17. Mal #2
My hands twitch with the need to rub at my chest. My sweating hands, like the beer bottle Skylar hasn’t touched since I invaded his evening with my fucked-up mood.
A roll of joyous bass pounds the walls from the bar next door.
More thunder, only this time I can’t be sure it’s real, and the bitter taste of anxiety rises in my throat.
It becomes my anchor, that acid searing my windpipe. The only tell I’m still upright as a run of off-beat thumps blurs my vision and my surroundings tilt with a subtle lurch, as if I’m standing on the softest sand in boots built for hard ground.
I need to sit.
I need to lie the fuck down.
I need to be anywhere but this stinking fucking bar, and I need it now.
Air too thick clogs my throat. Sweat trickles down my spine and my breath starts to shorten, letting me know this core-deep malfunction is digging in for the ride.
Skylar.
I can’t tell if he’s still looking at me, but it doesn’t fucking matter. I hear his voice and it’s too much. Those rough northern vowels that feel like silk when they shouldn’t. The deep timbre that eviscerates my common sense more than any booze ever has.
Go .
I let my misfiring body take over and push off from the bar, shoving through the cram of bodies, the noise, the stench of beer and sweat and unwashed men, until I reach the door and propel myself through it.
Outside, vicious wind hits me. Cold rain.
It should feel good, to be out here. To be free.
To be alone , away from Skylar’s piercing gaze, but I don’t feel anything but the lurching thump in my chest, the squeeze in my lungs, and the irrepressible urge to do something really fucking stupid to make it stop.
Like jumping out of a plane. Or climbing the wet roof to reach my open bedroom window.
My boots hit the floor, rainwater dripping from my hair. I shake it out. Regret it as the room tilts with more force than the bar downstairs and I stagger to my bed with a light head and legs that feel like I have an overloaded bergin strapped to each thigh and too much rhythm in my ears.
Nausea grips me. Vertigo. I lean forward, scrubbing my hands down my face, trying to ground myself in the sound of doors opening and closing and footsteps descending the stairs.
Sol.
Jack, maybe.
If it’s both of them, I’m alone up here, and I should feel relief. No one can see me like this. But I don’t feel relief. Not even a little, and I rake my face again, slower this time, forcing cleaner air into my lungs than I ever could downstairs.
Seconds pass. Then minutes. I have a grand old time kidding myself that was it—the crowds, the noise. Being jacked from the fight on the boat. This shit, it’s just spare adrenaline fizzing my blood. Textbook PTSD. Maybe both. Who cares? It’s all fixable. None of it’s permanent.
But as the minutes grow longer, even as time seems to stop, I know it’s not that.
That it’s never going to be that, because the physical fault lines in my body are inseparable from whatever psychological mess I’ve brought home from a decade of war and losing my best friend, and the only time I don’t feel like I’m no longer alive is when I’m with Skylar.
Fuck.
Fuck.
I need to leave—this room, this pub, this town. Before I can’t.
My phone is on the windowsill, where it always is when I can’t think of a reason to want it anywhere near me.
Below the contact details for Vinnie’s widow and Folk Whitlock is another number.
An open-ended job offer that will take me to the other side of the world and everywhere in between.
My pulse starts to slow as I tap out a message to an old mate—a coincidence, but I latch onto it anyway.
Fire the message into the ether and focus on drawing more air into my parched lungs.
Eventually, I find some semblance of calm. My body feels like my own again and I need some fucking food.
I rise from where I’ve fossilised on my bed with aching limbs and cracking joints, and venture out of my room. The flat is cool and quiet, save the muffled thrum of sound from the pub below. Even the thunder has stopped, if it was ever there at all.
It’s dark until I get to the living room. Find a low lit red lamp casting an eerie glow over the sleeping form of my brother, and a different pain lances my heart. One that matters more.
I crouch by the sofa and study Jack’s face, lines of pain carved into his rugged features, brows cinched together even in sleep, and my resolve to leave Porth Luck takes a bullet to the gut.
