Chapter 14
Now
Bea
Silas knocks softly on my bathroom door the following morning, bleary-eyed, bed-headed, and hoarse-voiced, still blatantly sleepy.
But he offers to help me with my shot again, and I let him.
The day after, he’s walking up the stairs with two mugs of tea just as I’m about to send a text to see if he’s up.
I’m sore and bruised, now, and hypersensitive.
I have to close my eyes and avoid looking at him in the mirror when his calloused hand slides over my skin to move my pajama pants out of the way.
The contrast of his roughness to how gentle he is sends a stinging ache down the backs of my legs.
I hiss at the shot this time, though, and his reflection finds me, his brow folding and his mouth flattening in a grim line.
“I’m sorry,” he grits. And the proximity of him, the feel of his breath on the back of my neck, the spread of his palm high on the curve of my ass—my body’s wires all get crossed and too many tiny reactions happen in a flash before I can stop them.
My lungs hitch, I break out in chills, and my spine arches into him.
“It’s okay.” It’s not.
His hands shake when he deposits the needle into the bin.
Silas was right, though. After his help these first few times, I’m able to administer my own shots the remainder of the week, other than one day I’m too sore to do it.
He assists me wordlessly and avoids looking at me as much as I avoid him, but I still catch his jaw working and his nostrils flaring.
I can’t tell if he’s mad at the needle or irritated with me.
I have ten-hour days at the salon, and we still text sporadically throughout, at least at first. But when I see him around the house in the evenings, I act flat-out weird.
I can’t stand it, and yet I can’t stop it.
It’s like I’m watching myself from outside my body, quieter than normal and standoffish.
Nervous, like the intimacy of his help rattled something loose in me.
I’ve got to find a way to get a grip. It’s not his fault that his calm competence fired up my dormant crush.
Nor is the furious rush I got out of his reaction to my shorts, or the recurring dreams that make me sweat.
It is now the following Friday, and I haven’t talked to him at all in the last two days while he’s been back to work himself.
I am spending my lunch hour at a park around the corner from the salon, watching the clouds do pinwheels above me, and have just taken a very robust bite of my sandwich when my phone pings with a text from Silas.
Are you eating lunch?
I pause chewing and search around the park. Are you stalking me? I send back.
My phone rings. I answer around a full mouth.
“I was just checking because it looks like you left lunch in the fridge,” he says, and I can tell that he is also eating. I picture him in his kitchen in front of his open refrigerator, a wad of food stashed in the side of his bulging cheek. “I would have offered to bring it to you.”
I’m suddenly suspicious. I swallow. “Silas, what are you eating?”
A beat of silence. “I would have brought you something else, I mean.”
“You just helped yourself to what you thought was my lunch, huh?” I laugh. That nervous thing in me is instantly a little calmer. I might be having a hard time getting used to this closeness between us, but I’d hate it more if he pulled away.
I hear him take another bite. “Sorry, Red, I had to. Chicken parm? For lunch on a regular old Friday? Damn.” He moans without remorse, and I catch myself biting down on a smile.
Wiggling on my bench. “Ellis was off, so we had the volunteer cooking at the station, and oh my god, Bea, he can’t even make rice. I was starving.”
I cluck sympathetically before I remember something I overheard last week.
The new aesthetician at the salon—who I suppose is not new, since she has been renting the room that Merritt used to work in for going on eight months, now—was telling one of the other stylists that she had to call an ambulance for her grandmother last week and how three out of the four paramedics who showed up were tall, beautiful men with BYRD stitched onto their uniforms. Or, in Micah’s case, on his VOLUNTEER shirt.
“I know who the Byrds are. They’re from Spunes, like Bea,” the stylist, Rachelle, told her, before angling my way. “Bea just had the middle brother in here a couple weeks ago getting a haircut. Bea, you should fix Zoeie up with Silas!”
After clarifying that Silas was the one she had the most interest in, Zoeie sent me her number. “He’s my roommate,” I declared as if that would have any bearing on her interest in him. And what did I care if it did or didn’t, anyway?
Even if I do care, I shouldn’t. I have zero claim on him and should probably encourage him, as his friend, to open himself up to dating again.
“Hasn’t Micah been volunteering at the station?” I ask him now.
