“I’m not.”
The rum bottle is halfway to my mouth again.
I set it down. “Something happen?”
Skylar shakes his head. “No, I just…I don’t know. I feel like I need to sit with how much I miss him to get through it. Or I’ll be someone different by the time he comes home.”
“He could come home tomorrow. Tonight, even.”
“What if it’s months?”
Counterargument bubbles up my throat, but dies as I realise I don’t really have one. I asked Jack the same question the last time we spent any significant time together—the morning we lay in his bed after Mal left—and his answer was unsparing enough that I blocked it out.
If it was straightforward, they wouldn’t need Mal. And following those threads instead of steaming in, it takes time, Sol. Time that gets people home alive instead of in pine boxes.
It’s the worst thing—the absolute worst—how right Jack was. And how calm he was when he said it. Despite the shock of Malleaving, the words came out of him clean and coherent, how they used tobefore, like the injury to his brain had never happened, and I hate that I felt steadied by it. That I still do.
I drink more rum.
Skylar watches me with the eyes of an old friend. A friend who’s done dancing around two things that must be truly obvious to him by now. My dad. Me and Jack. But he says nothing for the longest time, and neither do I.
Eventually, we roll downstairs.
Iroll.
Skylar never did drink that beer, so he’s sober as a judge as we venture into the carnage of a rowdy Friday night in Porth Luck.
The bar is stacked. Bodies jammed together as festive lights twinkle in the beams above the trays of cider-spiked mince pies we’ll lay out every day until we close on Christmas Eve. I duck behind it to help out, while Skylar takes his customary perchonit, so he can see out over the crowd without being jostled enough to lamp someone, or getting fondled to death by the few women among the hordes of bladdered fishermen.
Drunk bartending isn’t as easy as it looks. I spill beer down myself. On my shirt, on my shoes.
Jack laughs.
I feel it more than I hear it. Then I spin around and he’s behind me, sleeves rolled up, eyes bright with timeless amusement, the angles of his face gilded by the firelight catching him just right.
Quiet rolls over me—the stunned kind, as all noise and motion around us fades, muffled by the live wire between us. And his hot stare, it isn’t careful. Isn’t soft.
It’s charged.
Deliberate.
Like he’s remembering what we were doing every night before Mal left. Ten days of beautiful madness, smothered in the end by real life. By open bedroom doors and the nights I’ve slept alone since, restraint snarled beneath my ribs like a second soul, heavy and untouched. Until now, as I see every long night of yearning and want carved into Jack’s face.
He takes a step towards me and my pulse stutters.
I rub my chest.
He tracks the movement, eyes darkening like it offends him, and something reckless unspools between us.
The fishermen are singing tonight. A shanty swells, raucous and loud, as Jack narrows the distance between us.
He has a pint glass in his hand, full of dark ale. He reaches around me to place it on the bar, still holding my gaze, and his lips nearly brush my cheek he’s that close.
“Kitchen. Now.”
I don’t need telling twice. It ruins me that he tells me once. That my body responds before the rest of me and I find myself alone in the cool dark space of the Joker’s long-abandoned kitchen.
Actually, it’scold, but I don’t have much time to feel it before the door behind me opens and closes. Before strong hands grab me and crowd me against it.