15. Skylar
His kiss crashes into me like a storm-fuelled wave, his tongue in my mouth, my teeth at his lips, the slap of the roughed-up water echoing around us.
It’s wet and wild, and burns with the same frenetic need it did the first time, but sharper now, like an unsheathed blade. And it’s dangerous that I know how it’s going to feel when we have to stop, and yet I still want more.
My hands roam his bare skin. His claw at mine with bruising fingers, and the rocks behind me dig into my spine—like the first time we came together.
Back then, it was by chance.
Now, it’s a choice, and I have no regrets.
Not yet.
I want it too much. I want him , and I grip the back of his neck without caring anyone can walk up on us and I won’t notice. That he won’t notice either—because this heat, this fucking hunger, is stronger than us both.
Mal kisses me like he’s stealing a part of my soul and he’ll never give it back.
I let him.
I tear at him too, and I realise the water is saving us. If we were on dry land, we’d be naked already and then what? We’d fuck on the river bank? Go back to our lives after and pretend it never happened?
Mal’s low groan rattles me.
Dizzies me.
I bite his bottom lip, mauling it like I own it. He groans again, louder than we’d dare at home, and it’s laced with the same helpless desperation I’m starting to feel.
His grip on me loosens.
He pulls away and dunks himself under the water, leaving me reeling, my lungs like broken glass.
I heave myself onto the bank and move to where he dumped my bag. Inside, I find the towel I stashed with Mal’s meds before we left. Water. Snacks. Who do I think I am today?
A fucking idiot, that’s who.
I take the bag and slip through the undergrowth to another hidden spot—a sun trap beside a waterfall just big enough to be the perfect shower. I wash the lagoon from my body, aware of Mal a hot beat before his hands raze my skin, chasing water down my spine.
His mouth claims me again and I don’t fight it. We fall headlong into another wild kiss, but it’s tempered this time. As if he’s holding back, and he retreats again, pressing his forehead to mine. “Sorry. I’ll behave when we get home, I promise.”
I don’t want him to behave. I want everything he has, right here, right now, and again when we get home. But what I want and real life aren’t following the same trajectory.
We need to stop, before we can’t.
The waterfall seems to simmer down with our blood.
I take Mal’s hand and tug him away from it and back to where my bag lies abandoned in the sun. I pass him the towel. Mal takes it and draws it over my skin, my hair, my face.
It’s cute. And from him, unexpected. I return the favour, stealing one last kiss— just one —before I toss the towel on the ground and sink down onto it, awareness I’m fucking shook creeping over me.
Mal doesn’t seem much better off.
I blame the cold water, discounting the blazing sun, and pass him one of the trail mix bags we keep in the kitchen for Oscar. They’re a lot more interesting than what I brought for myself, but we are who we are. Mal doesn’t comment as I shove down two vanilla protein bars.
Then he does. “You suck dick like that?”
I chuck the wrappers in his face and push him, hard.
He laughs and flops onto his back, and I think I might love him for the levity he’s forcing on me.
The life . It’s so easy to lie down beside him.
Easier, even, than it was to coax him onto my bed.
The sun beats down on us, drying our wet clothes.
Mal curls his fingers around mine and the quiet we share heals wounds I’ve almost forgotten about.
It’s a while before he speaks for the first time in what feels like hours.
“I’m sorry about the other day.”
Fuck. Did I fall asleep? I don’t know. And I’m drowsy enough that I have no clue what he’s talking about either. “For what?”
“For pushing food on you. I shouldn’t have done it.”
I turn my head. “Why did you?”
“I wanted to know you better. And I’m a twat.”
I don’t argue with him there. And the rest of it isn’t a surprise. I’ve been here before with other people—with everyone, if I think about it long enough, which isn’t happening. Not today. “It’s not a secret, how I am. You could’ve asked someone else.”
Mal squeezes my fingers. “Not about you. Not about this . No one talks about it.”
I should be relieved, but the truth is it’d be easier if Jack or Sol had this conversation for me. Or if they’d never met me and Mal never knew my name.
The protein bar wrappers lie on the grass by Mal’s shoulder.
I can’t look at them.
Or him.
I sit up and drag my bag towards me, fishing out the iPad and my phone. “We need to pay that tax bill.”
Mal skates his palm down my spine, just once. Then he sits up too and takes the iPad from me. “ I need to pay it. Said I would.”
“You have eleven grand lying around?”
“How do you know it’s eleven grand?”
“I heard Sev shouting about it from the car park.”
