22. Skylar #2
“You didn’t,” Mal agrees. “But they deserved it. And what’s the alternative? You pay for their waste disposal? You got that kind of money, Sol?”
“I’ve never had any money. You know this.”
Mal’s hard edges soften. Like they do when we’re alone and I’m not antagonising the hell out of him because I like his sharpness just as much. “Course I do. Why do you think this pisses me off so much? Aside from the fact I love the shit out of you?”
Sol grins, the haze of too many Luckstable ciders returning to his bronze-flecked eyes. “You love me, Mally?”
“For my fucking sins.” Mal pushes off the interior door and embraces Sol with more warmth than I think I’ve seen from him, like, ever.
Then he exits through the back door without so much as glancing my way and I can’t for the life of me figure out why it makes me want to punch things.
“It’s not his fault either.”
I blink. “Whose fault?”
“Mal’s. Couch wanting to torch this place isn’t new. He’s been threatening it since he won big on the pools, so he can buy the land and build holiday lets on it. It’s me that’s made him want to do it more.”
A familiar story, one that’s monotonously shit.
Not with Couch or with Mal, but with other rich cunts who see the tourist money in Porth Luck and want it all for themselves.
A hard-won part of me hates that Mal did something so violent to combat it, but the rest of me knows it has to be this way.
That it’ll always be this way until someone fucking dies.
That’s the life, right?
Wrong. It’s not my life anymore. Hasn’t been for a long time. But what about Mal? And why the fuck do I care?
“What’s up with you two anyway?” Sol eyes me. “You not getting on?”
“What?”
“You and Mal,” Sol clarifies. “I know the look on your pretty face when you want to murder someone.”
He really doesn’t. “We get on just fine.”
“Well, if that’s true, I hope you don’t ever hook-up. You’ll be the ones burning the place down instead of all these rich emmets who want to build houses here.”
Sol’s joking, but he’s too close to the truth for me to laugh. A piece of my heart left the building with Mal, and what’s left of it just wants to sleep. “Go help Jack and sing your shitty songs, old friend.”
Sol rolls with the gentle push I give him, and I think I’ve got away with it. But he turns before he reaches the door and gives me a stare that’s more like Jack than him. “Are you okay?”
“I’m tired.”
“Apart from that. They scan your head after that whack?”
“For what? It clipped me, it didn’t crack my skull.”
Sol blanches, and the guilt is immense, but other wicked things are too strong to fix the triggering image I’ve just thrown in his face. I let the loaded silence fester until he blinks first and leaves me alone in a kitchen as barren as I feel right now.
Go to bed .
It feels impossible, and I know why.
Mal .
I don’t like that he walked out of this conversation without knowing I appreciate that he spoke with Folk and Saint in front of me. That wherever he’s gone, he might be thinking the way Sol is, even if it’s true. We don’t get on. Except…
We do.
We really fucking do, and the alien emotion rattling the cage around my heart has nothing to do with the mad and utterly silent sex I can’t stop thinking about any moment I’m not having it.
An emotion I don’t understand, and I wonder when I became so dense.
So hard to reach, even for myself. And it’s a stupid rumination that won’t lead anywhere fixable.
I know why I’m like this.
Trouble is, there’s only one soul on earth who knows it too, and it isn’t Mal.
It’ll never be Mal.
The emotion fades, leaving an oily, unclean mess in its wake.
The gym calls to me. But I haven’t eaten enough to survive the punishment I’m bound to inflict on my body and it’s a small victory to head up the stairs in the right direction.
One I need to face what someone’s found the time to leave in my room.
Dinner .
Chicken. Rice. A simple salad that’s a kaleidoscope compared to what I’ve managed to eat this week.
It’s Jack’s style of cooking. Plainer than Sol and Oscar’s. But it’s a weird thing for him to be up in my business enough to bring food to my room, so I have to contemplate why , and the only conclusion I settle on is the exchange I missed before he left the kitchen.
Mal told him to.
I don’t like it, but that cage rattles again, another dare I can’t seem to walk away from. I leave the food and shower, so I won’t use it as an excuse to go to the bathroom later. Then I come back and face the plate with the comfort of knowing I’m only alone because I choose it.
It’s a state of mind that works for a while. I eat on the couch and watch TV with heavy eyes, pretending I’m not hyper-focused on the sound of doors opening and shutting downstairs as Sol and Jack close the pub.
Revellers leave, and they’re not quiet about it, hollering through the streets in a way locals have had to accept, given they’re usually making most of the noise. Staff leave. More doors close. Locks click. Jack and Sol ascend the stairs together, but go their separate ways on the landing.
Then it’s quiet. No Mal. Unless he’s been in his room this whole time, a fatigue-fuelled mindfuck that has me shutting off the TV and taking myself down the hallway to his empty room.
He makes his bed like Jack does. All neat corners and straight pillows.
Like a soldier, maybe. But it doesn’t feel like him.
The Mal of my dreams is scruffy and kinda wild.
Sometimes it’s hard to remember the institutional machine that’s shaped him, especially now I know what a mess he can make of a bed.
Rough lips.
Hot limbs.
His strong grip hauling me from the sheets and crowding me to whatever surface he feels like.
I’ve been cold all week, every moment I haven’t spent with him. It makes the heat that ripples through me so much hotter and my fingers dig into the doorframe, charged recollections that come at me from all directions and leave my veins thrumming.
Scalding water on slick skin.
His body curved around mine and the snatched rumble of every sound he suppresses.
A physical memory, but tonight, maybe because he’s not here, it feels rooted in more emotion, as if it’s my heart that craves his chest to my back and fresh bite marks on my shoulder.
As if I crave more than that.
I return to my own room like a fucking ghost. I leave the light off, and in the dark my stomach becomes a yawning grave, clamouring for more than I’ve given it until I get up and eat a little more to pass the time.
But alone in my room again, it feels like a mistake. I lie on my back, tracking the cracks in the ceiling with too much weight on my ribs and an evil urge burning deep and dark in my gut.
Can’t lie, it hurts, both real and imagined, twisting sharper as I grind my teeth, screwing my fists into my eyes like Jack does when he’s worried one might fall out.
We’re all so fucked-up.
I laugh at the shadows, at the edge of what I can bear. But just when I think I might die right here in my bed, the window pushes open.
Mal .
He drops silently onto the carpet and comes to the bed as I start to sit up, blinking away my worst nightmare.
His palm hits my chest and he eases me back down, tapping a finger to my lips. “Don’t wake up.”
“I’m not asleep.”
“Aye, but you should be.”
I don’t know what that means. But as Mal stretches out on my bed, barefoot with the scent of an ocean gale clinging to his clothes, I’m not sure it matters.
I’m not sure anything does, except him and the barbed corkscrew in my stomach.
It still hurts.
Mal shifts onto his side and stares at me in the dark as if the walls I’ve built around myself are made of the thinnest black lace. As if he can see through my skin. “You’re even fucking hotter with that war wound.”
“Hmm. I don’t know about that.”
“Just believe it then.”
The cramp in my belly amps up a gear.
I don’t blink.
I don’t breathe.
I do nothing .
And yet Mal’s hand skates over my abdomen, warm and solid. It splays out, like it does when we’re fucking. He leaves it there long after he falls asleep, and all I can think about is how I’ll feel when he’s gone.