Page 20
Sound.
Faint.
Him.
And gone as quickly as it came, leaving something unsettled in its wake. Something different, which fits for Oscar. Everything about how he makes me feel is so unlike anyone else.
The line of his throat.
The way breath moves through his big and elegant body as he slides his hand from mine and ghosts it to my bicep, sensing the ripple in the lake as I swallow, hauling myself back to where I should be, so I can answer him as if nothing’s changed.
Because, really, nothing has.
“I should go home,” Oscar says when I don’t speak. “I have an early start.”
“How early?”
“Five. Is not too bad. But you will have been up for hours by then, no?”
“Probably. Depends if I like sleeping or not.”
Curiosity flares in Oscar’s gaze, so vibrant now he’s recovered from the crisis I walked up on, and he makes no move to rise from the ground or reclaim his hand from my arm.
Maybe that’s why elaborating slips out lighter than it feels, a confession I’ve never made to anyone else. “I love sleeping, but waking up isn’t my favourite thing.”
Oscar has been stroking my bare skin with the pad of his thumb. It stills as he leans closer. “Why is that?”
Because he knows it’s not as simple as not wanting to leave my warm bed.
You don’t have a bed.
No. Not here. But this tic is years old, and I wrestle with how to explain it. “I don’t like that moment before everything settles. When I forget and reach for things that aren’t there.”
“Ah.” Empathy bleeds into Oscar’s warm stare. “You…forget that you cannot hear?”
“Something like that. Sometimes it feels like falling off a cliff all over again.”
“That’s what happened to you?”
“Metaphorically.” I look away, spinning out a little. If Oscar speaks again it’s to the side of my head. “Anyway.” I force my mouth into an almost smile and turn back to him, tilting my head to mirror him. “Sleeping? Big fan. Waking up? Less so.”
“Still,” Oscar says gently. “You wake up anyway.”
This time it’s me who hums without tangible meaning. I brace myself for Oscar peeling his tall frame from the ground and taking his comforting touch with him.
Again, though, he stays where he is. “I feel like I fall from a great height some days too. And ever since…there was an accident, a while ago, and I feel like I’ve put myself back together wrong since then, over and over, you know? It’s like my skin no longer fits and I am the only one who can see it.”
“You nearly died.” It isn’t a question. I know what happened to Oscar last Christmas. My brother was there when they pulled him and his friend from the sea, and it upset him enough that he brought his family home to Moondust Farm to get over it. “Folk told my parents.” I fill in the obvious gap. “People talk about you too.”
Oscar says something, but it’s barely a murmur and I don’t catch it.
For reasons I don’t understand, I reach for his velvet jaw. Claim it as he repeats himself. “We move in the same circles.”
I know what he means. Who he means. My brother. The Rebel Kings. “I don’t ride a motorcycle.”
“Neither do I.” Oscar leans into my touch, as if he wants me to tighten my grip and tug him closer. “I only drive a car at all because Aras’s school is out of town and there are no streetlights between Hanna’s house and mine.”
I know there are no lights between Porth Luck and the few dwellings that exist beyond the town border before the road reaches Porth Ewan. I see it when I walk the boundary of the farm every night and the land seems to melt away, the horizon as black as it gets beneath a starless sky like tonight. And it makes sense to me that Oscar doesn’t ride a Harley like the Rebel Kings. As much sense as the first time I ever saw him—the only time I saw him before now—and I knew in that instant he lacked the lethal edge of the other men mingling with the trees in my parents’ garden. That I wouldn’t forget him even if the time we spent together later that evening never happened.