Mal frowns. “I was closer. I didn’t hear that.”
“You were upside-down.”
“Aye, but—fuck it. Never mind.” He pokes at the iPad, frown deepening. “How do you work this thing?”
I reclaim it, and navigate the apps, trusting Sev has left everything we need. I’m still not sure Mal has the money we need to pay the outstanding bill, but whatever he’s pushed aside to glare at the iPad screen feels more important. “Are you getting much sleep these days?”
Mal cocks a brow, fingers tapping the grass. “More than you, I’d reckon.”
In the last twenty-four hours, maybe. But it’s not really what I’m asking. “What about the rest of it?”
“You wanna be a little clearer?”
“If you like.” I shrug and open the HMRC app, clicking through to the screen that shows the outstanding amount owed by Joker Brothers Ltd. “I’m asking how your head is doing. Your life just went through some big changes, and brains get bruised as much as the rest of us.”
“You can save your concern for Jack’s brain.”
“Jack’s brain is healed as much as it’s ever going to.”
“Aye, well. We all have our broken parts, Sky.”
Sky. I’ve punched people for calling me that, but it’s the second time the nickname has fallen so casually from Mal’s lips, and I like the feeling it leaves in its wake.
I don’t like the absent haze in Mal’s eyes, though.
I’ve put it there, and maybe it’s the other side of the push and pull that defines us, but I want him back.
I miss him.
The iPad needs a data toggle before I can go any further. I connect it to my phone, deleting the calls from Cam O’Brian. For the first time in a while, I don’t sense Mal’s gaze on me. I glance up to find he’s lying down again, eyes closed behind the arm he’s thrown over them.
It’s how he sleeps when he passes out on the couch, but he’s not asleep now.
I set the iPad aside and block the sun as I ease his arm away.
His eyes are tight, reddened from whatever emotion he’s battling, but he’s still so fucking gorgeous I can hardly stand to look at him.
I can’t stop looking at him. “I’m sorry too.”
Mal smiles without humour. “It’s okay, I probably deserve it.”
“Which part? The PTSD symptoms or me being nosy about it?”
A beat passes. Mal slides his hand around my hip, coming to rest at the base of my spine. Then he sighs. “All of it. And I don’t know if it’s PTSD. I’m not having nightmares and shit.”
“What about when you’re awake?”
“I zone out sometimes, and I’m not as alert as I’m used to being. Fucking Whitlock snuck up on me the other day, on his bike. I didn’t hear a thing.”
Whitlock.
Folk .
Before he came looking for Mal, I hadn’t seen him since I went with Oscar and Aras to watch him get married.
I lean into Mal’s touch. I don’t mean to, it just happens, and he responds by pulling me closer until I’m all but lying on him.
It’s a wicked distraction. His arms are sun-warmed and he smells good, and his mouth is right there.
Don’t.
I kiss him anyway, and he kisses me back, but it’s slow and sweet. Hypnotic, almost. I’m not sure how long it lasts, just that it does. And that I stay where I am when it’s over, tucking a lock of Mal’s hair behind his ear. “You feel jumpy at all? Like your body is still at war without you?”
Mal thinks about it, our legs tangled, bare feet entwined. “I don’t know. I feel something brewing inside me sometimes—like some distant fucking rage bearing down on me, but it’s hard to tell what’s in my head and what’s going on in here.”
He taps his chest, the first time he’s acknowledged what the pills in my bag are for. Then he lets his hand drop and I replace it with mine, my palm against the steady beat beneath his warm skin.
Steady for now .
I know it skips sometimes, I felt it when he was asleep on the sofa beside me a few weeks ago. I felt it again the night we first kissed and it’s bothered me since.
It bothers me still. “What’s your diagnosis?”
Mal cracks his eyes open. “You don’t already know?”
“You’ve asked me that before.”
“Not about this.”
No. About Sol. But if he thinks I ask intrusive questions for a good time, I don’t know what to fucking say. “I know you had suspected atrial fibrillation when you got hurt overseas. Jack asked me what it was.”
“What else did he tell you?”
“Nothing. He talked to the soldiers who came here alone—they said he had to.”
Mal rolls us, so he’s on top of me. Then he hides his face in my neck, and it’s as close as we’ve ever been. But it’s not sexual this time. It’s a different need and I let it happen. I thread my fingers into his still damp hair and rub the base of his skull, closing my eyes to his answering groan.
