Chapter 4 Ghost Sharks #2
Grandpa squints at me again and reaches over to pull out the adjacent chair.
He clasps my wrist around the blue fish band and steers me to sit.
His touch is warm, firm, and just that has my breath hitching.
He cups a hand around his mouth and doesn’t lower his voice at all.
“Your older brother is a stickler for rules.”
Except moral ones.
I don’t make eye contact. But I feel the weight of Trent’s attention, a shift of air against my profile, a slow burn at my periphery. Watching.
“Anyone have a coin?” Grandpa asks, patting his pockets.
And this is my moment. It’s one of the useless things I do exceptionally well. I lean in, frowning. “What’s that behind your ear?”
I reach and produce a shiny fifty-cent piece.
Grandpa chortles and snaps it up and into a twisting flip, while Trent stares at me with folded arms.
“You’re not missing out,” I say. “Check your pocket.”
Grandpa forgets to call his toss, prodding a finger in Trent’s direction. “Do as Ika says.” He watches on, rapt, as Trent pulls out the contents of his pocket, including his keys and . . . a fifty-cent coin.
Actual surprise flickers over his face.
“How?”
I flick another coin between my fingers, slow, easy, a well-practiced rhythm. “A magician never gives away his secrets.”
Grandpa claps the table with a laugh and tosses his fifty-cent piece again. Whatever rule he’s using now gets him out of his rut and when he wins, he pats the back of my hand and then eyeballs his organic whatever. “Now you’re back, you’ll slip me something stronger, won’t ya?”
“Grandpa,” Trent warns.
“What’s the point having a year left if it tastes like this?” A point Grandpa doesn’t quite underscore as he tips every last remaining drop from the pot into his cup. And then guzzles it down.
I tap a fist over a smirk.
“Let an old man have his way,” Grandpa says to Trent, and winks at me.
Trent picks up the emptied teapot and carries it to the kitchen. “I’ll let you have your way with anything else. Not this.”
A gleam hits Grandpa’s eyes and he throws me a mischievous smirk. “Taken as license then.” He grins. “Go marry your boyfriend already.”
The teapot clatters into the sink and Trent chases after it. “I don’t have a boyfriend anymore, Grandpa. Not for years.”
Grandpa frowns and rubs his brow. “Right, right. Slipped my aged noggin.” He leans into me and whispers, “Set him up with one of your friends. Someone cute, with just enough bite.”
Something crashes in the kitchen. Then Trent’s patient voice, “I don’t need—”
Grandpa chortles. “All work and no play makes Trenty a dull boy.”
Trenty?
My gaze snaps across the room; Trent is whipping open a cupboard and pulling a whiskey bottle from the top shelf. He pours a good slosh into a cup and sets it before his grandpa’s smug wrinkles. “You’re right. Live it up large. Go with a grin.”
Grandpa tilts the cup towards me like a toast. “That’s my boy.”
I slide my chair closer to Grandpa.
I’m on the team that has the power to make Trent completely one-eighty like that. What a spin of the bottle.
Trent’s gaze flicks over mine and snags on the grin I’m biting.
I gesture lazily at the whiskey. “Can I try, Grandpa?”
“Go for it.”
I take the cup and swallow half before I can think better of it.
Grandpa watches me, his bushy brows arching slightly. Then he looks into the cup, sighs like a man burdened by misfortune, and turns to Trent, who’s already settling into the chair on his other side.
“Let me guess. You also want a try.”
Trent picks up the cup and finishes it off with a clean, easy tip of his wrist.
Grandpa’s bark of laughter fills the room.
Trent sinks deeper into his chair, his gaze gliding briefly over the postcards on the wall before landing on nothing.
This is a play they’ve done before.
And somehow, I moved into it seamlessly.
Like I’m not an outsider. Not a stranger trying to keep up.
And . . . it should have felt staged. Awkward. Like an act I was still learning to perfect.
But it had been too easy.
Like my body remembered I’ve done this before. I’ve once been someone’s grandson. Someone’s younger brother.
Trent leans forwards, sharply, his gaze pinching on me. “It was a long flight. You’re tired. You need to rest.”
He saw my shiver.
He’s . . . covering for me. For Grandpa?
Or genuinely concerned?
My throat tightens. My jaw aches. “I’m fine, Trenty.”
Trent is already up, gesturing me out of the chair. Catching it when it tips.
Grandpa reshuffles his cards, chuckling.
I’m not sure what I was expecting.
But it wasn’t bunk beds.
I stop, my chest crushing. It feels like stepping into a space already so full it has to squeeze the last breath out of me just so I can fit.
I drag my gaze around, taking it in.
One half lived in. The other, frozen.
