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Not even beautiful farmers with wheat-blond hair and disarming blue eyes. Soft lips, hard muscles, and a gleam in his gaze that made me think he knew something about me I didn’t know myself.

Yet.

Keep working.

Everything else sits just out of reach and I leave it there.

Sol pilots us home. He’s excited to see Jack and his energy is hard to resist. He sings, to himself, mostly, but the folk tunes running through his Cornish veins call to me like they have since we met.

I join in, my voice deeper than his, thicker around words unfamiliar to my Lithuanian tongue, but I find myself in them. The tales and yarns it’s taken me years to decipher. “Someday, you will have to tell me why you sing songs about trees when we are at one with the waves, my friend.”

Sol leans into the arm I’ve slung around his shoulders. “The land is as important as the ocean. You know that better than I do.”

Because I’m from farming stock. Sol isn’t, and still the man sings of ash and oak as though they stand on the water with us.

Smiling, I shake my head and let him carry the rest of the tune alone, enjoying the evening sun. Without Aras at my side, it’s as happy as I ever find myself, but it doesn’t last.

We can see land when my equilibrium shifts.

A subtle hollowing under my ribs, the deck a fraction less steady under my boots. I turn my head and the horizon drags, a feeling I know and have come to hate. My phone buzzes a heartbeat later, catching the signal we’ve been without all day. The alert lands and I check it, already irritated, swiping it away just as fast.

“All right?”

I ignore Sol, aware he’ll have the same numbers on his own phone, and step off from him to take care of it. Easy. Quick. Efficient. A part of the day I shouldn’t remember. And yet it lingers, simmering under my skin like a virus I can’t shake, distrust like an iron curtain between my soul and the body that let me down so badly last Christmas.

It’s nothing. You’re just hungry.

And tired. With Aras at his mother’s house for the night, when we’re done with the pop-up I want to take a shower, eat a second dinner, and fall asleep early enough that my pre-dawn alarm won’t leave me nauseous. The numbers on my phone screen don’t change any of that. But I’m annoyed now and it’s something else I can’t shake.

“You need to get laid.”

Sol says this from the wheelhouse. After answering a text from Sev—Sol’s brother, not mine—I slip my phone into my pocket and turn to face him again.

“Why are you saying this to me?”

“Because it’s true.”

“Since when?”

“Since forever.”

I snort because that is not true. Sol’s interest in my love life, or lack of it, has only surfaced since his own evolved into the joyful existence he deserves, and truly it is the sole thing I dislike about his newfound happiness with Jack. That he wants everyone he loves to be as content as he is. “Sol, I do not need sex to enjoy my life.”

“You think that because you haven’t had it in so long you’ve forgotten how good it can be.”

“Don’t make me repeat myself. Or I will go home without unloading the crates.”

An empty threat. I would never leave Sol to work alone, on dry land or at sea for a voyage longer than a few hours, an unspoken pact we’ve forged since the Sirona survived the worst storm of the century to carry us again. But the sentiment holds: be quiet, my friend. I do not want to talk of such things.

A sentiment Sol ignores. “What’s the best sex you’ve ever had?”

I suppress a groan, along with the urge to manually check my blood sugar, coercing myself into believing the numbers on my phone screen, the silence of the stupid thing. “Why do you want to know this?”

“Because I remember you telling me about it, way back when. How lit up you were by it. I know people have different appetites for sex and none of it’s wrong. I just…oh, I don’t know. Ignore me.”

“I am,” I say mildly, despite the irritation building in my gut. I’m not an irritable man. But lately I feel like I might explode at any moment, and if it happens, it can’t be with Sol. He is kindness and light, and he’s been hurt enough.

A resolution that holds as long as Sol purses his lips, but he’s not done. “You’re missing out, you know.”