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I sigh. “On what?”
“Closeness. Intimacy.”
“How is getting laid going to help me with that?”
“Sometimes you find the whole package.”
“Then you are talking about love, not sex. And I don’t need that either.”
A world of protest colours Sol’s face, but he’s interrupted by a coastguard vessel intercepting us, cutting across our bow.
He straightens, mood already shifting, easing the throttle as the coastguard pulls alongside us and an officer leans across the gap.
“Hold position, boys. We’ve got a rescue in progress off the beach.”
They move off without waiting for much of an answer, but their warning sucks the air from my lungs.
Rescue.
I look to the shore as Sol adjusts the Sirona, letting her settle on the line they want held. But we’re too far out for me to glean much beyond a hive of indiscernible activity, and somehow that’s worse. Someone’s in trouble, or they were, and we know better than most how fast the worst can happen.
Our conversation dies as if it never mattered. We stand close together and barbed weight settles on my chest, phantom pain fluttering in my abdomen, too faint to be a memory, too real to ignore.
“Sol?”
“I know.” He moves nearer still, his shoulder pressed to mine. “They’ll get them, Os. I feel it.”
A year ago, I’d have believed him. Have said it first, maybe. Now, something jagged lives in my bones. I don’t trust the sea to be kind anymore, and even though I’m alive to share this fateful moment with Sol, the blind faith I had in fate has deserted me.
And so I count seconds instead. The minutes. Waiting for the shapes onshore to sharpen into something I don’t want to see or face. Light shifts. Shadows find us, and time expands to become meaningless.
At least, it feels that way to me. I don’t know where we are in the world when the call finally comes to move in.
Sol brings us into land, the Sirona cutting through the home stretch of water, our girl as eager to be done with this as we are. Her mooring lies a little way down from the beach, in the cove attached to the Joker, but the chaos on the water has spilled out into Porth Luck’s narrow streets. There’s no escaping it—the sight of bodies on the sand-crusted pavement, seawater clinging to their pale skin.
They are young.
Two are conscious, coughing and retching, hands braced to the sunbaked concrete as if this is how they’re clinging to life. A third is flat on her back and deathly still. Surrounded by motion, practised and pressured, and I stutter to a halt as I alight dry land, knowing this dance, recognising the angle of the body, the fading line of it, for exactly what it is.
Sol collides with my shoulder and a startled curse escapes him. It should reach me, but something else—someone else—hooks me deeper into a scene I need to be a thousand miles from right now.
Skylar. Barefoot, rumpled hair, he must’ve run straight from the Joker to help and he’s in the middle of it, voice sharp, gaze so focused and grave he almost doesn’t look like him. Except...I’ve seen this version of him before. Leaning over me, hands on my chest, hauling me back into a body that had already given up with the sheer force of his unshakable will.
Velnias.
I swallow hard, frozen in place as Sol moves around me, gratitude for Skylar’s dedication to saving my life morphing with a feeling harder to name, in English or Lithuanian. An emotion that grates on me the same way it has ever since, whenever I see Skylar and I’m already…triggered, the word is triggered—by…gods, most of the time, I do not know more than I don’t like looking at my friend when I feel like this, and it’s wrong.
I know it is.
It’s why I stay instead of pushing through the crowds and jammed emergency vehicles to go home. Why I stand with my feet planted to the ground, watching the hands of a man who won’t stop, won’t give up, even when a paramedic tells him to.
Moments later, Skylar revives the young girl lifeguards have pulled from the ocean. Only then can I look away and find myself alone in a huddle of the men I call family.
Sol.
Mal and Jack who’ve arrived later to this carnage than we have.
Jack pulls Sol to him with such force they both stumble. Mal has eyes only for Skylar as he watches his lover stand down and hand over care of the girl to the paramedics who would’ve declared her dead.
