8. Silas
SILAS
The plywood is cold beneath my back. The sleeping bag still smells of her, vanilla and salt and the sharp sweetness of her arousal, but the scent is fading, hour by hour, replaced by sawdust and bourbon and the hollow stink of a man who has not eaten in two days.
I stare at the exposed studs above me, the skeleton of what was supposed to be our bedroom, and I count the nails I drove this afternoon.
Forty seven. Each one a prayer, each hammer fall a conversation with a god who does not answer.
Dad's voice echoes in my skull. "I will call the police, Silas. I swear to Christ I will. You contact her, you come near her, you so much as drive past that house, and I will have you arrested. Do you understand?"
I understood. I understood that my father, the man who taught me to swing a hammer and hold my liquor and never back down from a fight, had drawn a line in the sand. I understood that the line was my heart, and he was standing on it with both feet.
I roll onto my side, reach for the bottle beside the mattress. The bourbon burns going down, but it does not burn enough. Nothing burns enough except her.
I close my eyes and see her in Stella's car, the red Mercedes accelerating into the dark, her face pale in the side mirror, her hand gripping the door handle like it was the only thing keeping her from running back to me.
She did not look back. I watched until the taillights disappeared around the bend, until the darkness swallowed every trace of her, and then I stood in the headlights of my own truck like a fool who had burned his house down to keep a woman warm.
The hammer is beside the mattress. I pick it up, feel the weight of it in my palm, the splintered handle rough against my skin.
I drove forty seven nails today. I will drive forty seven more tomorrow.
And the day after. Until my hands are bloody pulp and my arms refuse to lift and my mind has no room for anything but the next swing, the next strike, the next piece of wood that submits to my will because she will not.
I set the hammer down. Reach for the bottle again. The bourbon is half gone. I drink until my throat is numb, until the construction site blurs at the edges, until I can almost pretend the sleeping bag beside me still holds her warmth.
She is three miles away. Three miles of dark road and scrub pine and the Atlantic crashing against the cliffs. Three miles that might as well be three thousand. Three miles that Dad has turned into a prison wall with a single threat.
I will not call the police on you, he said. But I will call them on myself if you make me. I will tell them everything. I will ruin you. I will ruin her. Is that what you want?
No. It is not what I want. What I want is her. What I want is her small body beneath mine, her voice breaking on my name, her walls fluttering around my cock as she comes apart. What I want is the life we were building in this half framed house, the future we hammered into existence nail by nail.
What I want does not matter. What matters is keeping her safe. Even from myself.
Especially from myself.
I drain the bottle. The empty glass rolls from my fingers, clinks against the plywood. I stare at the ceiling that does not exist, the stars visible through the open frame where our roof will one day be, and I wait for sleep that does not come.
The sun rises gray and joyless, and I don't sleep.
I work instead, letting the saw scream through two-by-fours, the nail gun bark in rapid bursts, the hammer fall again and again until my hands blister and the blisters burst and blood mixes with sawdust. I wipe it on my jeans and keep going because the pain is the only thing that makes her absence bearable.
By noon the framing for the kitchen island is complete, and I stand back to admire it, but I feel nothing.
It's just wood and nails, a structure that will outlast me if I don't finish it, if I drink myself to death in this sleeping bag, if I let the ocean take me one night when the bourbon finally wins.
I eat nothing. I drink lukewarm water from the cooler, tasting of plastic, and I go back to work.
The afternoon sun beats down through the open walls, turning the site into a furnace, and sweat pours from me, stinging my eyes and slicking my back.
I strip to the waist, let the heat bake the ink on my chest, and swing the hammer until my shoulder screams and my vision starts to spot.
At dusk I collapse onto the mattress, the sleeping bag cold beneath me, and I press my face into the fabric where her head rested, inhaling the fading ghost of her shampoo.
I ache, but not in my hands or my shoulder.
It's something deeper, something beneath muscle and bone, something that feels like my ribcage has been hollowed out and filled with static.
