Aras’s stare widens.
Oscar says something to him in a language I don’t know. Then to me he says, “You are joking, yes?”
Not really. But if it helps Oscar, I can pretend. “Aye. It was the circus for me if I didn’t follow Jack.”
“You are a clown, my friend?”
“Nah, but I can walk on my hands for fucking miles.”
Oscar snorts.
Aras wants to see, so I show him the only party trick I have that doesn’t involve death or the place my imagination has taken me way too often since I kissed Skylar.
I’m still upside down when I sense him—Skylar, not Aras. I know where Aras is. I can hear him laughing from his dad’s broad shoulders. Just like I see my brother shaking his head at me as I place my palms, one after the other, on the sun-warmed brick wall I fixed a few days ago.
Skylar’s presence is something else. Like mist rolling in from the sea, tickling my skin, my heart doing the skip that scares me when I’m alone.
I flip down from the wall, landing as he pauses on his way inside, sunlight catching his hair, his gaze skewering me where I stand.
Hisprolongedgaze.
It’s the first time he’s truly looked at me in days, and I’ve somehow forgotten how it feels to have those pewter eyes pinned on me and not have a clue what he’s thinking.
He’s tired, that much I do know.
Jack sees it too, and speaks before I can, as blunt as I was bound to be. “You work too much.”
Skylar glances his way, breaking our stare off. “Says you.”
Touché. Jack works every day—says he has to or he’ll forget how. And Sol’s job is a way of life that has no days off. But Sol can catch a nap on the boat when he’s not being rammed by other fishermen, and Jack only has to walk upstairs when he’s done for the day. Skylar’s the only one with a forty-minute commute after a fourteen-hour shift.
Sixteen hours.
Right. Because I felt the moment he left as acutely as the moment he came home.
Jack has no argument to Skylar’s retort. He says goodbye to Aras and Oscar and comes to me, his eyes still warm with my quota of nice things for the week. “Are you growing this dodgy beard because of me too? I’m not sure it’s working out for you.”
He rubs his knuckles on my scruffy jaw, inviting me to shove him. But I can’t do it, not now, or ever again. I grab him instead, kiss his temple, and call him a name that would turn our mam in her grave, and I don’t know who’s more surprised, me or him.
Either way, Jack has a pub to run. He goes inside. Oscar scoops up Aras to take him to school. And me? I stare at Skylar, because why the fuck not? And because I love it when he stares right back.
Oscar leaves. I’m aware of that much. And Sol and Sev are still bellowing at each other on the boat. Beyond that there’s nothing but blond hair and grey eyes, and the discordant thud of my pulse in my ears. But that’s fading, and I belatedly realise it’s as much from tipping myself upside down as from Skylar’s simmering gaze.
When did I get so slow?
The easy answer is when I met him.
The real one is layers of an existence I don’t want to look back on just yet, and with Skylar so close, it’s not that hard to ignore the reality that adjusting to civvy life is fucking tough.
“You do work too much.” I echo my brother’s sentiment.
Skylar says nothing. His phone buzzes with a call, and he ignores that too, until he doesn’t.
He pulls it out of his pocket.
Camflashes on the screen and a muscle tics in his jaw.
“You gonna take that?”