His bed is made for once. I slide the paper-wrapped bracelet under his pillow without thinking too hard about when he’ll get round to finding it. Hit and run. But as I turn to leave, the wall opposite catches my attention the same way the charity box did downstairs. But my mind is so full I can’t see what I’m looking at.What I’m missing. All I see is empty space where a new thought should be and I can’t fucking stand it.
I leave Sol’s room and go back to the living room. Mal and Skylar are gone. Sev is lounging on the floor, poking at his phone, and Oscar is sprawled on the couch with Fiadh in the crook of his elbow.
Aras went to Norfolk, remember? With his mam.
“Stay,” I tell Oscar. “You and Sol are heading out early anyway.”
Oscar smiles. “Thank you, my friend. Sol already asked me and this couch is not half bad.”
“That’s the gin you made me fetch talking,” Sev says without looking up. “The lumpy bits don’t get you until the witching hour. Sol’s in the shower.”
The last part’s for me, even though I didn’t ask. “The shower?”
“Tipped Kraken down himself.” Sev finally spares me a glance. “You need anything, Jack?”
Yes.
My body thrums with so much fuckingneed. But that isn’t a conversation I want with anyone but Sol, so I say goodnight and leave Sev and Oscar to their living room slumber party.
The hallway lights are off. Sev and Oscar talk quietly over the low hum of the TV and I swear to god, the slow thump of my brother’s bed against his bedroom wall somehow reaches me.
Fuck that. I unhook the hallway door from the wall latch and ease it as shut as it ever gets, sealing out the rest of the flat until I’m left with only the hush of Christmas Eve, the distant roll of the ocean, and the shower running in the bathroom as though it holds the secrets to eternal life.
Sol hasn’t closed the bathroom door properly. Steam filters through the gap and creeps along the ceiling as I watch it, feelingthe bindings snapped tight around my composure slip away, one by one.
Mal’s voice is still in my head.
Shut out all the noise.
I can’t do that on my own. I need Sol. I need the conversations we haven’t had. The things I don’t remember. The things I do. I need the way Sol looks at me sometimes like he’s dying inside and something insidemeholds the cure.
And that need has me drifting closer to the bathroom. Reeled in by Sol’s absent humming and the blurred shape of him behind the shower screen. The line of his inked back. The arch of his neck as he rinses his hair.
I brace on the doorframe, steam still pooling around me, hands curling into fists as every ounce of tenderness I feel for my best friend fights with a scorching urge inside me. A soul-deep instinct that wants every piece of him he’ll give me.
More.
Fuck, that word has done a number on me for weeks now. But as the water shuts off and sudden quiet fills the space, I do what Mal said and push everything aside. Shove it off a fucking cliff in time for Sol to slide the shower door open and find me waiting on him.
He knows.
I see it in his dark, heavy-lidded eyes.
In the deliberate step he takes past the towel rail and into my orbit.
I meet him halfway. The tiles are cool beneath my feet, the air hot in my lungs. My pulse is a hammer in my veins as I grip his jaw with deeper intent than I ever have before. “How drunk are you?”
He shrugs, gaze simmering with everything I feel. “Just the right amount, Jackie. If you’re worrying about consent.”
I’m not. No noise, remember? I’m not worried about anything. We are skin and light and breath, and I claim Sol’s lush mouth in a rough kiss. Then I pull back to press my forehead to his. “Get in my fucking bed.”
22SOL
I don’t have time to overthink it. I don’t havepermissioneither. Jack takes my hand and pulls me out of the bathroom, and he’s not gentle about it.
Bare feet on the floorboards.
Steam clinging to my skin.