I don’t want them.
We’re never going to happen.
So where’s the harm in thinking about it?
In too many places to contemplate when the real question is where the hell is Mal?
I swipe my phone screen, checking Sol’s online status. Calling him again. No luck, but it’s not that late. It’s not that rough.
They’ll be okay.
But still I watch the waves, locked on the horizon, caught between a deeper kind of worry I’ve never felt before and my spasming gut, Porth Luck’s history of freak storms and giant waves rolling through my brain.
The empty ocean taunts me.
I shut the blinds and lie on my bed, AirPods jammed in my ears, Sleep Token blasting my brain. It’s dark, the way I like it, but for the first time in forever—since Jack last had a major seizure—I leave my door open, gaze fixed on the moonlight flooding in from Mal’s window, on high alert for shadows in the hallway.
Him.
Jack.
Sol.
It’s late when Jack comes upstairs alone and goes to bed.
He always leaves his door open if Sol’s not home. I get up an hour later to check on him. He’s asleep, his rugged face folded into the same smooth lines as when I’d found him in a coma in Birmingham, not a mark on him, save the taped gash on his temple. The same smooth lines I saw on Mal’s face a few nights ago.
But I don’t want to scratch my fingers through the scruff on Jack’s jaw. I don’t want to kiss him. I don’t want to press my face to his neck and breathe. I wantMal. And somehow his prolonged absence has that want hooking sharper claws into me.
It’s gone midnight.
Eat.
It’s the last thing I feel like doing. But I can’t regress to where I was the night I met Mal. It’ll make it too real—that he saw me like that. Empty. Screaming. Even if I never made a fucking sound.
In the kitchen, I eat protein bars and yoghurt in the dark. Drink more water. Consider the white ice cream desserts Sol buys when he’s worried about me. There’s a fresh one, which means where I was a few weeks ago didn’t pass him by.
I hate that as much as I love him.
And I don’t eat the ice cream.
But the rest of it stays down and I go back to bed. Back to my angsty playlist and my open door. To the cold as the temperature drops. I have no idea what time it is when a shadow that isn’t Sol finally darkens the hallway.
10MAL
Sol and I part at the top of the stairs. He banks left, pausing at Jack’s open door, before he disappears into the bathroom they share.
I go right with every intention of hitting the shower before I spend the rest of the night staring at the ceiling, but another open door pulls me up short.
Skylar’s.
It’s never open, even when he’s home. Even when he’s not. But it’s open now, and the sight of it has me frozen in the hallway like I’m fourteen again and creeping into my dad’s old flat up the road. Except, back then, my pulse didn’t jump into my throat, cutting off my air supply while my heart did that equilibrium-stealing back flip it’s only ever done aroundhim.
Skylar.
It’s how I know he’s home. That he’s awake. And despite the tug I feel to go to him, I’m probably the last person he wants to see.
Go to bed.