Not a fatal wound, but one I can’t ignore as guilt throttles my lungs, anger too—at the men I fought at sea when I should’ve been here to help my brother through whatever’s happened to him tonight.
If they come back, I’ll kill them.
Probably.
Definitely won’t fucking miss, a thought that takes hold as my brother stirs awake to find me looming over him with murder written all over my face.
I move back, giving him space, but in my addled state, I’m not fast enough, and his strong hand clamps around my wrist, confusion colouring his gaze.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.” I pull my arm back, but Jack doesn’t let go.
He uses the momentum to sit up and grabs my other arm. “What is it? What happened?”
“When? Tonight?”
Jack blinks hard. “I don’t know.”
“That should tell you I’m fucking fine then.” But I don’t pull back again, finding comfort in the tactile nature he didn’t have when we were young. “What about you? Music too loud?”
Jack releases one of my wrists to rub at his least favourite eye. “Aye. Rattles my skull.”
“Does it hurt?”
He shakes his head, slowly, the frown I’m still getting used to drawing his brows together again. “I don’t really know. Pain up here”—he taps his temple—“it’s fucking weird. Sometimes it hurts so much I stop feeling it.”
It shouldn’t make sense. Or fill me with fresh sickening grief to know he’s not in as much pain as he could be. But these things, I can’t control them. They happen anyway and all I can do is stop Jack scrubbing his eyeball clean off his face.
So I do it, knock his hand away, and it leaves us clinging to each other’s wrists as if we’re punctured life rafts drifting in the dark. I don’t know how to save him, or tell him I’m drowning too.
We let go.
I move to the kitchen while Jack puts himself back together and make toast and jam like our mam used to in the noughties. Brown bread, butter, and too much seedless raspberry gloop.
Jack comes up behind me and peers over my shoulder. “So you do know how to feed yourself.”
“Fuck off.”
He snorts and stirs decaf instant coffee in chipped mugs. We eat and drink together and it doesn’t feel as strange as everything else has since I came back here.
I start to believe I’ve got away with it. That he hasn’t noticed the flayed sensation still lingering in every fucking nerve. But not for the first time, my brother sees more than he seems to think he’s capable of.
He pushes his plate aside and rests his elbows on the table, old tattoo ink bleeding into his skin, his gaze weary, but keen enough to have me fixing my own on a knot of wood in the table top. “Have you been to see Vincent’s widow?”
Vincent . Vinnie. His real name was fucking Tom , but no one ever called him that. Except maybe his wife. “No.”
“Has anyone from your crew?”
“Raven did.”
“That’s the one that never smiles, right?”
“Raven fucking smiles.”
“Didn’t when I knew him.”
“That was a hundred years ago.” I don’t mean to snap, but it bubbles out of me anyway, and hits my brother square in whatever part of him he’s digging deep for to have this fucked-up conversation.
He flinches, like I’ve thrown a rock in his face, and that damn eye screws shut and stays that way.
I can’t look at him. I wrench my body from the bench seat I’ve claimed since I’ve lived here and take our plates to the sink. Put them in the dishwasher. Wash my hands for no reason at all.
Jack comes up behind me again and lays a careful hand on my shoulder. “You can’t pretend it didn’t happen.”
“Pretend what didn’t fucking happen?”
“Vinnie.”
So he does know his name. I don’t know why it matters, but it does.
“Mal, it wasn’t your fault.”
“How the fuck would you know?”
“Orion came to see me before he shipped out again.” Jack lets his hand fall. “I can’t remember everything he said?—”
“He had no fucking business saying anything.”
“He’s your friend.”
“Exactly.”
“Exactly what?” Jack frowns, genuine confusion creasing his face, but I see the buried deep part of him that wants to throttle me too. “You weren’t here and I couldn’t get to you. He came to make sure I had all the information I needed to take care of you.”
I laugh, bitter and cold, dragging the sound from the pit of my soul. “Fucking hell.”
“What? You hate it that much that your friends give a fuck about you?”
Yes.
No.
