I look at him, though. Shady glances, as if I’m peeping through a keyhole at something not meant for me. I track the rise and fall of his shoulders and the tilt of his neck. I feel every breath like they’re my own, and as the song fades out, and other voices climb over his, shifting the mood, I’m so fucking done I walk out halfway through a beer order.
Someone follows me.
It’s not Sol, so I don’t give much of a fuck. Until I realise it’s Skylar and he’s trailed me all the way to the water in the tiny cove that belongs to the pub. The minuscule slice of beach that even my damaged brain knew meant the world to Sol when we bought it.
“I don’t need parenting.”
Skylar reaches my side, shorter and narrower than me—than all of us, and yet somehow he’s the most imposing. At least when Mal isn’t wanting to slot every local who annoys him. “I know that. Just don’t fancy assaulting my eardrums with accordions just yet.”
Right. Because he’s been at work and we only schedule the Porth Luck folk band to play when he’s not here. Skylar puts upwith the slow pace of Cornish life, and the feudal bullshit that isn’t much different to the rules of an outlaw motorcycle gang, but he draws the line at accordions. We all have limits, eh?
“I don’t know where Mal is,” I tell him.
“I’m not looking for Mal.”
I turn my head. “No?”
“No.” Skylar crouches to pick a stone from a shale patch on the beach. Pockets it instead of skimming it over the waves. “Following him around like a puppy isn’t good for me.”
Tonight, I understand that more than I want to. But I’ve never seen Skylar simp after my brother, so whatever’s going on must be in his head, and way above any pay grade I’m fit for. And yet, I try. I have to. I love my friend and I love my brother. “Does loving Mal scare you?”
Skylar rises from the sand, hood pulled up against the whole world, his pewter-grey eyes glittering in the dark. “Some days.”
“Why?”
For a long moment, I don’t think he’ll answer. Skylar walks the line between pack and lone wolf so well sometimes I forget even Mal doesn’t know most of what goes on behind that hood. But the thing about love is that it changes you, recoding your DNA while you sleep, while you’re busy with other things, and no one’s immune to that. Not even Skylar Buchanan.
“Because I can’t pretend I wasn’t in bits before he found me,” he says in the end, “and there’s a fucked up part of me that resents him for lovingmeso well I don’t know how to be without him anymore.”
“Do you need to know?”
Skylar fires a scowl at the night mist creeping in from the ocean. But it’s soft at the edges. He doesn’t want to resent Mal’s love. “One of us has to die first. And selfishly, I hope it’s me.”
It’s as close as he’s ever got to admitting he and my brother are a forever thing. And he leaves me to puzzle out why he feltthe need to follow me onto the beach to tell me. To give up trying fairly quick, because I’m not sure it matters.
I crouch by the water and let a frigid wave run over my fingers, more Sol than myself in this moment, though he’d be in up to his knees by now, impervious to the bone-shaking cold. Because he’s warm warm warm and I didn’t know how to live without himbefore.When I took him on every deployment with me, every station, every mission. Every firefight.
He’s my best friend. My heart swells, brave in the face of the devil twisting my gut. Because it knows, of course it does, Sol’s far more than that.I want?—
Movement in my peripheral derails wherever that thought was going. The air shifts and not in the way that lets me know someone I love is close by.
No.
This prickle at the back of my neck is different, sharper,colder, and my senses snap into place before I remember they don’t work properly anymore,instincts burned too deep to lose.
I’m moving before I choose to. Breath quiet, cold forgotten, footsteps silent on the crunching sand, the shallow cove compressing to a map of shadows and sound.
Someone’s here.
Someone who’s trying to hide their footfalls, but I hear boots on the shingle, the rustle of an old coat, and I swear to fuck I scent guilt on the air as I ghost to where theSironais moored, the moon at my back,protect thema drumbeat in my chest.
Sol.
Skylar.
Mal.
Though it crosses my mind it could be him creeping around—my brother. I’m never sure what he gets up to when no one’s looking.