“Needs what?”
Skylar has a temper. His job has taught him to contain it. But I know him. Know the twitch in his jaw and the flex in fingers more inked than mine as he grips the steering wheel too tight, fighting the urge to punch it.
It’s a while before he sighs. “You’re the most impossible fucker I’ve ever met.”
I tear my gaze from the black night sky. “You’ve met Mal, right?”
“Fuck off.”
All right then. I turn back to the window.
Skylar thumps my arm, catching the bruise on my shoulder from the bulkhead.
I swallow a wince.
“Mal’s not as difficult as he wants the rest of us to think,” Skylar says.
“That doesn’t make him easy.”
“Doesn’t make you easy, either. Something going on you want to talk about?”
“Like what?”
“You need to scrubwhatfrom your fucking lexicon. How long have we been friends?”
I count the years. From the flat we shared when I was an idiot working on trawlers to pay off Dav’s debt to Jack, to where we find ourselves now. Voice the number and Skylar almost smiles. But he doesn’t, because he’s still annoyed, and as we slow for a red light, Porth Luck twinkling in the distance, the same emotion barrels through me. Fear turns to the kind of anger that eats a man alive and I yank the handbrake, reaching for the door handle with my other hand. “Just because you fixed your life, doesn’t mean it’s so easy for me to fix mine.”
“Sol—”
“Leave me alone.” I echo the words Jack murdered me with a few weeks back. Before he asked me to help him believe sexual pleasure wouldn’t kill him. Before he kissed me. Before he shattered me into a thousand pieces I’ve yet to scrape from the ceiling.
I lurch from Skylar’s car and leave him at the lights and he doesn’t come after me. Can’t, actually. Unless he wants to plough through the sea wall and pursue me across wet sand.
He’d do it if he still had a bike. If he’d stayed in the life he was born into and walked the same path as Cam and Saint. But Skylar…he altered his destiny. I don’t know how. He’s never told me and I’ve never asked.
Shame.
Maybe if I did, he could show me how to alter mine.
I traverse the sand to the foamy edge of the incoming tide. It washes over my boots and I let it. I’m already wet and carrying enough reason to piss Jack off. Saltwater in my shoes is nothing. On my hands, on my skin, it’s everything. It’s who I am, and I take a moment with the ocean, wishing I was drunk enough to enjoy it. Wishing time would stand still, except that would mean I’d never be with Jack again, and however angry I might make him tonight, the call to go to him is so strong I almost stumble as I come upright and turn my back on the ocean.
The pub is still open.
No live music tonight, but a local has a banjo out the back and the singing is loud enough to welcome me home.
I slip through the crowd to the back bar. So drawn to Jack I feel it in every cell of my body, my nerves already anticipating the warmth of his touch, even though he’s too busy serving to notice me yet.
It’s my turn to clean the flat. I should go upstairs and ditch my wet clothes for some of Jack’s. Dig through the half dozen bottles of Ajax to find the Dettol my nan used to bath me in.
But Jack.
He glances up in the same moment I find I can’t look away, and whatever emotion I expect to see in him, the smile that lights his face is the reason I was goddamn born.
I smile back. For the split second he has before someone else claims his attention. Then I’m bereft and I can’t bear to stay.
Upstairs, I shower and change my clothes, swapping my wet gear for sweats that were once Jack’s, but Mal wears more these days. Means they smell of cedar wood instead of oak and musk, but I can live with that. I push a broom around, smothering yawns in the crook of my elbow. Mop the floors and clean the kitchen. I’m fettling the bathroom I share with Jack when I hear someone come home.
Skylar.