“I could drop it in the sea too, love.”
Love. I’m holding him so tight against me, on the jetty in the fading daylight, where the afternoon drinkers can see how entwined we are. “You’d never pollute the ocean like that.”
Over his shoulder, I see the bags and bags of sea litter he’s collected while he’s been gone. Plastic debris he’ll drive eight miles for recycling before he comes inside and gets out of his damp clothes.
And of course, I want to strip him where he stands. Wrap him up warm and dry. A compulsion that isn’t new, or even old. It just is and it always has been. But what is that feeling that hovers below it, above it, and everywhere in between? What is this need I have to map every inch of his tattooed skin with my scarred hands? With my clumsy mouth?
I drop my head to his shoulder and groan.
Sol rubs my back, solid and strong, as if he hasn’t spent forty-eight hours piloting a boat alone on the winter sea.
The thought drives me upright again, a jerk of my head that’s almost too fast, but Sol grips the back of my skull, tempering the movement. It buys me precious seconds to stare at his mouth as though I’ve never seen it before.
Then he lets go and withdraws a little, putting some space between us. “I need to make a run to the tip. Wanna come?”
Yes. A thousand times yes. But I can’t. I have no bar staff until six o’clock and even then, it’s fifty-fifty whether I’ll be able to leave them to it for a bit.
Sol sees my answer before I say it.
He nods and drops his hands on my shoulders, treating me to a stare as deep as the Mariana Trench before he seems to shake himself free of it. “I need to see my mum too. I’ll find you later?”
“You won’t have to look that hard.”
Meaning, I’ll be behind the bar, like I always am. Or in the cellar hefting barrels. Or alone in my bed if his mam waylays him like she always does. But thinking about Lisa Bosanko puts someone else on my mind—putsDavon my mind, and I realise too late that I haven’t told Sol about his father casing theSirona.
It’s too latenow. Sol’s already back on the boat, loading his arms with bags of trash to stuff in his beat-up old car. I move to help him, but a local hollers my name from inside. They’re dry and I need to get back to work.
Can’t lie, it’s in me to tell the old git to fuck off and stay with Sol anyway. But the locals keep the lights on at the Joker. Without them, I’d have no meaningful occupation, and Sol’d be without the second income stream we’re fighting so hard to grow.
With a last yearning look at his back, I trudge indoors and spend the rest of the evening trying torememberall the things I need to say to Sol when he comes home. It’s not that different to how the morning played out, but with the warmth of his embrace still seared on my soul, it’s less fucking fraught.
I close the pub. Ferry the takings upstairs and give Mal the nod to double-check the alarm system Sol will have to wrestle with when he comes home.
Skylar is already sleeping.
My brother hovers, but I push him away—I push him down the hall and wish him a good fucking evening.
Or a good evening of fucking.
Not sure how it comes out, and I don’t much care. I’m nothing but an empty bed and ears straining for any sound ofSol’s knackered Corsa. Rusted paint. Wobbly gear stick. Sand permanently ingrained in the seats.
The door that never quite shuts?—
A salty summer breeze barrels through the gap in the bent door arch. Steam fogs the windows from our soaked wetsuits and I peel mine down to my waist, goosebumps prickling my skin.
Sol eyes me from the driver’s seat, laughter in his eyes, a song on his lips. But it’s not the shanties he sings with the old fishermen when he works on Dav’s boat. It’s Brianstorm and he’s tapping his fingers, shoulders moving, whole body alive to the beat and the melody.
“Your wetsuit needs off,” I remind him, like I did before we got in the car.
A pause lands between us, one that has me fumbling the lighter I’m trying to light my smoke with—the cigs we stole from my dad when he passed out on the couch last night.
The lighter falls from my hand. I bend to retrieve it. Come upright to Sol’s bare skin, warm and brown from the sun, ribs marred by a scrape he got tumbling onto a rock when his dad got in a fight with another fisherman.
I want to kill old man Nelson for that. Not literally, but I’ll fight him next time. See who winds up with rock marks on their skin.
If I’m here, that is, and suddenly, the world feels small enough to fit inside this tiny car and it chokes me. I gaze at Sol and he gazes right back, and?—
I blink and I’m in bed. I’malone, but something has changed. Takes me a minute to realise it’s my dick.