13. Mal
It was Oscar who slid the water in front of Skylar, the only soul in the room who noticed the quiet showdown I forced on my housemate. And I’m not surprised it was him. I’ve come to learn the biggest man in the room is the most observant, even when Skylar’s at the table.
And he’s a fucking vault. Since that night, he’s brought Aras to see me three mornings in a row without mentioning it, and I’m more grateful for that than he’ll ever know.
I’m grateful for him . I don’t know him as well as I want to yet, but everyone breathes easier when Oscar’s around.
Even Jack.
Even me, as I sit with my brother, Oscar, and Aras at a picnic table in the sun, watching from a distance as Sol and Sev bicker about something in the cove while my mind spins between my loose plan for the day and the pining in my heart no pill can fucking cure.
He’s at work.
Skylar.
Has been since yesterday afternoon and I fell asleep on the couch in the early hours of the morning, waiting for him to come home.
For what, I don’t know. We haven’t spoken since I left the dinner table last weekend. But I’ve seen him, and I know he’s seen me. I feel his eyes on me sometimes, when we cross paths in a crowded room. Sometimes I even imagine I feel his breath feather my skin as we pass like ships in the night.
Others, I know it’s goosebumps from the meds that make my blood run cold. The ones I’d happily toss in the sea if I thought I’d survive sharing a bathroom with Skylar without them. I wasn’t fucking around when I told him it was him who makes my heart thump so hard I think I’m dying.
“Mal?”
Aras has the sweetest little voice. I drag my gaze from where it’s meandered to the frothy ocean and give him my full attention. “Yeah?”
“Why did you jump from the plane the first time? Were you looking for the shoe you dropped like Jack?”
He asks me this nonsense from where he’s sitting on Jack’s knee, eating toast while Oscar records the catch he and Sol brought in this morning.
Jack grins and I love it. My brother wasn’t always as serious as he seems to be now, and I miss the idiot he used to be.
Maybe that’s why a gut punch falls from my soul. Who fucking knows? Regardless, I tell Aras the truth. “I jumped because Jack did, and I wanted to be just like my brother.”
Jack’s smile softens. “You never told me that.”
“You never asked.” I drain the coffee mug he passed me a while ago, I’m getting used to this decaf shite. “Besides, if I hadn’t followed you around my whole life, I’d have wound up in prison.”
Aras’s stare widens.
Oscar says something to him in a language I don’t know. Then to me he says, “You are joking, yes?”
Not really. But if it helps Oscar, I can pretend. “Aye. It was the circus for me if I didn’t follow Jack.”
“You are a clown, my friend?”
“Nah, but I can walk on my hands for fucking miles.”
Oscar snorts.
Aras wants to see, so I show him the only party trick I have that doesn’t involve death or the place my imagination has taken me way too often since I kissed Skylar.
I’m still upside down when I sense him—Skylar, not Aras. I know where Aras is. I can hear him laughing from his dad’s broad shoulders. Just like I see my brother shaking his head at me as I place my palms, one after the other, on the sun-warmed brick wall I fixed a few days ago.
Skylar’s presence is something else. Like mist rolling in from the sea, tickling my skin, my heart doing the skip that scares me when I’m alone.
I flip down from the wall, landing as he pauses on his way inside, sunlight catching his hair, his gaze skewering me where I stand.
His prolonged gaze.
It’s the first time he’s truly looked at me in days, and I’ve somehow forgotten how it feels to have those pewter eyes pinned on me and not have a clue what he’s thinking.
He’s tired, that much I do know.
Jack sees it too, and speaks before I can, as blunt as I was bound to be. “You work too much.”
Skylar glances his way, breaking our stare off. “Says you.”
Touché. Jack works every day—says he has to or he’ll forget how.
And Sol’s job is a way of life that has no days off.
But Sol can catch a nap on the boat when he’s not being rammed by other fishermen, and Jack only has to walk upstairs when he’s done for the day.
Skylar’s the only one with a forty-minute commute after a fourteen-hour shift.
Sixteen hours .
Right. Because I felt the moment he left as acutely as the moment he came home.
Jack has no argument to Skylar’s retort. He says goodbye to Aras and Oscar and comes to me, his eyes still warm with my quota of nice things for the week. “Are you growing this dodgy beard because of me too? I’m not sure it’s working out for you.”
He rubs his knuckles on my scruffy jaw, inviting me to shove him. But I can’t do it, not now, or ever again. I grab him instead, kiss his temple, and call him a name that would turn our mam in her grave, and I don’t know who’s more surprised, me or him.
