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Mal Gallagher doesn’t miss a beat. He takes the envelope and tucks it into his pocket. “I’ll make sure he gets it.”
He faces me dead on as he speaks. But I get the feeling he does that to everyone, so I don’t feel like Folk told him to be nice to me. Honestly, he doesn’t seem all that friendly, at least not until I ease back to leave. “You want a drink?”
“No. Thanks.”
“Anything else you need?”
I almost roll my eyes, but restrain myself at the last second. “I’m good. You can tell Folk you tried.”
Mal offers me a shadowed grin. “I don’t tell him anything unless it’s something he needs to know.”
“Meaning?”
Mal’s green eyes spark with the kind of amusement that’s empathetic and annoying, but if he answers me with words, I don’t see it. I’m distracted by commotion around the singers. Dominating sound as the room erupts around them, but I have no idea why, and it gets to me again.
I need out.
I need fresh air—I need my air. My land. And probably my bed.
But—
No.
I back away from Mal and spin around, booking it for the exit. Someone blocks my path, but I shoulder them out of the way, prepared to throw hands if they get up in my face.
They don’t, and I feel like something is happening behind me, but I don’t care enough to find out what. I keep going until I reach the door, push out of the Joker, and the fact that I never looked for Oscar follows me out into the night.
Along with the startling reality that I didn’t look for him, because my heart knew he wasn’t here.
14 OSCAR
My conversation with Hanna proves as easy as it is frustrating. She isn’t worried about who I have around Aras and what they become to us, and I realise, perhaps, I wish she was—so I can validate my messy emotions.
Emotions that die the moment I walk into the Joker the evening after.
“He left?” I lean closer to Mal, struggling to hear him over the ethereal and eerie song of the Porth Luck She-Shanty Collective. “When?”
“A few minutes ago.”
I am barely through the door, my boots on dry land less than five minutes, but I turn on instinct, already searching for Poet, even though Mal is telling me he has already gone. Even though I know he is not here, because I feel it in my chest; an emptiness I can’t explain any better than to say it feels wrong.
Mal taps an envelope on the bar. “He dropped off Dav’s wages.”
“For Sol?”
“Aye, they’re not for me, eh?”
I ignore Mal’s sarcasm and absorb his expression instead, the steady glint in his eyes. He’s a man who notices tiny things. The ripples in the calmest ocean. And he’s looking at me like there’s something I should know. “What is it, my friend?”
Mal frowns a little, polishing a glass—a sight I rarely see. “Probably nothing, but he seemed a bit spooked. Maybe you should give him a call.”
Right. Except, Poet’s deaf, and… “I don’t have his number.”
Mal blinks and silence stretches between us, too loud to be smothered by the noise of the crowded pub. “You don’t?”
“No.” I’m already turning away, blocking out how un-shocking it is that Mal has figured out the man who’s turned my sexuality on its head is Poet Whitlock when River is the only soul I’ve told. Sol knows too. Probably Jack and Skylar. Rubi. Honestly, I am waiting for Aras to stare into my eyes one day and see the truth of it. To maybe tell me in the ways only a child can how absurd it is that Poet taught him to spot wild strawberries, that we both know how he likes to dunk his head in the outdoor sink after dinner on a hot summer’s night—that I have slept in his bed, and yet I have no way of reaching him beyond tearing out of the Joker and chasing him down.
But none of that matters right now. Spooked in Mal’s world could mean anything and I feel too much for Poet to ignore the tug in my gut that tells me it’s something. An instinct that propels me into motion.
