9. Selene
SELENE
The asphalt is cold through the thin cotton of my dress.
Silas has not put me down. His arms are iron beneath my thighs and shoulders, his chest a wall of heat and ink and furious protection, his heart battering against my ribs where my body presses against his.
Mom stands in the truck's headlights, her arms crossed, her face a mask of rage and grief and something darker that I do not want to name.
The courthouse looms behind her, its brick facade stern and indifferent, the flag snapping in a breeze that smells of salt and endings and the approaching edge of autumn.
"Put her down," Stella says again, but the command has lost its edge, crumbling at the corners like wet paper.
Silas does not move. His grip tightens, his fingers pressing into the bruises on my hip, the marks he left this afternoon against the concrete, the claiming that still throbs between my legs.
I can feel him hard against my ass through his jeans, his arousal constant and unapologetic, a physical declaration that needs no words.
"Stella," he says, and his voice is gravel and steel and the same command he uses when he tells me to spread my legs or count my strokes or whisper who I belong to. "You are standing between me and the woman I love. You are standing between us and the rest of our lives. I suggest you move."
My Mom laughs, a broken sound that cracks in the night air.
"The woman you love? She's twenty one years old, Silas.
She's my daughter. She's been in your house for only a few weeks.
You don't love her. You're obsessed with her.
There's a difference, and I'm not going to let her ruin her life because you can't control yourself. "
"There's no difference," he says. "Not with her. Not with us."
"Then prove it." Mom steps closer, close enough that I can smell her perfume, the Chanel No. 5 she has worn since I was a child, now mixed with something sour and desperate. "Prove it's real. Prove it's not just... this."
Her gaze flicks to my torn dress, my bandaged feet, the dirt on my knees, the swell of my lips.
"Prove you can survive without her. Prove she can survive without you. One month. Live separately. No contact. No sneaking around. No midnight visits to construction sites." She laughs again, sharp and bitter.
"If you can survive one month apart and still want to be together, I'll give you my blessing. I'll stand at your wedding and smile for the photographs. But if you can't even do that, then it's not love. It's obsession. And I won't let you ruin your life over it."
Silas's body goes rigid. I feel it in every muscle, the coiling tension, the barely contained violence. "I'm not waiting one month," he says, each word precise and deadly. "I'm not letting her go. Not for one month. Not for one day. Not for one hour."
"Then I'll call the police," Stella says, and her voice is steady now, the voice of a woman who has played her final card.
"I'll tell them everything. The age gap.
The step relation. The fact that she's been living under your roof.
I'll tell them you groomed her, Silas. I'll tell them you abused her.
I'll tell them whatever I have to tell them to keep my daughter safe from you.
Is that what you want? Do you want to spend the next ten years in prison while she moves on and marries someone her own age? "
The silence that follows is enormous, filled with the crash of distant waves and the hum of the truck's engine cooling and the sound of my own breath, ragged and too loud.
I feel Silas's heart stutter against my chest, feel the moment he understands that this is not a negotiation.
This is a siege, and Stella holds the walls.
I look at my mother. Really look at her.
Her hair is immaculate, coiled at the nape of her neck, but her hands are shaking where they grip her elbows.
Her lipstick is perfect, but her eyes are swollen, the mascara smudged beneath them, the tracks of tears she has already shed and wiped away and shed again.
She is terrified. Not of Silas. Not of scandal.
She is terrified of losing me. Of watching me choose him over her, of becoming the woman whose daughter ran away with her stepson, of facing a future where I am not hers to protect and guide and hold.
And I understand, in a way I did not understand before, that her terror is real.
That her love is real, even if it is twisted and desperate and wrong.
That she is trying to save me from something she cannot comprehend, something that looks like destruction from the outside but feels like salvation from within.
"One month," I say, and my voice is small but steady, the voice of a girl who has learned that love is not just passion but patience, not just claiming but sacrifice.
Silas's head snaps down. His eyes find mine, black and burning and full of a betrayal that cuts deeper than any blade. "You can't be serious."