On the right, Trent’s space.
Simple, neat.
An open wardrobe with hanging clothes—including some Under the Sea fanfare.
Books on the dresser and bedside table.
A basket of clean-but-yet-to-be-folded washing.
A bottom bunk loosely made, pillow on the right.
Above is Ika’s bunk.
Clean sheets. Pillow on the left.
Below, a black and white rug.
My foot nudges it, and the pattern becomes clear. A soccer ball.
I glance from it to three pairs of cleats stuffed in the bottom shelf, and possibly another inside a shoebox. Trophies sitting above. An old electric piano and stool takes up a chunk of space. And a dresser littered with half-used hair gel, shaving cream, and Calvin Klein cologne.
The cologne . . . it’s the same one I wear. My fingers graze the half-used bottle. I can smell it. But the whisper of its scent is coming from me. “Is that why you chose me to be your man?” I mumble, feeling Trent watching me from the doorway. “Do I smell like him?”
“Yes,” he says, and my stomach . . . tightens.
Not just from his answer; from how easily he gives it. There’s not a moment’s hesitation. Ika’s scent is on me, and he’s already claimed it as his brother. I’m Ika.
I suddenly have an urge to scrub it off, have him smell the scent underneath it, my scent. Why? Why do I want this man to see me? Just because he looks handsome? Or because, in those first moments, he saw through me.
Deep down, or perhaps not that deep down after all, do I want someone to see?
Then Trent speaks again and the discomfort shifts slightly. “You also look how I imagine he would, a decade older.”
I turn to him, tucking my trembling, scented hands into my shorts’ pockets. “How is that?”
“Like a fairytale prince.”
One who should have gotten a princess and a happy ever after. Not . . .
I swallow over a shiver. I don’t know how to respond, but Trent is moving into his side of the room, and I have to say something. I toss a finger towards the rug, the cleats. “If you expect me to play, I’ll need a stunt double.”
I glance over his side of the room again and shift towards a gleam tucked just behind the curtain.
Trent exhales. Not in frustration—fondly. “He also always snuck over to my side.”
My fingers still on the medal hanging from a small hook on the window frame. “Yours or his?” I murmur after a thick swallow.
“His thank you. For teaching him how to play.”
I let the medal hang and turn on my heel. Trent is a shadow behind me, large, close, steady. I look up on an uneven breath and lower my gaze to the sunglasses tucked in his shirt. “Why do you use this room?”
“That’s the way we grew up. It’s a small house.”
“I’m sure you could’ve squeezed out another space since.”
“Grandpa would be confused.”
“So you sleep in here to keep up the ruse for him.”
Trent leans in. “For his smile.”
“And this doesn’t break you?”
Trent shifts back, slow, deliberate. “I’m already broken,” he says simply, like stating a fact. “But it’s been over a decade now. I’ve done my grieving.”
Like he thinks there’s a difference between feeling and grieving. Like one exists, but the other surely can’t anymore.
I look from his stoic face to the room around us.
Fool.
But Trent doesn’t see it. There in his eyes, in the set of his shoulders, in the quiet surety of his posture; he believes he’s done grieving.
My gaze drifts to the neatly made top bunk.
A slow laugh presses against my ribs. “It was always the plan I sleep there, wasn’t it?”
Trent moves to the ladder, rests a hand on the fourth rung. His fingers curl around it and . . . just for a second, less perhaps, there’s a slight tightening. A strain around the skin of his knuckles.
Then, just as easily, he releases the ladder rung and says, “This one’s dodgy. Careful.”
I already smell like Ika. I might as well slide into his sheets too—
A deafening bang has me leaping into Trent’s arms. One moment, I’m standing my ground just as coolly as Trent the Flooder, the next moment, an ear-splitting bang and I’m clinging onto all that solid mass with a curse, head tucking right under his chin, hands fisted against his chest. It’s a wonder, honestly, my legs aren’t around him as well.
It all happens so fast, and my extreme reaction triggers Trent’s.
He cups a hand protectively around my head and turns me in towards the bed, his back shielding me from whatever might come through the door.
But there’s nothing.
Just a wild voice demanding someone take this pesky chicken away.
Trent’s shoulders ease, and I allow myself a silent groan against an Under the Sea starfish on Trent’s collar before I push him back.
I toss out a laugh. “At least yours is safe.”
Trent blinks. “My what?”
“The chicken. She didn’t—” I make a slicing motion. “Didn’t ravage your zucchini.”
A slow blink.
“Poor Grandpa though.” I shake my head. “That’s not the way to go.”
The slowest exhale. A deliberate pinch of his nose. And maybe, possibly, the slightest quiver at his lips.