Chapter 46
The water holds me gently.
Not warm, not cold, just there, a living cradle beneath my back while I float at the edge of the reservoir, looking up into a sky so wide it almost feels impossible that it belongs to the same world as motel rooms, hospital walls, blood on concrete, old terror dragged screaming into daylight.
Summer has settled over Spokehaven in a way that softens everything.
The sun is high without being cruel. The air smells like freshwater, sunscreen, cut grass somewhere farther up the hill.
Voices drift across the lake in bursts, bright and harmless, carried by wind and distance until they become little pieces of laughter instead of anything sharp.
A real breath fills my lungs.
Then another.
They go all the way down now.
That still feels new enough to notice.
The distant sound of my friends playing reaches me in fragments.
Cheyenne shrieking at Maria for splashing her too hard.
Maria laughing anyway, because of course she is.
Some stupid argument about who cheated first at whatever game they’ve made up near the shallows.
For once, the noise of other people does not make me brace.
It folds into the afternoon and stays there, exactly where it should.
Turning my head, I catch sight of Adrian on the dock.
He’s sitting with his canes propped beside him, long legs stretched awkwardly in front of him, the sunlight catching in his hair while he leans down to poke at Maria with the end of one cane every time she gets too close to the dock.
She keeps slapping it away. He keeps doing it anyway.
The sight of him there still does something strange to my chest. Maybe because when Silas first brought him around, he had looked like a boy who expected every room to spit him back out eventually.
Now he looks almost settled. Not fully. I’m not sure boys from places like St. Augustine ever settle fully.
Still, there is something softer in the line of him these days.
My parents made the decision quickly once it became clear that “temporarily staying over” was just Adrian’s polite way of pretending he had somewhere else to go.
By then Silas and I had already moved into our apartment off campus, ours in a way that still sometimes catches me off guard when I unlock the door.
With us gone, my parents had too much space and too much heart to leave him hanging at the edge of it.
So Adrian ended up there, half-resisting, half-relieved, pretending my mom's endless snack buying annoys him while eating every bit of it anyway.
My dad acts gruffer than he feels. Mom fusses over whether Adrian is resting enough.
The whole thing should feel strange. Instead it feels almost inevitable, like my family has quietly become a place where the broken end up if they are lucky enough to be loved by one of us first.
Another deep breath leaves me.
Peace is a delicate thing. I’ve learned that much. It arrives quietly. It asks nothing. It settles best when you don’t move too fast trying to name it.
The sky above me is painfully blue. My body drifts in a lazy little arc, water lapping at my ears, the sun warming my face.
For a moment, there is nothing to outrun.
No text messages. No recordings. No hospital machines.
No ghosts. Only this bright, ordinary summer day and the startling realization that I am inside it fully, not half waiting for it to be taken away.
Then hands find my hips under the water.
A startled laugh catches in my throat before I can stop it. My body jerks slightly, but there is no panic in it, not anymore, because I know those hands the second they touch me. Broad palms. Steady grip. The immediate, possessive warmth of him.
Silas pulls me toward him with no effort at all.
Water slides between us as my back leaves the easy cradle of the lake and meets the hard heat of his chest instead.
His hands stay firm at my hips, holding me there while I turn just enough to look at him.
Wet hair pushed back. Sunlight turning the sharp planes of his face gold at the edges.
The scar at his temple paler now than it was six months ago.
The kind of beauty that still catches me off guard because so much of it is made from surviving.
He kisses me before I can say anything.
It isn’t hurried. It isn’t for show, though the others are close enough that somebody is bound to groan dramatically in a second.
It is one of those quiet, claiming kisses he gives me when he has already decided the moment belongs to us and the rest of the world can wait until afterward.
His mouth tastes faintly of lake water and sunshine.
When he pulls back, he doesn’t go far.
The water rocks us together while his thumbs move once over my hips beneath the surface, a touch so slight it should not feel as intimate as it does.
