Fuck.
I’m hard as steel and I’m not even sure why. That memory, it’s benign. I watched a drop of sweat slide down Sol’s face, then he drove us home, and if I was fighting to breathe, it’s becausethere wasn’t room in that pint-sized scrap of metal he called a car. There was never room, not for both of us. There isn’t roomnow.
You wanted to touch that sweat-drop.
Did I?
I turn it over in my mind and recollection slams into me with such force my hand flies to my chest, as if I can push my thundering pulse back in. Like Mal tries to sometimes when his faulty heart runs away from him. But it’s not the kind of memory I can see. There’s no tangible scene. Just feelings—emotions and sensations, and I don’t know what to do with what’s left of me when it’s over.
I’m not seventeen anymore.
Neither is Sol.
We’re grown men and these feelings mean something. And Sol…he means everything.
I shut my eyes to that thought, but I don’t sleep. I drift in that dangerous place between awake and unconscious, my dick the only thing I’m truly aware of. That it’s rock-hard for the longest time, and then it subsides. As if it’s bored of waiting for something that’ll never come, a notion that leads me back to one of the worst conversations me and Sol have ever had.
“Being dead has to be better than living like this.”
“Jackie…please. Don’t say that. I can’t…Jack, please?—”
A shiver runs through me. The bad kind. The kind that’s a license to focus on the heat pooled in my groin over the months and months Sol spent talking me out of tracking down a gun and sticking it in my mouth; a feeling I thought hadn’t aged a day until I saw it fresh and raw in my brother.
You don’t feel like that anymore.
It’s true. I don’t—I feelaliveand even at my worst so far from death I almost mourn it. But I miss Sol more than I’ve ever wanted to die.
Because I love him.
I have no idea how long I’ve been lying in the dark when I finally hear his shitbox car crawl into the space by the back door. The exhaust sounds like a dying lawn mower, which makes me think of the clattering noise coming from theSirona, but I’m distracted by tracking Sol as he moves through the Joker, stopping at the bar for a glass of something, before his tread lands on the stairs.
One. Two. Three…
There are thirteen steps. The last one creaks, that’s why Mal never steps on it, a legacy of covert training, but Sol doesn’t mind the noise. Says it scares the ghosts away. And I can’t decide if it’s the best or worst thing to hear him coming.
It’s definitely the worst that I screw my eyes shut as he pauses by my open door before slipping into the bathroom. The fuck is wrong with me? I need to see him. Need to touch him. Hear his voice. As the shower turns on and pipes creak in protest, I can’t fathom how I’ve lasted this long without it. Withouthim, and the scene my imagination plays out as I listen to the water raining down on my best friend. As I picture him beneath the spray and the heat in my dick starts to burn.
Fucking hell.
I’ve listened to Sol take a thousand showers. How did I get here? To a place where I’m creeping on my best friend without actually looking at him?
It’d be wild if it didn’t feel so right.
So normal.
So definitely not new, though my skewed version of logic keeps telling me it is.
The shower shuts off.
Sol brushes his teeth, then exits the bathroom in a cloud of steam. I hear the impact as he tosses his old clothes on his bedroom floor and rummages in his drawers for clean ones.
Black cotton trousers so old they’re the same colour as Skylar’s eyes. No shirt because he thinks I’m content and asleep without him.
There’s that phrase again.
Without him.
Wrongness swamps me. I sit up as Sol comes back to my door.