Counter-argument surges inside me, but I catch it before it spills out. Mal asked me a question and he wouldn’t botherif the answer didn’t matter to him. “He was helping me with something I don’t want to talk to you about.”
Mal absorbs that, matching the most honesty I can give him with whatever he’s thinking. He doesn’t blink for a moment. Then he fixes me with a stare that would probably have other people stepping back.
Not me, though.
Not Skylar.
Not Sol.
We love Mal as fiercely as he loves us.
“I need you to promise me something,” he says abruptly enough I know at least one of us has drifted.
I move closer to him. “What is it?”
“Skylar. You need to tell me if you see something I don’t. My head’s fucked too, remember?”
From PTSD—a battlefield I recognise. What Skylar fights is different. And mostly unknown to me. I don’t know what triggered his disordered eating. Only that the day I realised he and Mal were in love was the same day I thought Skylar might die in my brother’s arms.
I need to make the promise Mal’s asking of me. But he moves before I can speak, tugging the phone he rarely carries when Skylar’s home from his pocket as a message lights the screen.
He frowns again. Deeper this time. The kind of frown that means something’s shifted somewhere I can’t see. Somewhere a lifetime away from Porth Luck.
“Who is it?”
“Orion.”
The name lands heavy. Orion is Regiment. Part of Mal’s old crew and last I heard—last Iremember—deployed overseas. If he’s reaching out, it isn’t for small talk.
“They’re going dark,” Mal says after a beat too long. “Could be months.”
I nod as the implication hits like a fist to the gut. The memory, old and new, of the quiet my brother will have to live with until his friends make it home. The quiet we’ve inflicted on Sol too many times to count. The utter silence I didn’t comprehend until I came home and Mal was still out there, in the desert, in the mountains. In hostile lands and hellscapes that could take him from me at any moment.
Mal’s still staring at his phone.
I reach for him, a hand to his shoulder that turns into a rough tug until he’s in my arms.
My brother.
I fold him into an embrace I should’ve given him more often when we were younger instead of letting Sol do it for me. I hold him there, taking the weight of the tension bleeding from him, knowing what it costs to love people who dance with death like it’s their fucking hobby. “They have each other,” I tell him in place of bullshit he doesn’t need. “And everything you and Vinnie taught them.”
Mal exhales into my shoulder. “We’re not there.”
“And you were never meant to be, not forever.”
Mal sighs again, a tremor simmering beneath his skin. He doesn’t speak, but he doesn’t need to. I know he’s thinking about his best friend. His partner in crime who never came home.
Fuck, I hate that I can’t spare him this pain.
This fear.
That I can’t make it better.
I draw back so I can see his face. So I can give him the only thing he’s asked me for. “I’ll tell you if I’m worried about Skylar, I promise.”
It’s all I have, and Mal knows it.
I hug him again, longer this time.