No.No.And he knows it, of course he does. The question is a courtesy. So what in the ever-loving-fuck was mine?
Go to bed.
For me, it’s a fabled get-out clause.
With everyone but Sol.
Because he’ll follow and climb into my bed with me. He’ll hold me through every shiver and twitch. Through every pained moment my brain misfires so hard I lose another piece of myself before it’s over. He’ll take it, he’llchooseit, because he’s too busy keeping me upright to remember he’s supposed to be living his own fucking life.
Lazy fishing trips where he isn’t racing the tide to scrape enough cash together to pay Oscar and keep theSironaafloat. Sweaty, rowdy gigs in pubs that aren’t ours. Hook-ups around heady beach bonfires while the stars gleam over the ocean.
You took that from him. A brutal truth eclipsing whatever part of me drifts towards uncharted territory and drives me to widen the distance between us.
“Jack—”
I turn away from him. “Leave me alone.”
5SOL
Jack’s in a mood. Usually I’d blame the cash I left in the microwave for him. A peppercorn sum compared to the sixty grand he gave my mum six months before he got hurt, and an old joke from our childhood he never finds funny.
But this feels like something else, and no matter how hard I focus on the rabble of spiteful crabs trying to take my fingers off, I’m still in the kitchen with Jack, drunk and listing—drunk andtumbling—headlong into his stare and imagining I see something I’ve yearned for my whole life.
We’re standing too close.
The edge of the world is soft.
His body heat reels me in, and fool that I am, I think mine does the same to him. I lean closer?—
Gods, make it stop.
Make it stop.
Make itstop.
I drop the pot and it topples overboard. I need the money from the big brown crabs, but I can’t bring myself to care.
He’s looked at you like that before…
Yeah.Before. So it doesn’t count. It doesn’tmatterthat he looked at methat night so long ago as if he’d been waiting twentyyears to touch me. That hekissedme that night like he’d drown if he stopped. Stripped me naked and?—
I cut the memory off at the neck. A raw sound escapes me as I shove it down where it needs to stay. That night was a one-off and belongs in a life I don’t get to live anymore. ThatJackdoesn’t get to live. The past is dead and no amount of drunken yearning is going to change that.
Not that I’m drunk right now.
I wish.
Instead I’m out here on theSirona,at the mercy of the honest Cornish winter, and I’m cold. Or at least, I would be if my imagination wasn’t making me sweat into my clothes.
I peel off my jumper.
Toss it in the vague direction of the cabin.
It lands on the sea-damp deck and on cue, the wind bites deeper, reminding me what a blithering idiot I am. The waves are calm, but everything inside me yawns and rolls like I’m pitching through a squall, and it’s one of those days I wish the sea would swallow me whole.
You’d soon be praying for Bucca to spit you back out.
‘Course I would. Jack needs me. And that thought…it lets our distorted encounter in the kitchen the other night crowbar its way back in. The nearness. The heat. The way we broke apart so slowly it couldn’t have been a mistake we’d drifted so close in the first place.