Chapter 9
One Night, Eight Years Ago
Bea
Silas fixes me with a look, eyes flashing before that charming mask falls away. It’s serious and studious and makes me want to run my fingers over the shape of that face, rub my lips against his jaw until they burn.
“Are you—”
“Don’t ask me if I’m sure,” I beg him. “Please. I’m .
. . I’m sure.” I am a little too sure, and I should feel guilty about it.
Somewhere in the melee of my brain, I know that I should.
I could tell myself I only want to walk him home to spend some more time with him, get caught up some more, and that nothing beyond that will happen.
But I don’t want to pretend. I want to be out of my own head and wholly under my skin, and wanting this is the first thing in forever that feels right and true, after feeling uncertain about so much lately.
School, what I want to do with my life .
. . my changing relationship with my best friend.
Merritt can’t be mad, I think. Not when she’s been in love three times over since high school.
No. I need to banish all further thoughts of Merritt tonight. I don’t want to set myself up to lie to me, either.
It’s warmer here, being so much farther inland than Spunes, and come summer, I know I’ll be sick of it very quickly. But right now, during spring, after the grass and trees have cooked all day in the sun, the air is thick with the scent. Every breath I take tastes green.
Silas chats to me about his siblings on the walk over, and I wonder if they know how lucky they are to have him. Someone who is so keenly observant of them. Proud and loving.
“How’s Wren and Ellis’s kid?” I ask.
His face brightens even more. “Sam? Barely a kid anymore. Full-blown preteen.”
“God, that’s wild. I remember when they graduated. Wren’s little bump under her gown.”
“They’re incredible parents,” he says firmly. He looks at me askance, like he’s checking for any judgment from me.
“I never doubted they would be,” I say. “Even my mom talks up what a great dad Ellis is.”
Silas hums. “He is,” he says, waiting a few sidewalk squares before he asks, “So, how’s school been? You like it out here? Happy to be out of Spunes?”
I nearly give him my prepackaged answers, but the way his gemstone gaze holds on to mine and the genuine interest he doesn’t try to disguise makes me want to be forthcoming, too.
“School is . . . fine,” I say. “I’m majoring in communications because I still have no clue what I want to do. I don’t know that I feel passionate about any one subject. I feel more engaged and excited at both of my oddball jobs than I do in any of my classes.”
“You say that like you’re embarrassed about it.”
“It’s a little embarrassing to be out here wasting tens of thousands of my parents’ dollars all to ultimately conclude that I like people.”
My lips warm when his stare touches them. “Is that the part you like, then?” he asks. “The people?”
One of my jobs is at a cute décor boutique in town, and I love helping people pick things out for their spaces, as unimportant as that might seem.
But my other job is nannying for a seven-year-old boy, Pacey, and I adore everything about it.
I love when he’s naughty, probably because it always seems to be born out of boredom or curiosity, and it hasn’t ever included something severe.
I love how we can invent a game for anything and add rules or change them as we go.
His whole view of the world feels bright and limitless.
He is limitless. He loves to dance, and watching him do it makes me fight off tears every time.
I hope no one ever takes that joy away from him.
I’ve worked for his mom for two years, and the way he’s changed in that time frame is wild for me to fathom.
Lately, he’s been discovering his sense of humor more and is always trying to score a laugh, even at my expense, but he can be the gentlest and most thoughtful little human at the same time.
That kid can break my heart and put it back together in the span of a day.
His mom will be done with her residency soon and my time with him will be finished, and I get slightly morose every time I think about it.
It’s the most exhausting job I’ve ever had and by far the most rewarding.
My days with Pacey feel like they have meaning, where I have to search for it everywhere else.
“I do like people, but . . . can I tell you a secret?” I dart a conspiratorial look at him.
“Secrets are famously my favorite,” Silas says.
I chew my bottom lip. “I miss home. More than being homesick, I think. I—god, I think I want to end up back in Spunes.” I say it self-deprecatingly to be safe.
Like, How boring, how pedestrian, right?
In truth, though, whenever I find myself daydreaming of my own kids, I always catch myself picturing Spunes in the background.
Maybe I can’t imagine having them anywhere but the place I know best.
I wait a bit to look over at him again, but when I do, he’s beaming unabashedly. “Shut up,” I deadpan.
“I didn’t say anything.” He puts his palms up in surrender.
“Don’t gloat, Silas. Hasn’t anyone told you it’s unseemly?”
“Not when I do it,” he says with a noisy, happy sigh. “It’s just all my dreams coming true, Red.”
“Oh, give me a break.” I’m stuffed full of something giddy that wants to break loose.
“You and me in the same town, fighting this thing between us for decades,” he muses.
“Maybe we end up with other people, even, but we’ll always wonder what might have been.
” His smile brightens into something effervescent.
He leans closer to my ear. “You know I think we have a few of those in Spunes, right? My money’s on Walter and Martha. ”
I make an offended sound. “You think that sounds good?” I say.
“No,” he says, the word carried on a laugh. “But if I said something about settling down and having my babies, you’d go running the other way.”
“You tease too much, Silas. It’ll get you in trouble one day.”
“Should that be your nickname?” he asks. “Trouble?”
“I think you’ve given me enough over the years.” Nicknames and trouble.