Either way, Jack has a pub to run. He goes inside. Oscar scoops up Aras to take him to school. And me? I stare at Skylar, because why the fuck not? And because I love it when he stares right back.
Oscar leaves. I’m aware of that much. And Sol and Sev are still bellowing at each other on the boat.
Beyond that there’s nothing but blond hair and grey eyes, and the discordant thud of my pulse in my ears.
But that’s fading, and I belatedly realise it’s as much from tipping myself upside down as from Skylar’s simmering gaze.
When did I get so slow?
The easy answer is when I met him.
The real one is layers of an existence I don’t want to look back on just yet, and with Skylar so close, it’s not that hard to ignore the reality that adjusting to civvy life is fucking tough.
“You do work too much.” I echo my brother’s sentiment.
Skylar says nothing. His phone buzzes with a call, and he ignores that too, until he doesn’t.
He pulls it out of his pocket.
Cam flashes on the screen and a muscle tics in his jaw.
“You gonna take that?”
“No.” He kills the buzz and pockets the phone. I steel myself for a brutal exit, but he draws a little nearer and leans in, like a dare, teasing me with his close proximity. “How are you feeling?”
“Why are you asking me that?”
“Why not?”
“There’s no fucking need.”
“All right.”
He moves to step back.
My hand snaps out to snatch his wrist before I can contemplate what the fuck I think I’m doing. “How are you feeling?”
I’ve fought too many men to ever count. For fun, to the death, and everywhere in between. I know when someone’s about to deck me, and I brace myself for the impact, willing to take it and however many come after for as long as I get to keep my hands on Skylar.
But the hit doesn’t come. Whatever urge Skylar has to thump me, he suppresses it. Shoves it down, away , and the bland smile that sucks the life from him finds purchase in his features instead. “I’m tired,” he says. “So get the fuck off me and let me go to bed.”
Tempting, but as hard as I try—which isn’t all that hard—I can’t loosen my grip. If anything, I haul him closer, my lips at his ear. “You’re not going to bed. You’re going to that fucking torture chamber you call a gym.”
“So?”
“So don’t.”
Skylar almost laughs, but there’s zero humour in his gaze as he wrenches his arm, fighting to break my lethal hold on him.
“Don’t lecture me on harmful behaviour. You think I don’t see you running half marathons every fucking day?
You ever stop and think what it’d do to Jack if you keeled over at the side of the road and never came home? ”
“As much as he stopped to think about me before he stepped in front of mortar fire.”
Skylar hisses through his teeth. “Let go of me.” This time I do, but he doesn’t step off. He stays where he is, breathing as hard as I am. Like we’ve just fucked instead of whatever the hell this is. “What are you doing today?”
I just laugh.
He fills in the blanks, shaking his head. “Wait here.”
“The fuck for?”
“Just do it.”
Skylar breaks away from me and ducks inside, taking the madness of his presence with him. And now he’s gone, I take a breath that actually fills my fucking lungs, but my head spins like I’ve just rolled off the waltzers at Killinchy fair.
Skylar, man. He has me messier than eight pints with Vinnie, and I swear to God, it’s getting worse.
There’s no other explanation for why I do exactly as he says and wait when I have shit I need to do today while Sol’s on dry land, working on boat maintenance with Sev tearing him a new one for reasons I’m not privy to.
At least, I’m not until Sev storms up the ramshackle jetty and hurls an iPad at me. “You need to deal with this.”
I catch the tablet. Then I catch Sev too, who can fuck all the way off if he thinks he’s chucking something in my face and getting away with it.
You’re still salty he threw that fritter at Skylar.
Not the time, Vin. Not the time.
I haul Sev back to me. “If you want my help, I’m gonna need more than that.”
“Your help ?” Fire burns in Sev’s brown eyes. “Are you fucking joking?”
No. But I don’t need a decade of elite military training to know more words are going to make this worse. So I wait, letting my silence simmer Sev down, doing the work my big fat mouth has become incapable of since—well, since ever, to be honest.
Sev snarls like an angry badger.
Then he sighs, frustration bleeding from every pore. “You’re not helping me by taking responsibility for your own business. I don’t work for you. I don’t have a stake in this hell hole.”
“You want mine?”
“Fuck, no. I want this to work , for all of you. So I can go back to my real life and stop worrying about your overdue tax bill.”
“What tax bill?”
Sev jabs the iPad screen. “It’s been overdue since last December. I’ve told Sol a thousand times.”
“Does Jack know?”
“I don’t know.” Sev shrugs. “Maybe. If Sol’s told him.”
“Why haven’t you?”