Page 19 of True Honey
“I want it in writing,” she said and my heart stopped beating at her response.
“Are you serious?” I blurted.
“Were you not?” Drew said nervously, “was this a joke?”
“No, no.” I put my hands out toward her to get her to settle, “I just didn’t think that you’d actually go for it.”
“I haven’t said yes,” she warned. “I want a contract, a real one and a few days to decide.”
“I can do that,” I nodded.
“Alright,” she said. Her hair fell over her shoulder as she looked back down at what she had been working on before I interrupted her.
“What are you filling out?” I asked her to break the tension. I was still feeling sick to my stomach.
“Mydoctortold me to fill out an incident report form,” she said to me.
I couldn’t stop the smirk that formed. “I’m yours now? Moving a little fast aren’t we?”
COURTNEY
After Silas left I finally took a breath of air.
I replayed the conversation in my head, over and over for the rest of the day until it was time to pick up August from school. What Silas was offering would solve so many problems but the situation would cause just as many in return.
He was asking for weeks, maybe months. Time I’d be contractually required to stay put…No running.That was the scariest part of it all. The proposal had been a shock but in the hours after I realized that it was easily handled and if it meant giving August a place to sleep that wasn’t the passenger seat of our car…I could play a doting fiancé. But the worry that crept in afterward wasn’t about the plan, it was about whether I could actually pull it off.
It was the look in his eyes. They had gotten so dark when he’d said please. I could tell that it was his last resort. He’d run through every option, played them all out, and landed on me. I knew the process of trying to logic myself out of an anxiety attack caused by stress. I’d done it everyday for nearly thirteen years.
I had to come up with a way to let him down easy. Silas had narrowed in on me by accident, bad timing whatever you want to chalk it up to. It wasn’t fate. I’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time when his brain cooked up whatever impossible plan this was.
I’d done the same more than once over the years.
He had no idea that he was getting the worst end of the deal. It wouldn’t take him very long to figure out that the pretty, sassy red head he’d stumbled upon thinking she was his saving grace was in fact a depressed, anxious mess and nothing more than a failed study in single parenting.
Shit.I looked at the clock, then up at the green light I’d been sitting at for… who knew how long. The people of Harbor might have been a little touchy but at least it was quiet here. I appreciated that. I’d never been much one for the city, smaller towns soothed my aching heart in a way I couldn’t quite describe to anyone that didn’t justunderstand.
I rubbed at my chest, trying to quiet the crushing weight left behind from the conversation.. Silas wanted soft, pretty, charming. All things I could be on a regular basis, all I needed to do was keep him at arms length so he didn’t see the pain, the coldness, the sadness.
“I can do this,” I thought out loud, tears welling. “For Auggie.”
The school was busy when I finally cleared my head and made my way down there. It was nice to be around the sound of laughter and conversation, it muted the little voices in the back of my head that wanted me to believe I was doing something wrong.
August noticed me right away. He pushed off the step and made his way across the lawn, avoiding contact with all the talking and joking kids around him. He kept his head down and I knew at that moment that something had gone terribly wrong. He’d always had a hard time fitting in, his interests and activities didn’t necessarily line up with the interests of what the world viewed as a typical teenage boy. And it made it hard to make friends.
I knew that part of the reason why it was difficult was because he very rarely was afforded the time to even try to make friends, or to acclimate to the groups before we were moving again. He climbed into the passenger side and slammed the door shut behind him.
“How was your day?” I asked him even though his headphones were still safely positioned over his ears. He turned to look at me, his father’s dark stare glaring at me and my heart thudded uncomfortably in my chest.I’m sorry, I wanted to say. I didn’t know what I was apologizing for, everything or maybe nothing at all but every time he looked at me like that the guilt seeped through every logical thought and the urge to apologize became incessant.
“Fine,” he said with a tight, annoyed tone.
“Did you get to your classes alright? Was there someone there to show you around?” I asked him. I had to push the conversation, or else that was all I was going to get from him.
“Yeah,” he said, surprisingly quickly. “Some girl has been dragging me around.”
“Some girl?” I asked with a soft smile, “was she in your grade?”
“Yeah,” he repeated.
