“Firstdudeblowjob.”
“I think it might’ve been my first blowjob ever.”
Those bronze-brown eyes widen a touch. “You’ve never said that before. I thought you did everything with women.”
“Nope. The more I think about it, the more I remember I barely did anything. I know I’m broken now, but I feel like the sex part of me never worked properly until this. Untilyou.”
Sol looks like he might cry. But it passes and he smiles, and I come back to what led us here. What he wants to know. “I can’t be sure, but I bet I left your bed that morning and tumbled myself down a rabbit hole of research. So I was ready for whatever happened when I next saw you.”
“Because you wanted to come home and fuck me?”
“No, Sol. Because I was always going to come home and love you, even if I don’t remember it.”
He does get emotional then, and I hold him while it flows through him. Because this is Sol. And I love him so fucking much.
“Can I ask you something?” he says after a while.
I’m not asleep. But I reckon I will be soon, if we stay here in this bed that smells of him. And of us. “Aye, of course.”
“You said you were fucking fuming, but you never told me why. Or with who.”
And he wants me to tell him now. So I force some energy into my brain and try. “I can’t bring it all together anymore. But I think it was because you never believe your heart matters. You’d leave it by the bins for someone else’s sake and it drives me fucking crazy.”
“So…you were angry with me?”
“Huh. Maybe.”
I kiss him to let him know whatever I felt, it was temporary. Passing through while I searched for my real emotions. It’s gone now and I feel nothing for him but decades of love that has morphed into something so precious and vital I can’t look away from him.
Sol smiles against my lips. I get the sense he has something to say, but slackness seeps into his limbs, and I soak in a feeling I’m still getting used to—the one of him falling asleep in my arms without fear something terrible will happen while he’s gone. It’s unfair that he had to be so badly hurt to find that peace, but I can’t fight what’s already happened. I can only hold him, and rub my cheek on his sex-warm hair, and die the sweetest death as his sleepy murmur reaches me.
“For the record, Jackie. I’m in love with you too.”
EPILOGUE - SOL
TheSironadidn’t sink. A salvage crew found her three weeks after the storm and towed her in.
She was more wrecked than me. Still halfway lost, and even with my dad’s terrible life choices off my plate for a while, I couldn’t see a path where I’d ever have the money to fix her.
Then Oscar told me he’d renewed an insurance policy I’d thought had lapsed. That he’d used the extra cash I’d been slipping him to add more protection, and by some godly miracle, not only was theSironacovered, but her loss of earnings were too.
I didn’t even need the money Jack had hoarded for me. Not with the piles of crumpled cash Saint Malone brought me one night when I was searching for storms and terrors in the calmest waters I’d ever seen—every penny I’d paid the Kings over the years. But it took months to rebuild her. Weeks of whining grinders and welders spitting sparks well into the night. Days and days of sanding and sealing new boards. Long nights of painting over scars that would always be there if you knew where to look.
Story of our lives.
All of us.
And now it’s summer and she floats—she sails—and the engine purrs under my boots as she cruises though an easy swell, cutting through the water into a breeze that tastes like salt and diesel, humming a song to the spinning gulls.
She’s happy to be back, I feel it. I breathe it in. I face the horizon with no fear. I’m happy too.
And I’m not alone.
I turn as a shadow moves behind me.
Jack.
He leans against the rail as if he’s always been there. As if this isn’t the first time he’s been to sea with me since before he got hurt.