Another light touch.
Another pulse in the dark.
“You need help sleeping tonight?”
Byhelp, he means the pills that make me fall off the edge of the world and take days to come back. A world that turns black in ways I can’t stand, as though the dreams I can’t reach and the years I’ve lost are the same haunted void.
I shake my head. “I’m fine.”
Sol studies me a second longer. Then he goes back to his bed, leaving me loitering in the doorway unsure which way is onward and which is back.
It’s so tempting to watch him stretch out. To track the shape of him under the lamp light, and the rise and fall of his bare shoulders. Sol’s every breath and movement has always fascinated me. Before, now, and every time I woke up in a hospital bed to the grounding sight of him leaning over me, his hand wrapped so tight around mine.
That enduring grip.
Some days it was my only tangible connection to the world. Others, it scared me how much I needed it.
It scares me now.
I back out of Sol’s room and return to my own, closing the door behind me to four bland walls and the echo of his touch running through me like a charge from the earth’s core. A bed that feels all wrong as I sit on the edge of it, elbows on my knees, replaying every moment we’ve shared today.
His hand on my arm.
My back.
My face?—
Fuck. My body reacts too fast for my brain to catch up, and I feel it before I can stop it.
Heat.
Pressure.
Blood in all the wrong places.
Pulse in my ears, I lie down, dragging the covers over the hardness at my waist. Ignoring it. Fixating on it. Fuck, I want to touch it, but I can’t. If there’s one thing worse than wanking over my best friend, it’s the thought of him finding me mid-seizure with my dick in my hand and his name on my lips, and I just fuckingcan’t.
And so I stare at the ceiling. Breathe through every tiny noise of Sol moving around his room before he turns the radio off and the flat is deadly quiet until Mal comes home.
He’s not okay. I know it because Fiadh stays with him instead of scratching at my door to get in. But I’m too worked up to go to my brother. Too aroused to leave my bed without tripping over my dick.
I’m too messy to be alive.
Falling asleep feels like death.
But he’s there.
Sol.
And I call for him, again. Always again. In the dark as the storm rages on, I call for him like the sea calls the drowned.
3SOL
The fierce storm breaks at dawn. The call to it fades and I watch Jack for signs of life. He’s an early riser when he’s feeling good.
This morning, though, he’s out for the count, head pillowed on my chest, muscled arm slung over my abdomen, and it’s the best and worst thing I’ve ever known.
Love that I’m able to comfort him.