But everything with Silas feels more intimate than it should.
Maybe because he has never touched me carelessly.
Maybe because even now, after all this time, there is still something reverent in the way his hands hold me.
“What are you thinking about, beautiful?” he asks.
His voice is lower up close, softened by the fact that he is already smiling a little, as if he knows there is a good chance the answer will make him either jealous or sentimental.
My fingers drift to the wet nape of his neck without permission, playing there because touching him has become as natural as breathing.
Behind him, I can still hear Cheyenne yelling about something, Maria cackling, Adrian muttering a dry insult from the dock.
The sun glints off the water. Somewhere a dragonfly skims low across the surface and disappears.
“All of it,” I murmur.
The words make his expression change at once, not dramatically, just enough that I know he’s listening differently now.
“This,” I say, glancing past his shoulder toward the dock, toward Adrian, toward our friends, toward the whole strange little life we somehow clawed our way into.
“The lake. Them. Adrian looking almost happy and pretending not to. The fact that my parents took him in without blinking.” My mouth curves faintly.
“The fact that you somehow convinced me to leave the house before noon during summer.”
That gets a real smile out of him, devastating in the way his smiles always are when they’re not meant for anyone else.
His hands tighten very slightly at my hips, pulling me closer still until my chest brushes his and my legs drift against his beneath the water.
Heat licks low through me at the contact, subtle but immediate.
Even now, after months of waking up beside him, of coming home to him, of learning the exact shape of his want and the deeper shape of his tenderness, my body still answers him too fast.
“And?” he prompts, because he knows me too well not to hear there’s more.
My gaze lifts to his fully then.
“And I was thinking,” I say quietly, “that this is the first time peace hasn’t felt borrowed.”
For a second, everything in him stills.
The summer noise goes distant. The lake keeps moving around us. His eyes hold mine with a depth that still makes it hard to breathe when I let myself fall all the way into it.
One hand leaves my hip just long enough to brush wet hair back from my face, his knuckles trailing over my cheek in a touch so gentle it nearly undoes me.
“You deserve that,” he says.
Maybe I do now.
Maybe that is what six months has changed most. Not just the apartment, or the way my body no longer goes rigid every time a phone buzzes, or the fact that my dad says Adrian’s name like he has always belonged to us.
Maybe the biggest change is that when Silas holds me in the middle of a bright summer afternoon and tells me I deserve peace, some part of me finally believes him.
I lean in and kiss him this time, slower than before, letting the feeling sit between us.
The water sways around our bodies. His hands return to my hips.
Mine slide up into his hair. It would be easy to let the kiss turn into something hungrier.
With him, it always would be. There is enough heat coiled lazily under my skin to know exactly how quickly a quiet moment can become a ruined one in the best possible sense.
The way his fingers flex against me tells me he knows it too.
Still, neither of us rushes it.
Not today.
Today, the sweetness matters just as much.
The kiss I give him doesn’t stay sweet for long.
Maybe it never really had a chance to.
Not with the water rocking us together so slowly that every shift of the lake presses me more firmly into him.
Not with his hands already planted on my hips beneath the surface.
Not with the sunlight on his skin, the wet hair pushed back from his face, the look in his eyes every time I say something that sounds too much like hope.
His mouth changes under mine first.
The softness is still there, but heat begins to thread through it, turning the kiss deeper, slower, more tense in the way only Silas ever manages.
He kisses me like he has all the time in the world, though the hand at my hip says otherwise.
His fingers tighten, then ease, then tighten again, as if he is trying to decide whether to keep this gentle or ruin us both in the middle of the reservoir while our friends complain from the dock.
My body answers before my mind can pretend otherwise.
A quiet sound catches in my throat when his mouth moves more aggressively against mine, when one hand slides a little farther around my waist under the water, the other drifts up my side in a touch so light it feels almost teasing.
The lake cools my skin. His hands do not.
The contrast is enough to make every nerve in me wake up all at once.