We stay like that for long minutes, and I accept he’s probably done talking about a moment in his life that took more from him than I likely know about. I accept the fear snaking around my heart at how easy it is to be so intimate with him and shift us a little, so he can lean on me harder.
Mal takes a slow breath. Then he raises his head so we’re face-to-face again. “I don’t like thinking about Jack living through that. I know how it felt when it happened to me.”
“He was okay once he knew you were awake and talking.”
“I wasn’t for a while. I don’t remember being extracted…someone carried me onto the chopper and I woke up in Germany.”
“That’s where you were when they came to find Jack. He would’ve got on a plane if they’d have let Sol or me come with him.”
Mal seems to realise how entangled we are. How his weight pins me to the ground. He adjusts us, propping himself up on his elbow, messing with my hair with his other hand. “I’m glad we didn’t meet like that.”
Right. Because how we did meet was so much better?
Was for him .
Maybe. I don’t know where his head was at that night. I don’t know where his head’s at now , and I realise he hasn’t answered the question the nurse in me wants him to. But I don’t know how to lead him back to that. If I can live with doing it when he’s already giving so much.
But in the end, I don’t have to lead him anywhere. He traces the ink lines on my wrist and gives me the good news.
“I still have AFib. It’s never gone away. They said I’d probably end up with the other one too.”
“POTS?”
“Aye, that’s the one. And I think they’re right, seeing as I can’t take a hot shower longer than a couple of minutes without passing the fuck out.”
I file that away with the symptoms I’ve already seen in Mal too many times to discount. “How do you feel about that?”
His gaze flashes to mine and he jabs a finger at my face. “Damn, you’re good.”
“At what?”
“Lots of fucking things, if any of my daydreams are true, but right now you’re giving me a masterclass in deflection.”
“It’s not a masterclass, Mal. Anyone can do it.”
“Hmm.” Mal brings his chest down on mine, his mouth so close I can almost taste his lips. “Say my name again and I might let you get away with it.”
“What will you do if I don’t?”
“ Mis behave.”
I don’t need the emphasis, or the subtle rumble in his voice, to know he means it. But it’s a threat I like, so I say nothing, daring him to do his worst, and he blows my mind with another kiss that feels like he’s committing my mouth to memory.
And maybe he is, because this is definitely not happening again.
It can’t.
We can’t.
Jack’s on my mind. Sol. They need Mal. But I’m as weak now as I was the night I met Mal.
And I kiss him back anyway, accepting the just this once mantra that began in the water is going to have to claim the whole day, or however long we spend here.
I let my hands wander, learning the map of his bare back—the bumps and ridges of muscle, and the rough texture of a dozen scars.
The flex of his hips as he responds to my touch and heady energy builds between us, despite the effort we’re both putting into taming it.
An ache blooms in my groin and I feel his dick hard against my leg.
Feel it in my hand as self-control abandons me and I palm him over his clothes.
Rigid heat greets me, and Mal tears his lips from mine to ravage my neck. To knock my hand away and grind against me .
Fuck.
Fuck .
It’s too good. I need more. He needs more, I feel it in every bite of his lips and press of his dick against mine.
I feel it in the thunder of my own heart and the lack of concern for his as the soft thrum in my blood becomes a wild wall of noise.
That noise, though. It doesn’t last. The fire between us burns something fierce, but a strange sense of peace wraps around it like the sweet smoke from Sol’s incense sticks. Like warmth seeping into dead limbs, bringing them back to life.
Even my breath stills.
Mal’s body bearing down on me begins to feel like an anchor, one I grab onto with both hands as his calloused palms sweep my torso, sliding over my abs, up my ribs, and to my chest, as if they belong there.
As if he’s mine.
And I’m his.
It’s so fucked-up and wrong, but for the longest time it feels so right. The sun has dipped behind a cloud by the time we break apart.
Mal has eyes that’ve seen a different world to mine. He’s strong, even if he hasn’t felt it since he’s come back to Porth Luck. But as he stares at me with a wrecked gaze, and I stare right back, I know we’ve made a mistake.
He knows it too, though there’s no regret in the slow sigh he heaves as he sits up. “We need to pay that bill.”
I hum my agreement and reach for the iPad, coming upright as the first raindrop hits my face.
Mal passes me a bent and weathered bank card that’s barely in date. He makes the payment without blinking—turns out he has ten grand lying around.
I spot the rest.
Then he hauls me to my feet, wrapping his hand around my jaw one last time. “We need to go home. Before I fuck you in the rain and never let you go.”