of who he really is. And I’m too selfish to walk away from the best and worst idea anyone’s ever had.
Far too fucking selfish.
I take that seat on his bed and try not to roll my eyes as Skylar plugs two fingers into my pulse point. “Worried I’ll pass out and you’ll be stuck with me till morning?”
“I’m already stuck with you.”
“Not for long.”
“Going somewhere?”
“Not yet, but it’s not like I’m putting down roots here.”
Skylar’s gaze is absent—he’s listening, counting. Whatever he needs to do to check I’m not dying. Then he glares at me for real. “You have roots here. Jack and Sol just got you back.”
“And they know I’m not going to be here forever. I fucking hate this place.”
“Why?”
My boots are clean, I rinsed them outside. But so’s the carpet. I bend to unlace them one-handed, giving Skylar my back while I contemplate his question. “We came here so my dad could pretend our mam never existed. It still feels like that, even though he’s long gone.”
“Your dad’s not dead.”
“Is to me.”
I get my boots off and rise, taking them to the door, banishing them to the hallway that’s as dark as Skylar’s bedroom.
It’s autopilot to go back to his bed, and it shouldn’t be. He doesn’t want me there for company, and I don’t need to be there for my fucking health.
But here I am anyway, and he doesn’t comment. Or ask me about my loser of a dad. He tucks his little white earphones into a case and tosses them on the bedside table—beside the stone I flicked at his window a few weeks back.
He kept it .
To chuck at my head another day, perhaps, but I’m all right with that.
Skylar stretches out again, further away from me this time. He stares at me a long moment before he inclines his head to the space beside him. “You can lie down if you want.”
I do want. But not so we can glare at the ceiling together and talk about my dad. My brother. Or my non-existent plans for the future. I want to warm him up. I want to press my lips to his neck and taste his fucking skin.
Not happening .
And as I ease down beside him, I almost believe it.
“Can I ask you something?”
I turn my head. Skylar’s on his side, his face close enough to torture me. “You want permission? Or are you gonna ask anyway?”
“What’s happening on Sol’s boat?”
I blink. Not because I’m surprised the first question was a figure of speech. More that I assumed he already knew about Sol’s trouble with a thousand angry fishermen. To be fucking sure, I check. “You don’t already know?”
“He hasn’t told anyone.”
“What makes you think he’s told me?”
“Why else would you be on his boat for days at a time? Jack already told me the sea makes you sick.”
“When I was eleven.”
Skylar raises that brow again. “You didn’t go for the fish.”
There’s no place for denial in the way he’s looking at me.
On his bed. In the dark. Our faces inches apart.
But I still can’t be sure how much he knows.
How much I can tell him without betraying Sol, or compromising what I’m going to do to keep him safe.
“Sol needs fresh eyes on something. I have time, so I offered mine.”
Skylar scoffs, and it’s not a nice sound. It’s bitter. Cold. Like his gaze is fast becoming. “Don’t talk around the question. It’s worse than lying.”
Is it? I get the feeling he’s going to hate me regardless, or at least hate whatever shit comes out of my mouth, so I take a chance and go with the truth.
“All right then. I’m not going to tell you what I was doing on Sol’s boat.
I’m going to ask you to trust it was a good fucking reason and leave it at that. How’s that?”
Silence stretches out, infiltrating every scrap of space between us. For an endless moment, Skylar’s flinty expression doesn’t change. Then something in him seems to relax, and he shrugs again. “Better than bullshit. But for the record, I don’t fucking trust you.”
“And you let me in your bed?”
“ On my bed. And it was that or peel you off the floor when you fell on your face.”
“Wasn’t going to happen.” Hasn’t since the night Vin died. I haven’t let it , and I won’t. This shit might be permanent, but it’s not going to win. It’s not going to take anything else from me.
“Are you taking your meds?”
My vision clears, releasing me from a daze of blurry introspection I don’t need, honesty still throttling me in its grip. “Not often.”
Skylar’s pewter stare narrows with his unspoken retort.
I elaborate, “They make it worse. I’d rather spin out from time to time than be freezing cold my whole fucking life.”
Slowly, Skylar reaches out and skates a palm down my arm. “You never feel cold to me.”
Because he’s made of fucking ice himself?
No. I see the warmth in him, even if he doesn’t want me to. But the coolness still lingering in his touch, even as the contact sends fire to my blood, has all kinds of instincts starting a war in my chest.
I want to lay my mouth on him.
That’s a given.