I think.
I don’t know.
And this morning, I have no chance of figuring it out. With things so messy between me and Sol—with Solgone—my brain abruptly opts out of processing thoughts and emotions, shutting down to protect itself. Numbness descends on me. A robotic fog I carry for the rest of the day. That I take to sleep with me when Sol doesn’t come home.
Worry needles my armour, though. It’s not brutally cold outdoors. But it’s damp with drizzle and the wind is high, gales rolling in from the Atlantic, and I wake the next morning with concern weighting my chest like a bruise.
Mal makes me breakfast.
Toast and jam.
I brew him decaf coffee he hates as much as the rest of us and turn away from his best attempt at comfort. And honestly, he doesn’t try all that hard. Not with words, anyway. He gets me downstairs to the gym that somehow feels like a sanctuary and a prison rolled into one. We spar through a military workout when we both know he’d rather be outside with his face turned to the wind. WhenIknow he’d drink cyanide before he hit me with any real force.
I’m less kind to him. Hoping he’ll be less kind to me. Doesn’t work. But the exercise does me good. I feel strong by the time we head upstairs again, muscles pumped, limbs taut with addictive tension. My head feels lighter too, I can think clearly—about everything except my beautiful best friend.
Come home, Sol. I need you.
It’s afternoon by the time any deity takes pity on me. The sky is bleeding indigo, evening setting in. I’m outside, scanning the horizon under the pretext of collecting glasses, and theSironacrests into view just as the shield my fragile brain threw up this morning starts to slip. A smudge of white and cornflower-blue against the dark sea, riding the chop with the precarious tilt she’s always had, the engine a rough clatter that has me frowning as it carries her to shore.
But that frown. As Sol nears, it doesn’t last. The sucker punch to my ribs finally fades and warmth floods me, vast and bright, rising in my veins with a giddy joy I can’t pretend is anything but what it is.
Sol.
He’s home.
And Iseehim. A tall figure on the deck, shoulders squared to the wind, taking everything Mother Nature has to throw at him, his curly hair wild and heavy with rain.
TheSironaangles into the harbour, then breaks off into the narrow slipway leading to the cove. Something lifts inside meagain, and it’s too big to define. So I don’t. I let my brain do what it wants—I let it breathe, let it live, and I don’t fight the impulse sweeping over me.
Glasses forgotten, I hop the drystone wall my brother repaired over the summer. Jog down the shingle-covered path, my boots steady and sure on the wet stone as theSironanudges her way home.
She makes land.
Sol ties her in and looks up in the same moment I reach him, but he doesn’t see me coming. Doesn’t have a clue I’m about to sweep him off his sea legs and into my arms.
We collide. I grab him around the waist and haul him clean off his feet, my face finding a home in his salty neck, my heart in the unfiltered amusement of his startled grunt.
I spin him before I remember my own tenuous balance. Then I set him down and lean back enough to see him. “I’m sorry.”
A frown threatens his bemused happiness. “For what?”
“I don’t know. But I am.”
Sol takes a measured breath, as if he’s trying to catch a feeling that’s run away from him. “You don’t need to be sorry for a single damn thing. Life is complicated, Jackie. And it doesn’t stop when we don’t understand things.”
We. Is that true? Is Sol as confused and dizzy with this as I am? And what isthis?I hold him a little tighter and measure the effect on my body—on my skin, my pulse, and my ability to think of anything that isn’t his flesh and bone in my arms. “I feel like I’m waking up all over again.”
A rocketing gust of wind lifts the unruly curls from where they hang in Sol’s eyes. Bronze-brown orbs blaze at me, and I know the meaning of my blurted words isn’t lost on him. I woke up twice from a major head injury. The first time, all I knew for certain was that he wasn’t there. The second, I knew he was. Right now, I know he’s herestill, and yet it’s not enough.
I want more.
Ineedmore.
But what about him? What does he need? “Sol?—”
His phone rings in his pocket. My brain contracts at the sudden sound, but I stay in the moment as he curses and silences the thing. “Sorry.”
“You can answer it.”