Page 77

Find him.

I leave the Joker without waiting for Sol to come inside. Someone calls after me, but I don’t look back as the warm fug of the crowded pub gives way to the sticky summer night.

The door swings shut behind me. I break into a jog, already searching the horizon for strong shoulders and wheat-blond hair gleaming gold beneath the street-lights.

I don’t see him. With the Joker still open, the streets are quiet, anyone who’s not in the pub or the cider brewery is clustered around bonfires on the beach, and Poet’s not with them. I know without looking because I’ve come to carry him with me even when we’re apart. To feel him a heartbeat before we are together again. It’s how I know to keep going past my house, to push on into the shadowed parts of Porth Luck that aren’t touristy enough to have the street-lamps fixed.

It’s how I know the figure I finally see ahead of me is him a split second before a passing car lights him up. Because something—everything—about Poet Whitlock calls to me as much as it did two years ago, and I’m growing better at understanding why with every day that passes.

Every step that draws me closer to him.

It’s dark.

Poet can’t hear me. But I see the moment the vibration of my fast footsteps reaches him. Tension floods him. He spins around, shoulders square, weight dropped, hands lifting into the kind of readiness his older brother and his friends wear like a second skin. For a split second, I glimpse the man he might’ve become if he’d followed the same path as Folk. Then I just see him. Strong enough to work a farm from dawn till midnight. Fierce enough to protect it.

I hold my hands up, glad I wasn’t foolish enough to reach for him on the shadowed streets of Porth Luck. “Hey.”

Poet rears back. Then he sees me, his eyes find mine, and the fight in him drains away almost as quickly as it arrived. “Oscar?”

“It’s me.” I close the distance between us and grip his shoulders. “Sorry, I should not have run up behind you like that. You felt me coming, didn’t you?”

Poet nods, his gaze darting past me in to the dark before it returns to my face. “I almost decked you.”

“I know. I would have survived.”

“I might not have.”

“No?”

“No.” Poet slides his arms around my waist so naturally it’s hard to imagine he hasn’t been doing it our whole lives. “Hurting you would be worse than death.”

“You didn’t hurt me.”

Poet says nothing. Just stares at me as if my presence has fixed one problem without solving another, and it jars me enough to look closer—deeper—at what I see in him.

Tense limbs. Rapid breaths.

Anxiety shaping his features that reminds me of River when I first met him.

The most important question in the world bubbles out of me. “Are you okay?”

Poet nods again, but it’s too slow to be a real answer. Too vague to be a lie.

I try again. “You would like to go home?”

But he doesn’t seem to see me speak, and so I take his hand in the dark and lace our fingers together. “Come with me.”

I make sure he sees me this time. That he consents before I lead him back the way we’ve come. And as he falls into step beside me, I realise this feels like the night I steered him out of the Joker and into my house. That I’m taking him to my house again, and I like the low thrill humming beneath the concern and care dominating my emotions right now.

It doesn’t take long to reach our destination. I let us in without letting go of his hand. Flick some lamps on and move automatically to the fridge. “You are hungry?”

Poet taps my shoulder.

I realise I am angled away from him. Bite down on an apology and repeat myself.

He peers past me into the fridge, a ghost of a smile on his lips. “If I am, I’m in the right place.”

“I like to be prepared.”