His grin sharpens. A knife at my pulse that does nothing but thrill me. I need to regroup, take back a little control. “Never,” he says, timbre dipping low.
I am weightless and boneless and hate how hard it is not to act twitterpated at him.
I want to twirl my hair. Lick into his mouth and taste whatever he’ll say next.
But I have enough wherewithal to know that the weed isn’t helping any of this.
“Dial it down,” I say, unable to stop myself from sounding overcome.
“I’m already walking you home, aren’t I? ”
He must hear the truth in it, because his smile eases up. “Okay, Bea. I’ll go easy on you.”
I arch a brow. His bottom lip tucks behind his teeth.
A few more steps. Crickets singing through another chorus. “You really don’t reject anything about that?” I ask. “Settling?”
His head cocks like he’s weighing his thoughts.
“Not really, no, but I guess . . . maybe after losing my parents, I’m not quick to let go of the other people in my life.
Spunes stepped up for us, you know?” He hums again, like he is reaffirming this to himself, too.
“The feeling is likely not mutual,” he adds with a laugh.
“Yeah, okay.” I roll my eyes and a muscle ripples up his jaw like he likes it. He’s drawn even closer to me somehow. “Everyone loves you, and you know it.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“No?”
“No.” He glances at me. “You never did.”
This is approaching a territory I’m unsure I’m ready for.
“Don’t fish, Silas. You know I always liked you.
You’re pretty hard not to like.” I shiver, and he unzips his hoodie and tosses it at me.
I openly gape at the concrete mound of his shoulder where his shirt has ridden up. That is a new development.
“Eyes up here, Red.”
I shrug unrepentantly. “Can’t help it. You give good shoulder.”
“I give better head,” he says, and we instantly detonate into laughter. “I didn’t even mean it that way,” he gets out.
“But what a happy convenience!” I flush to the tips of my fingers. My body is warm and all abuzz beneath his hoodie, and I feel so, so good. So confident he can make me feel even better.
I want to touch him, I think, and so I let my knuckles brush his before I can second-guess it. He has no outward reaction, so I do it again. When I do it a third time, he pauses on the pavement, then steps off into the shadow of a house, leaning himself up on the side.
“Are you playing with me, Ruby?” he asks.
“Ruby? Why Ruby?” I say, stalking close to him again. “And would you like it if I were?”
He reaches across the space between us to hook a finger into one of my belt loops, slowly pulling me into him. His other hand comes up and threads a lock of my hair between his fingers. “What do you think?” he asks.
“I think,” I say, pressing my chest into his ribs and fisting his shirt, “you’d be fun to play with.”
He spins us around, switching our places, gently planting me to the wall. “It’s a happy coincidence, by the way,” he says, caging me in with his warm body.
“What is?” I ask huskily. I gulp as I watch him methodically wrap my hair around his fist before taking back his hand.
“You said it was a happy convenience, a few minutes ago. That I give great head. The expression is ‘coincidence.’ ” He’s so close I can feel the rumble of his voice. I imagine the cups of my ribs capturing it inside me.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Seems extremely convenient to me.” My teeth sink into my lip, and he swallows, drawing closer.
“Jesus Christ, do you hear that?” he rasps. My chest rises and falls against his.
“Hear what?”
“Is that your heart or mine?” he whispers, inches from my mouth now.
“You’re high,” I say. To myself as much as I do to him. My whole body is one throbbing pulse.
“So are you,” he replies soberly. He dips back to meet my gaze again. “Tell me you feel this, too.” And I know he’s not talking about the weed.
I pant but can’t tear my eyes from his. My palm snakes across his pec, and his comes over it to hold it in place. My hips bow up into him, and he hisses, our noses bumping softly.
“Bea. Bea. Bea,” he chants in synchrony with his heart’s rhythm beneath my hand, more of his weight leaning into me.
My eyes fall shut and my lips part open.
His free hand splays across my waist, thumb pushing into a spot just beneath my belly button.
“Bea. Bea. Bea.” His nose slides over my cheek.
And then his mouth grazes mine, the tiniest press of our lips.
A small, destitute moan sticks in my throat when he pulls away.
“Can I kiss you?” he asks.
“A little late for that,” I say.
His laugh is a hot breath on my chin. “Oh, Bea,” he chides. “If you think that was a kiss—”
I cut him off with my mouth. He makes a rough, satisfied hum that undoes something in me and summons up something new, chills racing over my skin like I just heard the notes to my new favorite song.
He breaks away before he comes back to me at a new angle, slotting my lower lip between his and scraping it with his teeth.
Pinching and soothing. Pushing and pulling.
I nip him in return, and an impatient hand flies up to cup my jaw, holding me open so his tongue can taste me.
We twist and squirm until we pick up speed and try to get at more.
He sucks a spot beneath my ear, and my hands sneak beneath his shirt, fingertips digging into the skin of his hard back.
He groans Oh my god, Bea into my neck when I slide them into his jeans and squeeze his ass over his briefs.
So firm I want to cheer. I whimper Touch me into his jaw.
“Wait,” I gasp when he snaps open the button of my jeans. “How far are we from your house?”
“This is it,” he grits.
“Take me inside, then,” I say.
“Pushy.”
“What do you want, manners?” At a time like this?
“I’m not gonna be polite,” he promises.