Sol doesn’t seem to notice. Or care. He slumps forward, burying his lovely face in the hands he works to the bone, and I stop thinking about sex. I stop thinking about the woman downstairs and the unfair weight I add to his life. I stop thinking about anything except him.
Sol’s my anchor to the world. He brought me back to life when my body wanted to die and I’m so fucking drawn to my best friend I don’t make a conscious decision to go him. I don’t need to. I’m by his side in a flash. Least, it feels like a flash to me, the way time blurs around him, then drops from my awareness as if it were never there at all. As if we could fall into the sea for all I’d notice.
He’d notice.
I ease Sol’s face from his hands, palms wrapping around his jaw, thumbs brushing his cheeks. And I stare—I stare hard, words slipping through my fingers as I search for clues in the uneven way he’s breathing and the reddened haze in his eyes.
He’s drunk.Another realisation that tears me up. Sol only cuts loose like this, only relaxes, when Skylar’s home for the night—because he doesn’t let himself have anything anymore.
Because of me.
It’s a moment where I should let my hands slip from his face, but as his gaze tilts to mine, I don’t move.
Hedoes.
I think.
He leans, a bare fraction of movement, but it’s an infinitesimal shift that sends my pulse crashing in my ears. A sliver of a second where I feel his breath on my mouth and we’re so close we could kiss. And Sol…
His gaze flicks to my mouth.
I’m fucking sure of it.
But this heartbeat in time. This lightning flash. It doesn’t last. He inhales and the spell breaks. We part like surf rolling back from the shore and space opens between us.
My hands drop.
Sol shifts another few inches and the soft retreat deadens the air.
I scrub a palm down my face, glad Sol’s not looking at me. That he’s fixated on a spot on the floorboards as I breathe too fast and hard for something that didn’t just happen. “Why don’t you hook up anymore?”
Fuck.
I blurt the question like it’s nothing.
Sol’s head jerks like a puppet-master has yanked his fucking strings. “What?”
Regret swamps me.
Panic.
But I can’t catch the words as they fall and stuff them back in. They’re out there, sprawled between us like roadkill, and if I thought my heart was beating fast before my perception of speed was fucking pathetic.
“I—”Stop talking, idiot.
I clamp my mouth shut.
Back up on clumsy legs and hit the doorframe.
And look, Sol’s drunk. But he’s still got my six. I’ve forgotten so much, but I can’t recall a time since my life was forever changed that I haven’t looked for him in the dark and the blinding light, and found him right there.
Righthere.
He steadies me.
I give my rogue eye a vicious rub, but it’s not the juddering in my vision that has a groan burning up my windpipe. A tortured sound that takes everything I have to smother. It’s how Sol’s touch skates from my skin like a ghost. How he steps backwith the kind of dazed confusion etched on his face that usually belongs to me.
“Are you okay?”