A yawn ripples through me, catching me off guard. But the timing is perfect. I go with it, stretching before I take the plate he’s made for me, more bacon than eggs, extra mushrooms, because he knows I’ll be sneaking extra spinach on his. “I’m tired. Bucca Dhu kept me up.”
At the table, Mal grunts at the mention of the sea spirit I was raised to believe is the storm god of Cornish waters, before he’s cut off by what sounds like an elbow to the ribs.
Skylar’s elbow.
Jack ignores them, laser focused on me. “You didn’t want to dance in the rain again?”
“Maybe if I’d sunk a little more cider.”
He gives me the same look he’s been giving me our entire lives every time I’ve picked Luckstable Lightning over ale and let it pickle my inhibitions. Amusement and affection softened by something warmer. The look that melts the years away until we’re teenagers again, him laughing on the shoreline as I stagger barefoot through shallow waves, slurring songs at the stars, both of us so young we thought those nights would last forever.
For a beat it feels like they did. His laughter echoes in my head, as vivid as his green eyes, and I catch myself smiling, even as his careful gaze seems to land on the gaping wound that’s never fully healed. The one I can’t quantify, even to him, especially on days like this when I’m not quite sure where the pieces of us both have all gone.
My phone shatters the moment.
The ringtone isn’t loud, but the intrusion is sudden enough to startle Jack. He freezes with his hand half raised and reaching for me, his gaze flickering toward the sound as if he can’t place it, and his mouth moves before he catches up, confusion creasing his face, one word a whisper on his lips.
“Sol?”
“I’m here.”
Jack nods, but his gaze goes distant and he’s not in the room anymore. He’sgone, though his absence is less violent than it used to be. Not a crash to the floor, but a slow drift upstream until I can call him back. A stutter in his rhythm, a glitch.
“Jack?”
He doesn’t respond. I call him again, claiming both his hands, squeezing his spasming fingers as someone gets up and silences my phone.
Skylar.
As someone leaves the room.
Mal.
Boy hates it when this happens to Jack. Though it descends on us most days, he’s not used to it yet, and he wasn’t here when this short circuit in his brother was so much worse.
He doesn’t know.
No. Of course he does. Mal knows most things. But I can’t spare him much bandwidth right now. I trust Skylar to take care of him while I take care of his brother. OfJack, as he chokes on an inhale and his hands twitch in mine as if he’s trying to remember what they’re meant for.
I rub my thumbs over his pulse point, feeling his heart rate steadying. “Jack,” I call one last time, breathing the words I always do when he’s gone. “Come back, love. We miss you.”
His eyes refocus.
“I’m here,” I tell him again.
Jack squeezes my hands. Nodding, blinking hard, before he frowns at me like I’ve just reeled him back from the moon. Like he’s annoyed, before that fades too. And honestly, it wouldn’t matter if it didn’t. Because this is what it means to love him. Digging my heels in no matter how far he drifts. Not letting go. Forever and always, I’ll never let go.
The absence seizure ebbs away, leaving Jack bewildered but as whole as he’s ever going to be. I coax him to the table with his breakfast. Mal and Skylar don’t come back, but Fiadh rises from her bed to lay her fine-boned head on his knee as he eats.
I smile at them, but my stomach is ash. I feel more like Skylar than myself. But for Jack, I eat every scrap of food on my plate. I drink more powdered lies in place of good coffee, and I stay with him for as long as he needs me to.
It’s opening time downstairs when I have to leave him to see theSironaback in. From the garden, I spy her in the distance, a dark smudge under the lingering storm clouds, Oscar piloting her to the mouth of the narrow cove with deft hands. Handling her like a lover, though he’s as celibate as me these days.
Should be poetry in motion to watch.
Our girl is as beautiful as the day I sold everything I owned to buy her back from the Dog Crow Motorcycle Club—bitter rivals of the Rebel Kings. But a sound, a subtle, grinding sputter, binds my muscles. An echo from the rocks, maybe, but my gut knows the truth. The familiar dread that one bad day could take her from me, and like so many things, how much of myself I’d lose with her.
Oscar hasn’t noticed the sputter yet. He eases theSironato her mooring spot and waves to me, grinning through his beard, his tall frame relaxed as the seagulls welcome him home.