Before Jack snapped his gaze from my mouth and asked me why I don’t hook up anymore.
It’s killing me that he likely meant that I should. That I need to, for his sake. So I stop leaning into moments that aren’t real.
And then…
Leave me alone.
Didn’t imagine that bit, and my chest contracts, a lance of pain real enough to lodge between my ribs and stay there.
Leave me alone.
He’s barely spoken to me since. I’ve had to get used to the shape of his muscled back as he walks out of every room I walk into. To the quiet when he can’t escape me and he keeps his lips pursed, parking whatever he’s thinking and feeling. So it’sseparate, and?—
My phone rings, buzzing against my thigh like a trapped wasp. I want to ignore it, but I can’t. I could never.
Jack.
I rip my phone from my pocket, my heart in my throat. But it soon sinks as the screen flashes the name of the last person I want to talk to. Despair turns to anger, an emotion I loathe with every fibre of my being, and I long again for a deathly swell to put me out of my misery. Or at least topple my phone overboard.
Of course my dad is calling menow, as if he scents I’m already flailing on the sea breeze.
I answer with a sigh, wishing for the hate I’m incapable of. “What?”
“Sol, lad. Did you talk to your brother yet?”
“No. I already told you I’m not tapping Sev for money.”
“He’d give it you, I know he would.”
“So? Why should he? Even if he has as much as you need, he’s not the one with a thirty-grand gambling debt, is he?”
Over the wind, I hear my dad shuffling around, rustling things to break the line up, like he always does to avoid admitting his sins.
“Maybe you could talk to Jack?” he says eventually, and a scream builds in my throat. A violent howl that makes my soul bleed even as I swallow it down.
“We’ve talked about this too. I’m not asking Jack for money. I still owe him from the last time you nearly put Mum on the streets.”
“He helped before?—”
“Exactly!” I explode. “That wasbefore, and it was a piss-take then. What makes you think he’s got that kind of money anyway? That you didn’t clean him out last time?”
“That was years ago, boy. And I know it was wrong, I just need this one more?—”
I hang up, like I have a dozen times over the past week, every time he’s called and called and called, telling me over and over he’s somehow secured a loan on the house Jack paid off and blown it all on the horses. Only this time, when I drop my phone into the wheelhouse pocket, something else claws at me as the wind picks up and I start theSirona. Something worse than the groan and shudder of that maybe-cracked engine block or the prospect of my family home being repossessed by the bank again.
Something money can’t fix.
Because Jack looked at me like he wanted something he shouldn’t?—
Except,no.
He didn’t.
I imagined it—because Iwantedit—and I was too bladdered to control my face, my gaze, or whatever it was that spooked him, and now, for the first time ever, he’s pushing me away.
And I don’t know what I’ll do if it’s permanent.
My dad’s waiting for me when I get back to shore.