Chapter 41

“Hey!” I shout, my toes squelching through the mud. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going inside so we don’t get killed.” He pulls the door open and I follow him through it, back into the lightless, echoing foyer.

“No,” I say, and Silas trains his flashlight on the ceiling so it illuminates the room. “Out there. What was that?”

“You’re asking me?” He thrusts a second flashlight into my hand, clicking it on and then letting go. “What was that, Audrey?”

Our voices are loud, bouncing from the marble. I glance at the office and Silas jerks his head toward the back of the house, where the bedrooms are. My footprints track mud and water the entire way to his room.

“Why are you mad?” I hiss when he leads me through the door and closes it behind us. “I thought you wanted this.”

Silas laughs, but it’s a bitter noise. “I’ve spent all summer shoving down how much I want this.” My skin goes hot and he wipes a hand over his face, pushes soaked hair off his forehead. “Because I know you have—that you don’t—” His eyes flick up to mine, unsure and then suddenly angrier, accusatory. “And now you’re going to do that to me? You’re going to come at me half-assed about it? No, Audrey, that’s not what I want.”

I blink at him, shocked silent.

“I don’t want part of you in secret,” he says. He’s holding his flashlight loosely, trained at the floor, so the planes of his face are soft and dark. “I don’t want to be some caught-in-the-moment mistake. A person you regret.” Thunder rumbles, shakes the walls around us. “That’s not what I want at all.”

“What do you want?” I whisper.

A muscle works in his jaw. “I think you know.”

I want to step closer to him, but I don’t. “Tell me.”

“I want this for real,” he says. The fight’s gone out of his voice; we could be back in his hotel room in Nashville, hands covering our eyes. “I want to be the person you go to on purpose, not by accident because you got the room number wrong.” He exhales, sharp, but I’m not breathing. “I want you to meet the rest of my stupid cousins and I want to watch Puddles fall asleep on your ankle like that night in the car a thousand fucking more times, every single day if you’ll let me. Audrey, I’m—” He swallows, scrapes a hand through his hair. “I mean, god, when you jumped in that water after Puddles I thought—fuck, if she doesn’t die, she’s going to kill me. This is going to kill me.”

I squeeze the flashlight so hard my bones ache.

“So if you aren’t serious, if you’re just going to be with him, I can’t—” Silas breaks off and shakes his head. “Please don’t do that to me. I can’t handle this if you don’t mean it.”

We stare at each other. I breathe and the air makes me shiver. I’m soaked and I’m freezing and I’m scared.

“Say something,” he whispers.

“Ethan and I are on a break,” I tell him finally. Silas blinks rapidly.

“What does that mean?”

“We aren’t—” I stop, dig my teeth into my bottom lip. Silas looks like he’s holding his breath. “We aren’t speaking. We’re taking a break. Which is why I—did that, I mean. And he was supposed to come here, but his flight’s canceled, so I don’t—”

I break off, and he takes a half step closer to me. “You don’t what?”

“I don’t know what happens now.”

We stare at each other, wind buffeting the house. “I think that’s up to you,” Silas says.

I press my eyes shut. I know that broken things never fit back together quite the same way, that there is no returning to the Ethan I knew before. Standing in Silas’s bedroom, storm swirling around us, the future feels dark as the bottom of the ocean. I can’t see myself there—I can’t see what I’m doing, I can’t see who I’m with.

“How would it work?” I say, opening my eyes.

“How would what work?”

“How would we—” I swallow, can’t believe I’m saying this out loud. The scenario I’ve gamed out in my own mind for weeks now, refusing to admit to myself what I was doing. “With you at American and me at Hopkins. I mean, we wouldn’t—”

“It’s a forty-minute train,” Silas says. He steps closer to me, and I’m overwhelmed by the urge to tip forward and rest my forehead on his shoulder. I’m so, so tired. “Is he going to Hopkins, too?”

I shake my head. Wrap my arms around myself instead of reaching for Silas. “Yale.”

“Okay,” he says slowly. “Okay, I mean, that’s farther—”

“But what about after?” I make myself look up at him, and it hurts. “There’s med school, Silas. And residency. And I have all these plans—”

“And I don’t? We can have plans together, Audrey.” His gaze moves over mine, searching. “We can support each other’s dreams even if they aren’t the same. You know that’s possible, right?”

“I don’t know,” I whisper. That was always the safety with Ethan: we had the same plans. We were going the same way and he’d be there at every point down the road. “Maybe?”

“It is.” I’ve been talking to the dark ceiling and Silas moves in front of me so I have to meet his eyes. “Besides, ‘after’ is three years away. At least that long. Do we need to know, right this second?”

I bite my lip, silent. I always want to know, is the thing. I want a map for everything to come and a steady line to trace myself through it.

“I don’t think we do,” Silas says. His voice softens. “I just want to know you, Audrey. Now. I want you to know me, too. We can figure out the rest later.”

It hits me then that Silas has seen me from the start. Not as someone he can mold into what he wants me to be but as someone he wants already, just as I’ve been from that moment in the back alley in Los Angeles. I squeeze my nails into my palm.

“Silas, it’s going to hurt.”

“What is?”

“All of it,” I say, shivering so hard now that my voice shakes. “Being away from you at school and not knowing if we’ll wind up in the same place and just—I mean, if it ends, I just don’t—” I break off, stare up at him.

Because part of me knew that I could do it, with Ethan. That I could be apart, do a relationship like that, have him in fits and starts. I could stomach the weeks and months of separation punctuated by frenetic weekends linked by train. I’ve already lost so much of him this summer, and I’ve survived it.

But the way I am with Silas—the hook in my belly when he’s close to me, the indefensible way I’ve needed him so much just this summer alone. It would be torture, wouldn’t it? To have him only halfway. A greater torture still to have him and then lose him.

“Yeah,” Silas says slowly. “We could get hurt, I guess, but doesn’t this hurt?” He reaches for me and then stops himself, and in the moment before his fingers freeze next to mine I think, please. “Don’t you hurt? Because I do.” He swallows, his voice going soft and small. “I really fucking do.”

I do. I do, I do. I squeeze my eyes shut. Thunder rumbles from the ocean.

“Can we try something?” Silas says, when I still haven’t spoken. “Can you tell me what you actually want? Not what you’re supposed to want, or what’s going to set you up for some other thing.” I open my eyes, and he takes a deep breath, and I realize he’s scared to hear me answer. “Just what you actually want. Right now. Right this second.”

I’m not brave. I can’t say it so plainly, what’s pressing at the roof of my mouth.

“I think you know,” I whisper, echoing his words.

And he echoes mine, too. “Tell me.”

I fill my lungs. I squeeze my elbows in my fingers, set my shoulders to stop the shaking.

And I look at Silas, who’s wanted the truth of me from the start.

And I tell him.