Chapter 19
Silas
Morning makes everything feel more unforgivable.
That is the first real thought I have when I step into the dining room and see her already sitting at the table, coffee steaming near her elbow, hair still a little damp from the shower, as if she didn’t spend last night underneath my hands trembling hard enough to make me forget my own name for a few brutal, glorious stretches of time.
The room looks painfully normal.
Steph has set out breakfast with the same quiet efficiency she always does, plates arranged neatly, fruit cut up, toast in a basket, coffee poured.
Jacob is reading something on his phone between bites, the kind of small domestic ritual that belongs to safe households and ordinary mornings.
Sunlight spills over the table in broad, clean bands.
It catches on Octavia’s mouth when she lifts her cup.
That alone is enough to send me straight back into the shower.
Steam.
Wet tile.
Her body slick beneath my palms.
The way she stopped trying to be angry somewhere in the middle of it and started being honest instead.
The way she looked at me after, not ashamed, not cold.
She had looked at me openly. Worse than openly.
She had looked at me like she wanted more, like she wanted me not to vanish again, like whatever she saw under all my damage had not scared her away nearly as much as it should have.
Taking my seat slowly, every movement in this room feels dangerous now.
It is not only the memory of her body that is making my pulse too loud.
It is the context. The table. The family.
The way Jacob and Steph move around us, offering coffee and conversation, while I sit here knowing exactly what happened a few hours ago in a room up those stairs.
The distance between night and morning should have helped.
It should have put enough air between us for me to gather some version of myself back together.
It didn’t.
Now all that exists is the awareness of her across from me and the unbearable fact that she is no longer a possibility. She is a memory I can taste.
I can’t stop looking at her mouth.
That’s the part that keeps undoing me. Not her legs under the table or the shape of her in that thin shirt.
Her mouth. Every time my eyes drift there, I’m right back under hot water, right back to the sound of her breathing breaking when I stopped holding myself together, right back to the moment she looked at me like I was not made entirely of things that ruin what they touch.
Forcing my attention down to my plate, it doesn’t stay there for long.
Trying not to look at me, she’s failing in a way that makes everything worse.
Every few seconds her gaze catches on me, before slipping away, quick and nervous, as if she’s still adjusting to the fact that I am sitting here dressed, pretending to know how to exist in daylight after what I did to her last night.
What she let me do. What she asked me not to pull away from once I started.
That distinction matters more than I want it to.
It means I can’t file this away under the usual categories. Drunkenness. Mistake. Need with nowhere else to go. She was not passive in it. She knew who I was. Knew enough. Saw the moth. Saw the scars. Saw all the pieces I hide behind anger and still asked me not to disappear.
I’m not built for being seen like that.
Which means now I don’t know what to do with myself.
Jacob’s voice cuts through my concentration before I can drown in it completely.
“It’s nice to finally see you at breakfast again, Silas,” he says with a warm, oblivious smile.
The sentence lands like a slap.
I look at him, really look at him, and for one ugly second all I can think is that he has no idea who he’s talking to.
No idea what I did only hours ago to the girl he calls his daughter.
No idea how thoroughly I lost every remaining line I had left to protect him from the truth of what he invited into this house.
It’s nice to finally see you at breakfast again.
He says it like I’ve just been adjusting. Like this is about transition, timetables and the ordinary difficulty of dropping a fostered, damaged boy into a new life. He says it like he’s pleased to see me trying.
They have no clue what I’ve done to their daughter.
The thought arrives cold and merciless.
He would not be speaking to me, let alone letting me sit in this house with coffee in my cup and his wife setting down toast within reach, if he knew the things I did to her last night.
If he knew how she sounded with my name in her mouth.
If he knew where my hands were. If he knew how many times I nearly lost myself completely and how little of me wanted to be found again once I did.
The guilt of that should be consuming.
It isn’t.