"I am." I reach up, touch his jaw, feel the stubble rough against my palm, the muscle ticking beneath the skin.
"I know her, Silas. I know how she thinks.
This is the only way. One month. We prove it.
We prove we're real. And then she can't touch us.
She can't say it was lust or obsession or a phase.
We'll have the proof, and she'll have to let us go. "
"Selene." My name breaks on his tongue, a prayer and a curse. "I can't. I can't survive one month without you. I barely survived three days."
"You can." I press my forehead to his, inhale the scent of him, bourbon and sweat and the dark musk that lives beneath his skin.
"We can. Because we have to. Because I won't let her destroy you.
I won't let her put you in prison. I won't let her take everything we've built and burn it down because she's scared. "
He stares at me, his jaw tight, his eyes burning with a fury that is not directed at me but at the world, at fate, at the mother who stands ten feet away with her arms crossed and her heart breaking.
I see the war in his face, the battle between the man who wants to carry me into that courthouse and make me his wife tonight and the man who knows that doing so would cost me my mother, my family, my last connection to the world I knew before him.
"One month," I whisper against his mouth. "And then forever. We can do anything for one month if forever is waiting at the end."
He says nothing. His silence is a physical thing, heavy and suffocating, filling the space between us with everything he cannot speak.
Then he turns, carries me to the truck, settles me in the passenger seat with a gentleness that belies the rage I can feel radiating from him like heat from a furnace.
He buckles my seatbelt, his fingers brushing my hip, his eyes avoiding mine.
He closes my door. Circles the truck. Gets in beside me. His knuckles are white on the steering wheel as he puts the truck in drive, his jaw a sharp line in the dashboard light, his profile carved from stone.
We do not speak on the drive back. The Hamptons streets are empty, the storefronts dark, the ocean a black void to our left.
I watch his hands on the wheel, the tendons standing out, the veins thick beneath the skin, and I want to touch him.
I want to crawl into his lap and wrap myself around him and tell him that one month is nothing, that we are stronger than this, that nothing can break what we have built.
But I do not. Because Mom is following us, her Mercedes a pair of red eyes in the rearview mirror, and because I know that if I touch him now, if I so much as brush his thigh with my fingers, he will pull over and take me in the truck and damn the consequences and the police and the prison sentence waiting at the end of this road.
He pulls into the driveway of the house I left three hours ago, the house that no longer feels like home.
The porch light is on, casting yellow shadows across the hydrangeas.
Richard stands in the doorway, his face gray, his hands in his pockets, watching us with the resigned expression of a man who has already lost.
Silas kills the engine. Sits for a long moment, his hands still gripping the wheel, his chest heaving. I reach for him, my fingers finding his shoulder, and he flinches. Actually flinches, as if my touch burns.
"Silas," I whisper. "Please. Look at me."
He does not. He opens his door, steps out, and walks toward the house without a backward glance.
His shoulders are broad and rigid beneath his white t-shirt, his stride long and furious, and he does not stop when Richard calls his name, does not stop when I scramble out of the truck and call after him, my bandaged feet stinging on the gravel.
"Silas, please?—"
He walks past me. Past Richard. Up the stairs. I hear his bedroom door slam, the lock clicking into place with a finality that echoes through my chest like a gunshot.
I stand in the driveway, barefoot and bleeding and broken, and I watch Mom park her car beside the truck. She gets out, her heels clicking on the gravel, her face composed now, the mask back in place.
"One month," she says, not unkindly. "Starting now. Get some rest. We'll talk when the sun's fully up."
She walks past me into the house. Richard follows, his hand hovering at her back, his eyes finding mine for a brief moment before he looks away. I see the guilt in his gaze, the knowledge that he set this in motion, the understanding that he has traded his son's happiness for his wife's peace.
I stand alone in the driveway until the porch light clicks off, leaving me in darkness.
Then I limp to the side of the house, to the window that has been my escape and my prison since the day I arrived.
The window he fixed, boarded shut from the outside, the gap of fifteen inches sealed with plywood and nails.