I believe in the harm a man can do with a fucking machine gun.
I don’t believe Skylar’s the cool,easymotherfucker he wants the rest of the world to see, and the kitchen starts to piss me off.
Brooding, I take the sandwich to the living room and eat it on the couch still rumpled from the coma I fell into at his unspoken bidding. Can’t deny, it’s fucking good. But I’m restless when I’m done, the need tomovecreeping over my skin like ants on roller-skates.
The shower smells like Skylar and his blue shower gel. Like clockwork, my dick notices, standing to attention in one snatched breath, but I ignore it and drench myself in cold water, chasing any endorphin I can find that doesn’t end in me picturing my housemate doing unspeakable things to me. That doesn’t end in regret we didn’t fuck all our troubles away that night before I found out who he was.
Other way round.
Aye. But thinking about it does nothing to calm the thrum in my blood. I need out of this room—out of this fucking house. This town. Whatever. I just needout, and for the entire time I’ve been here, that’s meant a run too basic to calm me the fuck down.
But that’s not happening today. My chest is too tight, my breath too short, and however hard I’ve tried to ignore this shit since it became my new normal, having a heart attack at the side of the road in Porth-fucking-Luck isn’t on my bucket list.
It doesn’t leave me many options, but as I’m dressing in the clothes someone’s dried and retrieved from the cellar for me, I spy Sol in the distance, mooching up the road by the harbour wall, and I’m waiting for him by the time he reaches his moored boat in the Joker’s private cove.
Hisdamagedboat, beyond the dent in the hull Oscar mentioned a few weeks back. “Hit another fucking iceberg?”
Sol jumps, fists raised to defend himself. Then he sees me and relaxes. “Christ, Mally. You trying to kill me?”
“Nope. Looks like someone is, though.”
Sol snorts and hops onto his boat to join me, agile as a fucking goat, even with his sore ribs. Not slipping even a little bit on the sea water clinging to the deck. “What are you doing out here? You hate boats.”
“Do I?”
“Youusedto,” he amends. “When I told my old man you were coming home, he wouldn’t stop talking about that time you puked on his feet on a crab run.”
“Amazing. He still gambling?”
Sol flinches. “Not so much these days.”
“Why’s that?”
“Your brother paid his stump and guilt is a good motivator, even for an addict like my dad.”
“Jack paid his debts?”
“Yeah.” Sol’s eyes haze with emotion. “I didn’t have the money and my mum was going to lose the house. Jack fronted the cash before he got deployed that last time. I took a job on a trawler to pay him back…it’s where I was when he got hurt.”
I match that with what Skylar’s already told me about a fucked-up time I don’t want to remember. My own guilt is razor wire around my heart, but I push it away, saving it for the next time I’m alone in the dark with nothing to do but hate myself. “No debts since?”
“Only small ones. Kings wrote most of theirs off when the club went legit, and I got him banned from the betting shops. It’s only the card games I need to worry about now.” Sol’s gaze flicks to the pub behind us. “Buying this place helped with that.”
I dissect that—all of it.
Kings.
RebelKings. The bikers who used to run this town when they weren’t at war with rival gangs. The gambling, the smuggling, the fencing. Most of it done from the back door of the dodgiestboozer in town. “So the Joker doesn’t host lock-in poker games anymore?”
“Fuck no. We’re legit too.”
“How’d that go down with the locals?”
“No one likes change. But they got over it. Jack doesn’t take any shit, and Skylar?—”
Sol snaps his mouth shut.
Awareness floods me. Agitation. And not just because any mention of Skylar’s name leaves me dizzier than any fucked-up heart ever could.