It tangles with satisfaction too quickly, with the possessive, selfish part of me that is still reeling from the fact that Octavia did not just survive my touch. She answered it. Wanted it. Held onto me like I was not poison even after I gave her every reason in the world to believe I was.
Muttering something back to Jacob that sounds enough like a response to pass, I don’t know what it is. The room has already started receding around the edges again.
Steph asks whether I need anything for campus.
Jacob mentions some paperwork. I hear words, but none of them stay.
All of my concentration is divided between keeping my face neutral and trying not to look at Octavia again, because every time I do, I can feel the memory under my skin.
Not abstractly. Physically. Like my body is remembering faster than my mind can regulate it.
This is the part I never accounted for.
Not wanting her. That was always there, whether I admitted it or not.
The real problem is what comes after. The ordinary aftermath.
Sitting in the same room. Hearing her father speak kindly to me.
Watching her try to butter toast with fingers that I know curled into my shoulders hours ago.
This version of intimacy feels more dangerous than the shower did, because the shower was honest. This is performance.
This is pretending that breakfast is just breakfast and not a kind of torture built out of fruit, coffee, and withheld eye contact.
It would have been easier if she had looked at me with regret this morning. Easier if she’d recoiled. Easier if she’d decided what happened was a mistake and built a wall high enough for me to recognize.
But she hasn’t.
She keeps glancing at me, and every glance feels like a question she hasn’t asked out loud yet.
Was it real?
Are you going to disappear again?
What now?
I don’t have answers to any of it.
All I have is the knowledge that Jacob is smiling at me across the table like I’m something he helped save, while I sit here knowing that if he ever understood the full shape of what happened last night, he would never look at me like this again.
Somehow, beneath the guilt, the conflict, and the constant threat of my own body betraying me all over again, there is a harder truth I can’t scrape out of myself.
If I look at her one more time and she looks back the way she did in that shower, I do not know how long I can keep pretending I regret it more than I want it again.
The moment only breaks because Steph stands to clear a plate.
Until then, breakfast has been one long act of pretending.
Pretending the room isn’t too small, pretending coffee, toast, and ordinary conversation are enough to anchor anything after last night, pretending I don’t notice every time Octavia glances at me and then away again like her own body is keeping secrets from her face.
I am already stretched too thin by the effort of sitting at this table and looking like a person who belongs here.
So when Steph drifts toward the kitchen, I follow almost without thinking, mostly because movement feels safer than staying still across from Octavia for another full minute.
It doesn’t help.
The kitchen is only another version of the same problem.
Steph moves easily through it, topping off coffee, opening cabinets, making harmless comments about campus and schedules.
Jacob lingers nearby, glancing between his phone and the counter, one of those men who can make domesticity look effortless because no one ever taught him to fear the spaces where families eat.
Then Steph looks out toward the driveway.
She pauses just long enough for me to notice.
“I thought today was an off day for both of you,” she says, mild confusion in it, the kind that belongs to a mother trying to keep track of young people’s schedules.
The words are barely finished before I hear the knock at the door.
My attention goes there instantly. Not because I know who it is yet, but because something in me already doesn’t like the timing. The sound is casual enough to be harmless, but harmless things have not exactly been my experience lately.
Steph reaches the door before anyone else can move. Octavia is coming in from the dining room at the same time, her expression already puzzled. The second the door swings open, the air in the whole house changes.
Maria and Cheyenne are on the porch.
And behind them stands Kadin.
For one second, all I feel is disbelief, quickly followed by something much uglier.
Steph smiles with automatic warmth. “Hi, girls. Octavia is in the kitchen…” Her eyes drift to Kadin. “And who is your friend?”
Maria and Cheyenne exchange a look that would almost be funny if it didn’t make me want to break something. They’re too pleased with themselves, too careless with the moment, the way girls get when they think they are helping move some romance along.
“Octavia’s friend,” one of them says, the other giggling immediately after, as if the phrase itself is hilarious.
The rage that hits me is instant.