There are moments I think he hears me and tries to obey. I spend those moments studying his face. The laughter lines and sun-stained skin. The mouth that was mine the night we fucked like we had all the time in the world.
I brush my thumb over knuckles that are almost as scarred and beat-up as Mal’s. Slow and deliberate, like I can reach him with my touch.
Maybe I do, but it doesn’t last. After a while, I notice he’s paler than ever. That his stomach concaves every so often, a subtle spasm, like his body needs to purge itself of saltwater and sand, but he’s too tired and broken to do it, and it’s in this moment something inside me breaks.
Am I crying?
I’m not sure.
Or how long it lasts before I feel my brother at my side.
It’s dark in Sol’s little corner of the HDU ward. I’m distantly aware that day has faded to night again, and that Cam O’Brian never left. That he’s been watching over me the whole time Mal has been somewhere else.
Somewhere important. I see it in our mam’s eyes as he stares hard at me and passes me the meds I’ve clean forgotten about. “You need to eat something and take a fucking nap.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Not what I said.”
Mal presses food and water on me and watches me consume it like an overwrought parent.
It should be funny, but there’s no humour to be found in this horrid space. No pleasant dreams as I fold my arms on Sol’s bed and rest my head on them.
I don’t know how long I sleep for. Just that it’s still night when I wake up and Mal is talking to someone six feet away.
Sometimes I wake up like I’m swimming through clay. Now, I wake like I was never asleep and I’m laser-focused on Sol before I’m upright.
Something’s different.
But Mal is on me before I can decipher what.
“You okay?”
“Aye.”
“Sure?”
“Aye.”
“Good lad.” Mal nods with the barest hint of a smile. “Oscar is too, eh? Least he will be. They’re booting him from ICU.”
I absorb that. And for the first time since lifeboat lights cut through Porth Ewan harbour, the horror in my chest becomes something I can face.
Something I do face until I feel a shift. A change in the air more than sound.
I break away from Mal and look down.
A bronze-brown gaze greets me.
Sol’s eyes are open. Not enough to consider him conscious, but he’s right there, on the cusp, as if he’s heard Oscar’s name and it’s enough to pull him to the surface.
His gaze hovers on me, then drifts to Mal, and his lips part, and I know what he needs.
I lean down so he doesn’t have to strain. “He’s okay, Sol. Oscar’s okay.”
Another faint shift flickers in Sol’s face. A release. Tension unwinds in his whole body and his eyes close again.
But it isn’t retreat.