Page 38 of True Honey
“Are you two joining us or?” Josh snapped from the archway and I looked over my shoulder with a nod. She had been putting on a show for him without a second thought.
It stung as she pulled away and left my mind screaming for her comfort.
It was just situational, I reminded myself.. If we were having the same conversation in the kitchen of the Nest none of the secondary stuff would have happened. I’d begged her to play the part, and she was nailing it, so well, in fact, she was starting to fool even me.
COURTNEY
Dinner was an absolute shitshow.
Seymour spent the majority of it talking and ranting about business issues no one at the table truly understood and my mind was stuck on how sad Silas had looked talking about his birthday.
Birthdays are irrelevant, that’s what he’d said. I didn’t believe it. Birthday’s should be celebrated, enjoyed. It’s about surviving the year behind you and opening up the possibilities for the next year of life. Parties and presents were symbolic of wealth and happiness to come. Silas looked devastated, sitting at the end of the table with a solemn look on his face and when dessert was nothing more than a banana pudding I couldn’t stop the feeling of sympathy that bubbled up.
During the brief moments where Seymour wasn’t talking, Sylwia filled the space with questions about my life. How we met, how long we’d known each other, did I like baseball, where I’d been born? Each question got more personal than the last. She was digging, trying to catch me in a lie but it was buried so deep in my chest that she would never find it.
In the car on the ride home Silas turned to me, “tonight went terribly,” he laughed, losing the tie around his neck.
“If anything, it tells me that we need to have an actual conversation,” I said to him and his brows scrunched. “I don’t know anything personal about you. The binder had everything except that. What if she’d asked your favorite color?” I said.
“Red,” he answered quickly. “But don’t tell anyone because they all think it’s Harbor blue,” he said, with a laugh. “Also what binder?”
“I’m serious,” I said as he pulled the mustang into the garage, completely avoiding telling him that Ella and Arlo had given me a treasure chest of cheat codes. Cael was asleep on the couch when we wandered into the house and Ella was sitting at the island with a book.
“Hey you two, how did the night go?” she asked and Silas grimaced as he chucked his jacket on the island. “Well, we took Auggie for dinner and then to the stadium and he wore Cael out, both of them fell asleep a little while ago on the couch but we got Auggie to bed.”
“You carried him down those stairs?” I said in surprise. I hadn’t been able to carry August in years and he hadn’t slept deep enough to even try. I smiled, picturing him happy.
“That would have been me.” An enormous man with a shaggy brunet mullet that may or may have not been cut in the dark wandered through the kitchen. “Van Mitchell.”
He held out his hand for me and I almost gave him my left before tucking it behind my back. I felt Silas slip the ring from my finger, shoving it in his pants pocket as I shook Van’s hand.
“Is that short for anything?” I asked him.
“No,” he chuckled, grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge. “Pretty sure my dad just named us by playing name association games. My sisters are Cosy and Guthrie, who my Dad lovingly callsGut.”
I giggled at the names, one being very girly and the other being very strange and Van shrugged, “I can’t say anything, my son's name is Auggie.”
“Weird names are cooler anyways,” Van said. “He slept like a rock, I don’t think I’ve seen Cael run that much in his entire career…”
“Trust me it’s as much of a surprise that Auggie was participating in any type of exercise, he’s more of a ‘stars and music’ kid,” I said, it was nice to engage in a conversation that didn’t feel like there were stakes involved. They were just genuinely curious about everything.
“He’s cool,” Van said, leaning over to kiss Ella on the head before excusing himself.
“I should get Cael upstairs, if we leave him on the couch, Jensen will have his hand in a bowl of hot water and we just got the pee smell out of the fabric fromthe last time that happened…” Ella said and at first I thought she was joking but Silas offered to help and I realized that it was an actual worry.
I kicked off my shoes as they left the kitchen and made my way downstairs and into my room to change. My mind was still processing everything that had gone on that evening, from the easy dismissal of his birthday to his family being less of family and more of a company. It felt cold and wrong. I tugged my hair out of the rigid bun it was wrapped into and let it fall over my shoulders before slipping into a tank top and pajama pants. I cleaned my face off, lingering on how sad Silas had looked and had a brilliant idea.
In the kitchen I found everything I needed to make pancakes and started to quietly put them together when Silas appeared in the doorway.
“What are you doing?” he asked me.
“Showing you how birthdays are done in our family,” I said, whisking the batter.
He eyed me for a second before disappearing through the apartment to his room, when he returned twenty minutes later his hair was damp and he was wearing a t-shirt and shorts looking more casual then I’d seen him before.
“Can I help?” He asked, standing on the other side of the island.
“Pour us a drink?” I asked, it had been a while since I had one with an actual adult and I was so nervous at dinner that it wasn’t even on my mind.
