I can’t remember if he’s called me Jackie since we were kids. If Mally came first or after. Hate that. Love that it’s only him who would ever dare. That it’s only him so close to us.
“Jack?”
No. Don’t say my name like that.
I find a hard blink from somewhere. “Yeah?”
“Why didn’t you come last night? Are you still afraid of it?”
A laugh bubbles out of me, unchecked and free; a mood one-eighty that takes us both by surprise. “I haven’t been scared since the first time. Being with you made me forget I ever was.”
It’s a simple truth, but Sol’s expression is anything but, and a flare of anxiety cuts me deep.
“It wasn’t important,” I try again, my brain working as hard as it can without melting down to see where I’ve fucked up. “I was too locked in to you to even think about it, and…I liked feeling like that.”
Sol’s gaze doesn’t soften. If anything, it sparks with sharper emotion, and my pulse starts to skid. Flashing lights. Floor shifting beneath me?—
He kisses me, warm and sweet, steering me from the edge of a cliff. I make a gruff sound and kiss him back, but I’m gentle too, and it’s so fucking good, as it ends, I find the words I need to say. “You were enough, Sol. You’realwaysenough. I don’t care about anything else.”
Emotion rolls through Sol’s open gaze like weather off the sea. His eyes glass for a second, as if he’s feeling something that hurts and heals at the same time. Something bright and dark and dangerous. Something fragile.
Like me.
No.
In Sol’s arms, with him in mine and his kiss forever imprinted on me, I’m not fucking weak. I’m awake and alive with everything he is to me and what it means.
Tell him you love him.
No. That’s not right either. He knows I love him. This is something else—something I reach for with both hands, but can’t define.
“I have to go.” Sol presses his lips to my temple. “Aras got sick so Oscar can’t do the whiting run.”
My heart sinks, letting me know how much I’d been counting on Sol staying close without realising. And it must show on my face when Sol draws back to leave. I see real pain in his eyes too and it hurts us both.
“You missing Mally, eh?”
Not what I was thinking, but he’s not wrong either. I nod, slowly, letting my brother’s prolonged absence sink in and merge with everything else I’m feeling, and…it’s a lot.
I reach blindly for Sol, like I always do when I feel so much about so many things I don’t know what to do with any of it.
“Hey.” He steps into my arms again, a perfect fit, like he never left. “I know things are weird at the moment, but it’s not in your head. It’s in mine too, and when I get back, we’ll talk, okay? There’s some stuff I need to tell you, then we’ll figure all this out. But, Jack?”
Sol holds my face in his hands.
I’m lost in him. “Yeah?”
“I love you. Whatever we’re meant to be to each other, that’s never going to change.”
20SOL
I’d never wish ill health on anyone, least of all a child. But it’s just as well Aras is sick and needs his dad. TheSironabreaks down at sea on my third day of solo runs and I’m so grateful Oscar isn’t here to see it I can’t even be that vexed about it.
Or maybe I’m losing the will to live.
It’s the day before Christmas Eve. The Joker is as busy as it gets in winter and I haven’t found a moment to talk to Jack about anything beyond beer deliveries and leaking roofs. If we’re not working, we’re asleep. In the same bed—his—and I cherish every moment of that, awake and asleep. In my dreams, when I’m lucky enough to remember them.
Yet a sense of wrongness hangs over me.