I dream of her. In the dream she is in my bed at the Hamptons house, the room with the thin walls, and she is touching herself the way I told her not to, her fingers sliding between her legs, her back arching, her mouth open on a moan.
I stand in the doorway, watching, my cock hard and furious, and I do not stop her.
I let her finish. I let her scream into the pillow.
And when she is done she turns to me, her eyes glazed, and says, "I only do this because you are not here, Daddy. I only do this because I need you."
I wake with my hand around my cock, my hips bucking into empty air, her name on my lips.
The release when it comes is bitter, joyless, a physical function that leaves me emptier than before.
I lie in the dark, panting, my seed cooling on my stomach, and I hate myself for needing her this much.
For being this weak. For being this lost without her small body and her broken voice and the way she looks at me like I hung the moon.
I do not sleep again. I sit on the plywood, my back against the stud wall, and I watch the stars wheel overhead.
The ocean crashes in the distance, eternal and indifferent.
I count the hours until dawn. I count the days until I see her again.
I count the ways I could die before then, and I find none of them appealing because they would mean never feeling her around me again, never hearing her say my name, never watching her stretch and burn and open for me like a flower in the sun.
Day two is worse.
The hunger has stopped being a sensation and become a fact, like the color of the sky or the temperature of the air.
I drink bourbon for breakfast, water for lunch, bourbon for dinner.
I frame the master bathroom. I install the rough plumbing for the shower.
I work with a precision that borders on madness, measuring twice, cutting once, every joint perfect, every angle true.
The house will be flawless. The house will outlast me.
The house will stand as proof that I existed, that I built something, that I was capable of creation even as I destroyed everything else.
Dad does not call. Stella does not call.
The phone in my pocket is a dead weight, silent and accusing.
I check it every hour, every half hour, every fifteen minutes, and each time the screen shows nothing I feel something crack inside me, another small fracture in a structure already riddled with them.
I drive past the house at dusk. I tell myself I will not.
I tell myself I will respect dad's boundary, I will keep her safe, I will wait.
But the truck steers itself onto Ocean Road, past the beach club, past the hydrangeas that line the driveway, and I slow to a crawl as I pass the house.
The windows are dark. The Mercedes is in the driveway.
There is no sign of her, no shadow in the upstairs window, no movement behind the curtains.
I grip the steering wheel until my knuckles turn white. I do not stop. I drive to the construction site and drink until the world spins and I vomit into the dirt beside the foundation. Then I drink more.
Day three. I know she will come.
The knowledge comes with the dawn, sudden and absolute, a certainty that settles in my chest like a stone dropped into still water.
She's suffering out there, withering, reaching for me in empty sheets and finding nothing, just like I'm reaching for her.
What's between us isn't something Dad can sever with a threat or Stella can dissolve with distance.
It's a physical fact, a gravitational pull, a need that has nothing to do with logic or law or what the world considers acceptable.
I shower in the rough plumbing, the water cold and stinging, then pull on clean jeans and a white t-shirt that strains across my chest. I walk to the center of what will be our living room, sit on the plywood with my back straight and my hands loose on my thighs, and I wait.
The hours crawl by. The sun climbs higher, and the site grows hot, then hotter, but I don't move. I don't eat or drink. I just sit and listen, my ears tuned to every sound, every shift in the air, every vibration that might be her bare feet on the gravel road.
At noon I hear it. Footsteps. Light at first, hesitant, then faster, running—someone who has abandoned caution in favor of desperation.
I do not stand. I do not move. I sit on the plywood and I watch the empty doorway frame, my heart battering against my ribs, my cock already hard and aching in my jeans, my entire body coiled like a spring that has been waiting three days to release.
She appears in the frame, backlit by the afternoon sun, a silhouette that resolves into filthy reality.
Her sundress is torn at the shoulder, stained with dirt and blood and things I do not want to identify.
Her feet are bare, shredded, leaving bloody prints on the plywood as she stumbles toward me.
Her hair is wild, tangled with twigs and leaves, her face streaked with tears and mud and the tracks of something that might be joy.