He doesn’t like brown ale.
Another silent curse rattles me, frustration roiling with the hangover effect of a simple glance from my housemate. My business partner. We’re so many things to each other, and so many feelings I can’t catch them all.
I take the old geezer’s pint to him. Place it on the bar. He opens his hand to reveal a roll of notes and I realise too late that he’s on the take. Notes blur as he shuffles them, talking a mile a minute, all charm and smoke, a vagabond trickster playing a con as old as the Joker itself.
Nothing I haven’t seen before, but my eye…it throbs in its socket, and my focus frays. I can’t keep up?—
Bang!
A beer bottle slams on the bar, thunking down on the notes the player has laid out. A storm of dark hair and ink invades his space, but it’s not Sol and his sun-warmed curls. It’s a woman with raven locks and daggers tattooed on her collarbones, her glare as lethal as the notoriety of her family name.
O’Brian.“Fuck off,” the woman snarls. “Now.”
The old fella takes a breath, brash stupidity rolling off him in waves. Then he spies something beyond the biker queen staring him down and does himself a runner.
She sneers after him. Then she turns to me and her face softens to something beautiful. “Hey, Jack.”
I tip my head. “Orla. How goes it?”
The queen smiles. “You’re not the Gallagher I came to peep on, but you’ll do. And we came to see Oscar too. River misses him.”
River O’Brian. The younger brother who joins Orla at the bar as she says his name. But she’s not done talking about mine. “Where are you hiding him, eh?”
Mal.“I’m not hiding my brother.” Not on purpose, anyway. Can’t say I know where he is, though. He’s not good at staying put when Skylar’s not here. “He’s out with the dog.”
Relief calms me as I remember that. Mal loves Fiadh and I know he won’t do anything reckless if he has her.
“Does he look like you?”
I’m staring at nothing. I snap out of it and focus on Orla again. “I don’t think so.”
Her red-lipped smile sharpens to a grin. “Shame. Though I reckon Skylar’s pretty enough to make anyone chopped.”
She pushes off the bar and leaves me with that, striding to the door and into the arms of a man I should know, but I’m too frayed tonight to recall.
I brace both hands on sticky wood and seek out Sol again. Someone’s talking to him, slapping his back and shoving a pint glass into his hands. But his gaze is on me, and I realise he saw everything from the trickster to my brief encounter with the feared matriarch of the Rebel Kings Motorcycle Club.
He tilts his head a little, a silent question through the rowdy chaos of the Joker tonight.All right?
Am I?
I think about it and nod slowly, my bearings coming back to me as the presence of an O’Brian at the bar keeps patrons away for now.
I’m okay.
Sol holds my gaze a moment longer. Then the singing starts again, another storm rolls in, and life moves on.
River drinks the beer his sister left on the trickster’s pile of fake cash. Then he hops up on the bar where Skylar sometimes perches, and I don’t stop him. The River O’Brian I used to know was never present enough to enjoy anything, let alone the spectacle of Porth Luck’s fishermen bringing the house down. This version of him, clean, grounded, and married to his childhood best friend, is transfixed by another mate. By Oscar and the years of trust and friendship between them. By the fraternal love they share in its purest form.
Know how that feels.
Without the pure part.
Maybe—
Thunder booms, rattling the steamed up windows. Lightning forks over the black swell beyond the sea wall and the flash seems to hold a warning I can’t decipher. The air tastes of metal. An echo stirs inside me, but of what?
Fuck, I wish I knew.