“I do—” But still I can’t lie. I hate this place—I hatemyself, and maybe that’s all this is. Like Jack, I should be dead, but instead I’m here, in Porth Luck, with no idea how to live with what’s left when there’s so much here that should make me want to try.
Jack.
Sol.
Skylar.
I shiver, suddenly fucking freezing, blond hair and grey eyes all I can see. I don’t know what’s hurt Skylar so badly, but Ifeelit, coiled beneath his dead stare and the safety he craves in the dark, and I want torip it outand kill it for him. But I’m not sure I’m strong enough. Not when I can’t fix my own shit. And that’s without confronting the reality that he doesn’t fucking want me.
He does.
I have no idea how Vinnie can be so fucking sure, and I’m so tired I can’t think my way out of it.
Me and Jack run out of things to say to each other. Sol’s been off my radar, but as Jack’s eyes grow heavy with alarming abruptness, he appears from the kitchen and convinces Jack to give me some space.
Knowing my brother needs his bed, I go along with it.
I’m staring at the wall when Sol comes back.
His gaze swims with empathy and love. “You need me to stay up with you?”
“No.”
“I don’t mind. Anything you need. You know that.”
I do know it.
But I also know Jack needs Sol more than I do. And Sol needs to sleep before he and Oscar take theSironaout in a few hours’ time. “I’m fine, brother.”
Brother. Sol smiles. “All right, Mally. Wake me up if it gets too much, okay?”
We both know I won’t. But I nod and track Sol’s footsteps as he pads to his room and shuts the door.
It leaves me alone in the dark, but it doesn’t feel that way. Skylar’s not here, but he’s on my mind and in my heart, whatever that’s worth. We’re two open wounds smashed together and there’s no healing here. But there could be—I feel that too, and I drift with those thoughts, pondering how something that should’ve been just this once has come to feel like taking fire in slow motion. Like, I know it’s going to kill me, but I’m living for the fucking pain. For the magic. For Skylar’s hands on my skin and his mouth on mine. For his body taking me inside him like it’s muscle memory and we’ve fucked in a hundred past lives.
I get hard thinking about it, but the heat in my blood doesn’t last, because it’s so much more than how he makes my fucked-up body sing.
It’s how he doesn’t let me stay dead inside. Or wear the mask that’s been welded to my face half my life. It’s how he tears it off without even trying, how I’d be dead and buried if I’d never met him, and somewhere amongst the numbness I can’t seem to shift when I’m alone, I know I don’t want to die.
I know I don’t want toleave?—
A crash tears through the silence.
Glass.
The toxic stink of petrol and a sudden burst of heat and flame as I’m ripped to awareness, every sense in my body, every nerve, lighting up like the fucking flare I shot at Couch Junior.
Smoke.
Fire.
Fuck.
25MAL
I roll to my feet, boots to the floor, in motion before the carnage unfolding fully manifests.
“Jack!” I holler my brother’s name. “Sol! Wake the fuck up!”