Sol stares up at me, dazed, as if he’s surfaced from the deepest ocean, but it’s not only me making him feel like that. He’s tired too, I see it in his heavy blink and reddened eyes, in the slow way he moves his mouth, like whatever he needs to say can’t take the weight of his fatigue.
I’m familiar with that feeling.
Too familiar.
So is Sol, but from the other side, and it fucks with my head to see what he’s seen since I came home with a hole in my brain. To feel how much it hurts.
I reach over him to the towel I abandoned on the bedside table before I toppled us onto my bed. Wipe my hands, slow and careful, and brush his messy hair out of his eyes, hair damp with sweat and heat and intimacy too profound to name.
Sol sighs, a long loose breath that seeps out of him as if he’s set down a back-breaking weight. For a heartbeat, I think he might fall asleep on me for the first time in years. His eyes slideshut and his body slackens, shifting closer to me in a way that makes something warm and protective unfurl inside me.
I bend my head to kiss his temple, and?—
The alarm system screams from the hallway, an ugly bleat that snatches peace from us like the devil claiming the dead.
Sol jolts beneath me, wide awake before my brain knows what’s happening.
The rest of me, though—I’m in motion before I comprehend what’s happening, and the world feels instantly wrong. Like the walls have thinned and the sky is lower, and the gossamer web of bliss around us shatters like paper thin glass.
Someone’s here.
14SOL
Jack’s a big man, and his balance is unpredictable. But he still moves like a predatory leopard when he doesn’t think too hard about it, and I’m too slow and too human to catch him before he’s gone from his room and halfway down the stairs.
It takes me a second to tuck my dick away and catch him up. But he blocks my path, keeping me behind him, and like everything this morning, I’m powerless to it. I can only shadow him as he bypasses the control screens telling us who’s knocking on the Joker’s front door like they own it and rips the damn thing open.
He’s a solid wall of Gallagher. I can’t see past him. But I hear who’s on the other side long before I see them. Smell the Charlie Red, interwoven with the ludicrous stupidity that’s blighted my whole life.
My mum.
Jack steps aside, revealing all five-foot-one of Lisa Bosanko, less than twelve hours since I last saw her, standing on our doorstep with a foil parcel tucked under her thin arm and her face alive with righteous anger.
“Did you punch your father again? Sol, we’ve talked about this.”
“What?”
She repeats herself as I try to blink myself awake, dimly aware of movement behind her. Of Mal as he retraces his steps to the window he jumped out of to intercept whoever had the nerve to knock on our door before Jack got downstairs. My ma has no clue she only got this far because he knows her. That most delivery drivers don’t make it to the door before he boots them back down the road. My ma has no clue about most things.
I scrub a hand down my face. “Who told you I punched Dad?”
“He did.”
“Right.” Of course he did. Of all the lies he tells her, it’s the worst. “When did I do this?”
“Last night.”
I was at sea last night. All night, until I came home to Jack this morning and my entire existence flipped on its head. But Lisa won’t know that. She doesn’t pay enough attention to me or anything else to have the first idea where I am on any given day, or how I feel about it.
My blood still hums with the waking dream I left upstairs, still simmers with awareness of how close Jack is standing to me, a solid presence at my back while I face my mother. His palm skims my flank and I ache to sink into the touch, but I can’t. If I lean on him he’ll know something’s wrong, and then I’ll have to tell him, and he’ll have offered me every penny he has before I’ve drawn my next breath.
I’m nowhere close to dressed, but I step away from Jack and into the elements anyway, shutting the door behind me. Shutting him in—shutting himout. The freezing wind feels like a punishment, the frigid concrete searing my bare feet, all the while I bet my dad is toasty-warm at home, unless the electric got cut off again.
I take Lisa’s arm and guide her away from the Joker. Away from Jack, Mal, and Skylar.
She resists as I steer her back to the road, gravel biting my cold feet. “Don’t manhandle me, young man. It’s bad enough you lay a hand to your father.”
I grit my teeth, swallowing the fury and frustration threatening the madness Jack gifted me this morning.