He knows it too, though there’s no regret in the slow sigh he heaves as he sits up. “We need to pay that bill.”
I hum my agreement and reach for the iPad, coming upright as the first raindrop hits my face.
Mal passes me a bent and weathered bank card that’s barely in date. He makes the payment without blinking—turns out he has ten grand lying around.
I spot the rest.
Then he hauls me to my feet, wrapping his hand around my jaw one last time. “We need to go home. Before I fuck you in the rain and never let you go.”
16MAL
I really miss cigarettes.
Even without the sex.
And theMary Gloucesteris owned by the CEO of a local waste disposal firm—Couch-It Waste LTD. It’s a plaything for his two sons and has nothing to do with fucking fishing.
Which means they’re coming at Sol for a different reason. One that seems a mystery to him until I dig a little deeper and realise he’s been collecting their sea trash and dumping it back on their doorstep for the lastfour years. Even after they torched his bigger vessel six months ago.
“You could’ve told me this when I asked you the first time.”
Sol keeps his gaze on the horizon, squinting into the chop, dusk barely smudging the sky. We’re on a solo voyage to the mackerel nets Oscar dropped yesterday. It’s cold and windy, and even from where I’m grumbling at Sol from inside the cabin, sea damp clings to my skin.Quietclings to me, and not the good kind I find with Skylar sometimes.
I toss a scrap of old rope at Sol’s head. He dodges, letting me know he hasn’t zoned out. That he’s ignoring me on purpose, relying on the fact I have to stay hidden in the cabin for protection.
What he doesn’t know is that I predicted this, and I have plenty more projectiles to chuck his way, and three days of insomnia to fuel my tenacity. “Don’t make me come out there.”
Sol’s lips twitch. “You can’t come out here. That’s the point, isn’t it? Why we spent all night wrapping the windows in the fiddly fucking film?”
“We didn’t have to do it at night.”
“I didn’t want Jack to see.”
“You don’t think he wondered why you weren’t in bed?”
“Jack doesn’t pay attention to my bed.”
“He’s always paid attention to your bed.”
Sol grunts, in a mood. I roll my eyes and long for a cigarette as theSironarides the steady swell, taking us past the headland and out to sea to where Oscar shot the nets.
It takes us a while to get there. Sol doesn’t say much, just keeps his eyes on the water, searching for the marker buoys Oscar left behind.
He doesn’t say when he spots them. Just throttles down and abandons the tiller to let the boat drift.
I watch him haul rope, hand over hand, working in a rhythm I found mesmerising when I was younger and not puking over the side of his dad’s bigger boat. Sol’s how I knew I liked boys more than girls. How I realised my brother didn’t. That for him, Sol was the only lad who ever turned his head.
It makes no fucking sense to me that they’re not together. And out here, with Sol uncharacteristically silent, I have plenty of time to think about it. To remember how they used to look at each other when we were young. How Jackgazed at Sol as if he’d fallen from the sun he was named after. How Sol forgot anyone else was in the room when Jack was there. That much doesn’t seem to have changed, but a deeper part of me knows everything has.
Sol keeps working. The rope in his practised hands becomes something else. Nets rise from the frothy sea, but I’m too penned in to see if they’re glinting and gleaming with fish. And I don’t give much of a fuck. I’m not here for the mackerel.
I’m here for what might happen next.
Sol does whatever he’s come out here to do, and the wind picks up before he’s done, slapping waves against the hull.
He resets the nets and returns to the tiller. Starts an engine that sounds like it’s had better days, the outboard catching with a sputtering growl. Then he points us towards home and I snap to, paying closer attention to any lights on the horizon that aren’t on dry land. The Couch vessel has come at Sol fast before, and I’m ready, though it’s been a while since I last went to war on a fucking fishing boat.
Might not come to that.