23JACK
Information overload is brutal. It hits as Sol and theSironafade into the distance. Deepens as Sev tells me Oscar is already onboard and my brain shudders as I learn Oscar walked her before dawn and discovered all the parts Sol has stripped and sold to bail out Dav.
He asks about the concertina.
I have nothing for him.
Sev grinds a cigarette into an ashtray on a picnic table. “Always figured he’d sell a kidney before he hawked that.”
“What?”
“I heard you rowing about it last night. So did Oscar. I thought he went outside to get away from all the shagging going on, but I guess not.”
I try to remember the conversation Sol’s talking about. It wasn’t a row. And we weren’t in bed. But my brain gets hooked on three words.
All the shagging.
Because I fucked Sol last night and until I opened my eyes this morning, it was the most moored and whole I’ve felt in years.
We hooked up before you got hurt.
My head spins harder.
I go inside and upstairs with Sev trailing behind me, trying to piece together the world I’ve woken up to. Take my medication and make coffee on autopilot.
Every part of me aches for Sol.
I leave the coffee and go to my room, as if my empty bed still holds a piece of him, but all I find are rumpled sheets and a lube bottle that’s pretty much empty now.
Dazed, I put it away.
Go back to Sev in the living room. “Oscar asked the Kings to round up Dav?”
Sev sets his phone aside. “I think so.”
“You think?”
“He didn’t tell me. But it makes sense. And…I keep trying to be angry about it, and I’m just fucking not.”
“But you’re angry with Sol?”
“I don’t want to be.” Sev rubs his eyes, looking far younger than twenty-seven or however old he is these days. “He just drives me crazy sometimes. He’s so good at piling shit on himself without anyone seeing, and I fuckinghatemy parents for letting this happen again.”
Frustration gets the better of Sev. He hurls his phone at the other couch and I feel bad for him, I do. But it isn’t Sol who deserves his rage. And I fucking tell him so.
I think.
My voice is distant.
Disconnected.
My overactive eyeball vibrates in the socket and suddenly it’s me who wants to slam doors and throw shit at the walls.
I go back to the kitchen. Fetch the abandoned coffee and give it to Sev. He says something, but I don’t hear him. My surroundings haze out and I fall into the kind of deep thought I’ll need help coming back from.
We hooked up before you got hurt.
What does that even mean? I sift beyond last night and phantom laughter fills my head.