Chapter 43

After that, Ethan and I eat Frosted Mini-Wheats in the kitchen. It’s the only room they’ve taken the boards off of, and golden light floods in to slice through it like some kind of Renaissance painting. This house is stunning—a different place in the daylight. Ethan is a sixty-year-old professor in an eighteen-year-old’s body, but he loves nothing more than sugary cereal.

“No flights today,” Mags tells us, scrolling her laptop at the island. She has her hair in a topknot and is wearing yoga clothes, not a speck of makeup. It’s like the storm shook something loose in all of us, brought us down to a common denominator. She props a hand on her hip in a way that can only be described as casual.

“Even private?” my mom asks, popping a Mini-Wheat in her mouth. I gape at her. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her eat processed food.

“Mmm,” Mags says, clicking around. “We might be able to do private.”

“No private planes.” I level Mags with my gaze. “No death traps.”

Ethan rolls his eyes, nudging me in the side. “I can take the bus again,” he offers, and Mags and my mother grimace in unison.

“Eight oh five tomorrow morning,” Mags says, glancing at Ethan and then me. “United from Miami International. That okay?”

I watch Ethan sip cereal milk from his spoon. “I have an aunt,” he says. “In Coral Gables. I can stay with her until then.”

When my eyebrows arch, he smiles sheepishly. “I told her I was coming, in case you kicked me out.”

“We’d never have kicked you out,” Camilla says, and I look up at her. “Not with nowhere else to go.” She sounds serious and sincere. Motherly.

Footsteps echo behind us, and when we turn around in the bar seats, Silas is standing in the foyer. He’s in basketball shorts and the T-shirt he pulled on after we got soaked through last night, bright purple with a frenetic line illustration of a cowboy hat that he bought from a street vendor in Austin. His hair is wild and unkempt, loose around his cheekbones. Puddles circles his feet.

“Hi,” he says, and Ethan’s gaze swoops immediately back down to his cereal. Silas lets his eyes linger on mine for one held-breath moment—he looks simultaneously wrecked and resigned. He turns and makes for the door. I’m standing before it’s fallen shut.

It takes me fifteen minutes to find him; Silas moved so quickly it’s like he and Puddles simply evaporated into the muggy post-storm air. I check the backyard, the tangle of palm trees behind the pool, the side gardens where people in matching T-shirts gather fallen plants into garbage bags. I walk half the seawall. I’ve nearly given up when I finally circle back to the front of the house and catch sight of Puddles: twenty yards down the beach, chasing a seagull along the shoreline. Silas sits in the sand with his knees pulled up to his chest.

He doesn’t see me until I’m right beside him, lowering myself onto the beach. It’s quiet out here—no one in sight except Puddles and the seagull and the two of us.

“Hey,” I say. Silas turns to me, his temple resting on one of his kneecaps. His arms are wrapped around his legs. We look at each other, the sun emerging from behind a cloud to cast his eyes green and gold.

I reach out to brush the hair off his cheek, same as I did on the dance floor at Lady June’s, and it’s not enough. I want to crawl into his lap. I never want to stop touching him. He closes his eyes.

“It’s over,” I say.

Silas keeps his eyes shut. He says, lowly, “I figured.”

“No.” I run my hand along his arm, fit my fingers around his wrist. He’s holding his own elbows so tightly his knuckles are white. “It’s over with Ethan.”

His eyes break open. It feels like gasping for air in that boat on Lake Michigan. Like his arms holding me together on the hotel bed in Nashville. Like everything’s all right.

“What?” he says, but I know he heard me. Every muscle in his face fights not to reveal itself, his lips listing sideways and his eyebrows drawing together and finally, total abandon, the smile breaking across his mouth on a breathless laugh. “But he’s here.”

“Yeah,” I say. When I slide my palm into his, Silas grips on to my fingers, tight. “To say goodbye.”

“I’m not—” He rights himself, focusing his features into a frown. Even as his body’s turning toward mine, my hand wrapped in both of his. “I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” A warm breeze moves off the water, rustling hair into his face, and I push it back. Tuck it behind his ear. “I’m okay.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” His eyes track over mine. “I mean, did he—are you—”

“Later,” I say. “I do want to talk about it, later.” I swallow, and Silas watches my throat move. “Right now I just really want to kiss you, if that’s okay.”

He grins. Wide and lopsided, flashing that crooked canine I noticed the very first time we met. Back in Los Angeles, when he saw the worst of me and wanted all of it anyways.

“That’s okay,” Silas says. He closes the distance between us before I have time to do it myself, dropping my hand so he can hold the back of my head. He kisses me gently and then, when I fist a hand into his T-shirt and tug him closer, not gently at all.

I’m still wearing the old Summit School EMS shirt I slept in and half-damp pajama shorts, but Silas doesn’t seem to mind. He pulls me onto his lap and my knees dip into the sand. His lips are soft and insistent and when he arches to kiss the delicate skin behind my ear I feel it in my stomach: new and warm and wanting. His fingertips press into my rib cage. I run my nails over the back of his scalp and he groans.

“Audrey,” he murmurs, right against my lips. “Jesus.”

“Don’t bring him into this,” I say, breathless. Silas laughs and I smooth my hands over his hair, push it away from his face, hold him steady so we can look at each other.

“I like this,” I say. It’s the first thing I can think of and I just let it come out, no second-guessing. “I like you.”

He smiles, brushes a thumb over my hipbone. “I like you, too.”

Something wet nudges my foot and I yelp, tumbling sideways off Silas’s lap. It’s Puddles, looking at me bewilderedly, and Silas picks her up to drop her onto my stomach. I let out an oof and he moves over us, lowering himself to hold all three of us in place. “Puddles likes you, too,” he says, kissing my cheekbone, then the corner of my mouth.

I look at her, fuzzy little face so close to mine I can’t get it in focus. “I will begrudgingly admit that I also like Puddles.”

“Knew it.” Silas rolls onto his elbow and Puddles wriggles away from us, snuffling over the sand. He watches her go, something moving across his face that I can’t quite place.

“Silas,” I say, and he looks back at me. Dips his chin, kisses me one more time. “What are you thinking about?”

“The mailboxes,” he says. I turn my face so his head’s blocking the sun. It haloes his hair, makes him look like a young god. “In Arkansas. Do you remember?”

“Of course.”

“I left a letter to my mom.” Silas curls a strand of my hair between his fingers, tracking the movement with his gaze. “Told her about you, a little.”

“Really,” I say, and he meets my eyes. Smiles in a shy sort of way that makes me want to eat him alive. “What did you say?”

“That I was hoping for this,” he tells me. “I mean, not the storm, and not even the stuff with Ethan, necessarily. Not so specific, just. That I wanted to be part of your life.” I reach up, touch his cheek, and he turns his chin to press his lips to my palm. “That I’d take any help she could give me.”

“Do you think she made this happen?” I ask, pushing my fingertips into his hair. I can feel the tendons at the back of his neck, the hard knots of bone at the base of his skull.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Do you?”

“No.” I shake my head. I can feel my hair growing sticky with sand but I don’t move to fix it. “I think I’d have wound up here, no matter what. Wanting to be with you.”

“‘It’ll be what it’ll be,’” Silas says, grinning, and I roll my eyes.

“Maybe this once.”

“If only once,” he says, “I’m glad it was this time.”