Skylar.
He’s wearing Mal’s oldest t-shirt, no coat, and his hair is all over the place. Like he rolled out of bed and straight outside. “Fuck. There you are.” He grabs my arm—the one holding Fiadh’s lead, not the drinks. “Where’ve you been?”
I know that tone. The look on his face. Thereliefin his pewter eyes that he’s found me upright and walking and not face down in wet sand.
Unbidden, irritation boils up to meet it. “I went out.”
“Can see that.” Skylar runs his gaze over me. Through me. Whatever. “You feel like telling someone next time?”
No. I feel like punching him. Letting him punch me back. Unlike Sol and Mal, I’m pretty sure he would. But Skylar doesn’t deserve the sudden sharp edge to my mood. No one does. So I thrust the drinks at him and walk away.
I’m in the cellar when Sol comes to find me. I can tell he’s been out looking for me too, in the opposite direction to Skylar. “Don’t fucking say it.”
He raises his hands, already surrendering. “I wasn’t going to say anything except thanks for the coffee. I needed it this morning.”
“You can have it every fucking morning. You don’t need to drink sawdust for my sake.”
Sol pauses in the doorway, absorbing the aggression I can’t control. The stupid, meaningless fury that has Oscar taking his kid somewhere else instead of a place I want him to think of ashome. The kind of place Sol’s parents gave me and Mal before Dav went off the rails and stayed there.
I toss a barrel. It lands with a clatter that makes Sol flinch and it should remind me how tired he is. How overburdened with everyone else’s fucking problems. But I can’t contain the ugly fire in my veins. It’s like a demon inside me has slipped its binds, mean and sharp, and it won’t die until I’ve fucked something up.
Heat burns behind my eyes.
I reach for another barrel with taut hands and they’re ugly too.
Fuck.Fuck.I blow out a breath and curl them into fists. Make myself face Sol and the patient love in his weary gaze almost ruins me. How many times have I done this to him? Thrown rage andnothingin his face when he needs so much more? When he needs so much better? “Why do you do it?”
“Do what?” Sol speaks softly, like I’m a caged animal.
Anger spikes again, but I swallow it. “Why do you stay with me?”
“Stay with you?”
Barrel forgotten, I advance on him, taking advantage of the inches I have on him in every direction. “I’m fucking awful to you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I am.” I loom over him. “You’re a mess over what your dad has done to your family and all I’m doing is giving you more to worry about.”
Sol’s eyes, already bloodshot from stress and lack of real sleep, shine with unshed tears. “That’s not what this is.”
“What is it then?”
“It’s us, Jackie. This is who we are and we love each other anyway.”
I know he loves me. How can I not when I’d be dead without him? But it’s more than that. More than the years we were friends before I became this. More than the heady inferno we’ve found in my bed this past…I don’t know. However long it’s been, whatever’s been and gone, we’re more than all of it. I know that—Iknowit, so why is the image in my head, the map of who we are, why is it so incomplete?
And why the fuck-damn hell can’t I justsay that, instead of glowering at my best friend, the love of my life, like a school bully?
I don’t know the answers to any of those questions. Or how to ask them. And Sol knows the monsters inside me well enough to gauge I’m not fit for a real conversation right now. But as the natural moment for us to part ways comes and goes, he doesn’t move. He takes a few breaths that seem to go nowhere and the sense he has something on his mind is potent enough that even my brittle brain can’t miss it.
The fucked-up fury in me ebbs, edges blurring and finally pushed aside by the primal need to be as close to Sol as possible.
I set my hands on his shoulders, using his solid warmth to tether me. “I’m sorry.”
Sol shakes his head without uttering the words he usually does.
Shh, Jackie. I have you.