Yes. I picture my phone abandoned on the windowsill. Raven and Orion are deployed. I can’t talk to them. Can’t check they’re okay after the shitshow they survived too. Moth’s not, though, and I’ve been dodging his calls for weeks.
Months .
My vision clouds again, all the good work of Jack’s company undone by his gentle scrutiny, by him giving a shit too, and I need away from him as much as I needed to escape the bar.
Below us, a door opens and shuts and I hear the footsteps of two people on the stairs.
Sol.
Skylar .
Panic flares and my pulse rockets to the same clusterfuck from before, except it’s louder this time, and I realise the thunder I heard downstairs was something else. Something worse, and the noise becomes this insidious fucking thing I can’t think my way out of.
Jack’s blocking my path and I don’t have it in me to shove him aside.
I plead with him instead. “Let me go.”
“What?”
“ Move . I need out.”
It takes Jack longer than it should to compute what I mean, but understanding— empathy —floods his gaze the second he does, and he steps aside without question.
But not without parting words that make me wish he really had just throttled me. “Don’t run from this. Stay where we can reach you.”
We .
He means him and Sol, but it’s Skylar’s name that echoes in my head as I bolt from the kitchen and make it across the landing a heartbeat before whoever hit the staircase first steps out of the narrow space.
And let me tell you, I’m ten kinds of messed up right now, but my heart knows it isn’t fucking Sol.
I reach my room. Shut the door. The window calls to me, but my legs aren’t playing ball. They tremble like a deer on stilts. I slide down the door, my back to the old wood, and there I stay, my head between my knees, fighting to stay conscious—to stay present—as the universe tries to tear me apart.
It’s a while before I hear muffled voices on the landing. Then Skylar in the bathroom. Door lock clicking, water running. Tracking him as he emerges feels like a fucking lifeline. Then he pauses in the hallway and my blood pounds in my ears again.
Don’t leave .
Skylar doesn’t leave. He goes to his own room and shuts the door, and the sound stirs some life into me.
I heave myself off the floor and lose the clothes I took to sea, swapping my oil-stained combats for some sweatpants Jack gave me last week.
“To sleep in .”
Right. Sleep. I know I need it. Or at least some real rest, but I already know my brain and body are gonna work in tandem all night to keep me awake.
Physical bullshit entwined with memory and misplaced fear.
Yearning for the kind of peace I’ve only ever found with my lips fused to the soul next door.
It’s fucking weird that I miss him. But as I lay myself down, I’m distracted by the off-beat jolts in my chest, my neck, and my wrists, like trapped demons beating their fists against hell-proof glass.
Except, it’s not fucking hell-proof, unless the devil is trying to find its way home and I’m on the wrong side.
The flare eases, leaving me dizzy and sweating. I take a deep breath, a slow one, but it’s on me again before I find any solace. And that’s how it goes for the next however long. Rush and retreat, over and over, until all I can think about is walking into the raging ocean and never coming back.
Call Whitlock .
I think about it. I think about Jack too. Sol. Even Moth. But it’s not them who tether me.
It’s him .
Skylar.
In the next room.
I get up before I can make sense of what I’m doing. Barefoot, and still so dizzy I need the wall to keep me upright to the fucking door.
Out in the hallway, though, the narrow line of moonlight from Skylar’s room, from his open door, is the only guide I need.
I push it enough to stagger into his space. Snatch a breath of his fresh rain and eucalyptus scent as he sits up in the dark, bed sheets falling to his waist.
He doesn’t say anything. Just inclines his head at the bed beside him and my feet find their own way there.
I ease down, my breath catching in my throat, clawing at my lungs. I can’t ? —
“Shh.” Skylar slides his hand over my clammy bare skin, palm splayed over the mess still trying to rip its way out of my chest.
He presses down, grounding me while he plugs two fingers into the pulse point of my wrist.
I know he’s checking, counting. But even as my heart keeps misfiring, it doesn’t seem to matter anymore.
A slow breath escapes me.
I shut my eyes.
And for the first time in days, I fucking sleep.