“You never do.” He lowers into the seat beside me. “Unless the Kings come to town. Sorry I didn’t warn you about that—I didn’t know. And I didn’t think Cam would come regardless.”
Cam O’Brian. The founding chapter president of the Rebel Kings Motorcycle Club.
A wave of acid threatens the barricade I’ve constructed around the devil in my belly. I reach for the water I brought with me from my room. Swallow it down before I clear my throat enough to answer. “Don’t worry about it. If your brother wants to run with them, it’s nothing to me.”
Jack frowns. “That’s not what that was?—”
A new presence in the doorway cuts him off.
Mal.
I haven’t seen him since that night on the roof and whatever Jack was about to say, I half expect him to be covered in biker ink and wearing a Rebel Kings patch. And of course he isn’t. He looks exactly the same as the last four times I’ve ever met him.
Long legs. Unshaven jaw. Eyes like the herbs Sol grows on the windowsill.Hardeyes as he sweeps the room and sniffs out Sol’s physical discomfort too fast for anyone to stop him. “What happened to you?”
“Bad hair day.” Sol smothers the wince in his gait and lugs his big pot from the stove, depositing it on the table with enough force and volume to distract Jack, and it works—for a heartbeat.
But Mal’s immovable. He stares, and Jack notices, halfway out of his seat, reaching for Sol with an instinct I wish he trusted.
“You’re hurt?”
“No.” Sol fires that shallow glare at Mal before he turns to Jack and his expression gives way to the grin that makes his best friend forget anyone else is in the room. “I’m hungover as fuck and I slipped on the deck.”
It’s good bullshit. Top tier to anyone who doesn’t know Sol’s been tearing around boat decks since he was a toddler and has the graceful balance of a mythical sea god.
None of those people breathe air in this room, but the angel of interruption seems to favour Sol today too. The intercom from the pub downstairs blares to life and the crude noise shunts Jack enough to overwhelm his fragile brain.
He doesn’t know which direction to look.
I intervene, rising to answer the intercom, enduring the narrow space Mal leaves for me to squeeze past him, sparing him even less eye contact than he spares me.
Fuck you.
Wow.
Okay. I don’t think too hard about where that came from, or if my subconscious really meant it. I brush past him, blocking out his body heat and the scent of cedar-wood, and answer the intercom in the hall.
It’s the bar. The locals’ favourite ale has run dry and they don’t know how to fix it.
The temptation to zip downstairs and swap the barrels myself hums in my veins. But Sol will think I’m dodging his spaghetti and I don’t need that conversation with him tonight or any night.
I take the message back to the table and reclaim my seat.
Sol stops Jack rising and slips away to deal with downstairs. Mal remains in the doorway, forcing Sol to move around him, not giving up an inch of that all-seeing stare. But once Sol’s gone, he lets out a breath and scans the room again, deciding whether he wants to come in, a struggle he can’t hide, even from Jack.
I look away.
Idon’t care.
Then the bench shifts with additional weight, relief floods me, and I realise I’m a big fat liar, just like Sol.
Mal settles into his seat, propping his back against the wall behind us. It means he can see all of me, but I can’t see him without shifting my position.
I hate that I want to. That on some level, Ineedto, a reality that settles as Sol comes back and starts dishing out dinner.
Fuck it.
I mirror Mal’s pose, propping a lean on the wall. There isn’t much room. My elbow brushes his and I feel it everywhere.