Because he knows me too. He knows everything about everything whether he wants to or not, because I’ve been drunk or marooned at sea with him far too many times for our friendship to be anything else.
My phone rings in my pocket again. With a sigh, I answer it, and my dad’s voice filters down the line.
“Son, I need to talk to you.”
4JACK
There’s sea glass in my room. A pewter dish of it on my bedside table, fragments of blue, green, and amber. Broken pieces that shine with the morning sun when we’re lucky enough to get some.
I woke up to them a few days ago.
Sol left them for me. To brighten my day, perhaps, but he’s a deeper thinker than that. I gather a few in my hand and roll the cool, worn edges through my fingers, wreckage made smooth by the tide. Yet they still feel alive somehow. As if they’ve held on through the worst storms, and if Sol’s told me anything a hundred times, it’s that storms are life, and they shape us like they shape the earth.
The last piece drops into the dish. One of the renegade amber shards, so dark it’s almost bronze. Like Sol’s eyes. Which gets me thinking about his face. His hair. His inked skin. An adventure in imagination I don’t have time for right now. I’m working—I came upstairs to check on Fiadh. But like every time I’ve entered my bedroom this week, the sea glass reeled me in, and now I’m finding it hard to unstick my feet from the floor when all my brain wants to do is think about Sol.
He’s your happy place.
I hear the words in Skylar’s northern accent. But I can’t remember him ever saying them. Can’t remember how I came to care about him so much either. Just that I do.
Fiadh is curled up on my bed, her dainty paws tucked under her chin, leaning against my pillow like she owns it. It isn’t cold in the flat—the windows are closed, Mal’s out—but I park a blanket around her anyway. “You all right, gal?”
The silver dog regards me with eyes so wise I know she’s the reason I got my brother back from a crisis-fuelled walkabout over the summer. That he came home to love Skylar better instead of breaking everything, including himself. We owe this sweet hound a lot, a thought that completes as she sighs and goes back to sleep, and I take my cue to go back to work.
I step out of my room, leaving the door ajar behind me. My senses are dulled, my brain a shadowed mess, but enough combat instinct remains that I know something’s different before I can name it. Heavier air—chargedair. The Joker creaks and groans like it always does over the bustle of the pub downstairs. But a pulse simmers beneath all that, a shift in atmosphere humming at the base of my cracked skull.
It’s not cracked anymore. Healed, remember?
Doesn’t feel like it. Not in moments like these when I can’t decipher what my gut is trying to tell me. What’s making my skin crawl as I pause on the landing, eyes adjusting to the dim light, andlisten, as timbers shift and pipes clank, and a steady rhythm that shouldn’t be there has violence rising in my blood.
Glass on the carpet.
Smoke in the air.
Flames licking Skylar’s bed.
A memory—a real one—of a petrol bomb that blew through Skylar’s bedroom window this summer for reasons and motives I’m yet to understand. I’llneverforget it and I turn towards the sound with every nerve wired as I consider my nearest weapon.But as I freeze in the dark, my heart in my throat, the noise sharpens. That rhythm becomes a low thump, a breath caught on the edge of a moan, and I get it.
Mal.
Skylar.
Christ. I rub my lips, torn between laughter and cringing myself through the floor.Sol warned you about this.That I needed to be louder, so they knew I was here. But I hadn’t counted on Mal being so intowhateverthat he wouldn’t notice my presence. And I’m going to fucking kill him later.
Maybe.
As much as I hate this moment, I can’t deny I feel something from it. Not arousal—Jesus, no—but the energy of it, raw and alive, hums in the air. A pulse that makes me too aware of the space around the deepest voids in my life.
You’ll never have that.
Late nights made of sweat and skin.
Lazy morning sex.
I force myself into motion and creep out of the flat, shutting the door behind me as if I’m sealing a stolen memory into a vault. Because whatever’s going down between my brother and Skylar tonight, it doesn’t belong to me. But jumbled as it is, the part of me that wishes it did grows louder. So loud it follows me downstairs and into the belly of the Joker.
Sofucking loud I don’t dare look for Sol.
I hide in the cellar instead, stacking barrels, shifting crates, blowing through the jobs I’m supposed to do tomorrow. Physical work and I like it. Feels good to move my body. To feel strong in ways IknowI am when the mess in my brain isn’t too fucked-up to let me.