Page 36 of The Someday Daughter
“Woof.” She drops my wrist. “Sorry. Don’t mean to—it’s just, I’m usually going in the right direction.”
“What about the time,” Mick says, him and Silas stepping into line behind us, “that you got us so lost in Arlington we were forty minutes late to dinner with my grandparents during family weekend?”
“You can’t get lost in Arlington,” Cleo says, staring up at the menu. “You just use the Lincoln Memorial like the North Star.”
“That’s just... not true,” Mick says. “At all.”
Cleo looks back at him. “Should I get apple pie topping or cinnamon sugar?”
“Why not both?” Silas asks.
“Oh,” Cleo gasps, widening her eyes at him. “Oh, I love you. Yes.” Then she adds, “Not in the romantic sense,” and glances at me in a way that I thoroughly do not enjoy.
“What are you getting, Audrey?” Mick asks, drumming his fingers on one bicep, his arms crossed as he stares up at the menu.
“Classic powdered sugar,” I say, and Cleo groans.
“You would. I bet your favorite doughnut flavor’s plain glazed, too.”
It... is. “Because it’s the best one.”
“Well, I’m getting rainbow sprinkles,” Mick says.
Silas eyes him. “I don’t think that’s an option.”
But Mick points over his shoulder, where a six-year-old in pigtails holds a funnel cake smothered in sprinkles.
“That’s for kids,” Cleo says, just as they call her up to order.
“Which is what I am,” Mick tells her solemnly, “at heart.”
“You?” I ask, glancing up at Silas. He’s wearing khaki shorts and a white short-sleeved button-down over a T-shirt. Those same abominable hiking sandals from the plane in Los Angeles. His hair’s a little wet, like he showered before coming here.
“Oh, caramel sauce for sure.” He combs a hand through his curls, trying to tame them at the nape of his neck. “Lily would kill me if I got anything else—my sister.”
I remember, but I don’t tell him that.
“She’s super into all those baking shows,” he says as we step forward in line. “Taught herself to make the perfect caramel sauce last summer before I left for school. Now she wants me to orderit out at every opportunity so I can report back how much better hers is.”
“She wouldn’t know, though, if you got something else.”
He looks at me, narrowing his eyes in a good-natured way. “Are you trying to rob my thirteen-year-old sister of a moment of glory, Audrey?”
I hold up my hands, a peace offering. “I’m just saying you should get what you want.”
His eyes linger on mine for just a moment, something inscrutable flickering across them, before he looks away. “It is what I want now,” he says. “She’s got me trained like one of Pavlov’s hounds.”
“What can I get you?” the funnel cake guy calls out to us, and Silas motions me ahead of him. He’s been true to his word, to what he said back in that classroom in Austin: the way Silas acts around me is easy and friendly and perfectly polite. Not a word or a glance out of place. The problem isn’t Silas, it’s me. It’s me, stepping around him and imagining what it might be like for his hand to reach out as I do it. To graze the small of my back.
“Let us have a bite,” Mick says, crowding my space as soon as I turn away from the window with my funnel cake. He holds his own besprinkled cake to the side while reaching for mine and ripping off a piece.
“Hey!” I say, in the same moment that he lets out a yelp.
“Oh my god.” With his mouth full of cake, it sounds likeormagore.He unhinges his jaw and fans his hand rapidly in front of his lips, giving us a full show of half-chewed dough. “It’shot.”
“You’re a mess,” Cleo says, reaching around him to rip off a piece for herself. I try to swivel out of her way, but I’m not quick enough.
“I thought this flavor wasboring,” I say, watching her blow on the sugar-dusted chunk of cake.