“Yeah, he has. And he’s a shit cook,” he says. “How’d you hear about that?”
“Hair salon,” I explain.
“Ah. I forgot. The mecca.”
We slip into quiet other than the sounds of us both eating.
And even with the unwelcome flutter in my belly, it’s nice, feeling like I’m not lunching alone.
“Speaking of the time-honored tradition of information sharing,” I begin, carefully willing nonchalance into my voice.
“I’ve been given a number to pass along to you.
” It comes out too monotone to be convincingly carefree. Shoot.
I hear him run his tongue over his teeth and marvel at how I don’t want to leap out of my skin at it. It’s got to be a bad sign.
“Is it the coordinates for the fountain of youth?” he asks. “Did future me find a way to come back and give you lottery numbers?”
“I guess that all depends on how you view women, Silas. Metaphorically, maybe this one could be the equivalent.”
He honks a short laugh.
“Apparently, you guys were called out to a lady who slipped in a store parking lot last week? Broke a hip?”
“She seemed lovely and all, but she was a little old for me, Bea.”
“Her granddaughter,” I say, eating one of the cucumber slices I packed. “She works here with me, actually. An aesthetician. She was off when you came in for your haircut, but she’s . . . she’s very pretty and very nice. Her name is Zoeie.”
“Pretty and nice,” he says wryly. “The rarest of all attributes.”
“She clearly cares a great deal for her grandmother, too.” I can’t hide the grin in my words.
“Oh yeah, absolutely. Enough to worry about getting her rocks off as her grandma was loaded into the back of an ambulance.”
“Careful now. That savored strongly of judgment,” I say, halfway to laughter. Then, more seriously, “Maybe she was interested in connection, Silas. Companionship.”
“Already told you. I’m no good for it.”
I doubt that. Since he’s already been perfectly companionable to me, even in the face of my weird resistance.
We fall quiet again, but this time, it feels precarious. Like there’s a match hovering beneath our bubble and all it needs is a spark. “I’ll give you her number. Just to hold on to. Maybe you’ll be ready to do something with it later.”
He sighs raggedly. “All right, Bea.”
“I made the extra lunch for you, by the way,” I admit, fiddling with another cucumber slice. “I mean, I had packed my own and there was plenty left over, so I left that for you. Don’t want you to think you really ate mine. I also made a couple extra cutlets for dinner, too, if you want some.”
“Thank you.” Two gruff syllables.
“You’re welcome.”
“Do you want to eat together again tonight?” he asks. “I’m off. I was thinking of driving out to the Point. The newsletter email from Starhopper said it’s supposed to be one of the clearest nights of the year to see the Milky Way. I could pack dinner to go for us?”
“Yeah.” Yes, I do want to do that. I want to get over my newfound shyness, and this will be perfect to knock me out of this weird funk. More exposure therapy. “Yeah, I’d like that. I won’t get home until about seven, though. You good with eating later?”
“I am an indiscriminate, enthusiastic eater, Bea-Bea Gun.”
“Hate that one.” I won’t address the rest of that sentence, even if something unzips between my ribs.
“Yeah, officially crossing that one off my list. Not my favorite, either,” he agrees. “See you around seven.”
On my drive home later, I decide to give Bonnie a call.
We catch up on her summer calendar and make plans for her to take me to the transfer appointment.
She asks me about Silas, and while I’m somewhat selective with what I share, I’m open when it comes to talking about him helping me and being there for me.
We avoid talking about my mom. The majority of our conversation is light and easy in a way that makes me feel winded.
Which is probably why I start to cry the moment I realize she is.
“I’m sorry, babe. I don’t know why I’m being like this,” she says, pushing out a damp laugh. “I’m just so happy you’ve got a friend. I’m happy you’re doing well and that I’m doing okay, too. But then every time I even think that, I feel this . . . this . . .”
“Guilt,” I finish for her.
“Yes. And we both know she would have hated that. But still, I want to feel everything.”
“I do, too.” I want to keep feeling all of it.
“When I feel whatever it is that comes now, it’s like she’s .
. . here.” Not alive, I know. But still here, present in the pinch of my heart, in the band around my throat.
The shaky smiles that tug at my mouth when something reminds me of her.
Even the insipid guilt is better than the numb emptiness of suppressing it.