Page 65 of The Someday Daughter
“It is.” I’ve been talking to the dark ceiling and Silas moves in front of me so I have to meet his eyes. “Besides, ‘after’ is three years away. At least that long. Do we need to know, right this second?”
I bite my lip, silent. I always want to know, is the thing. I want a map for everything to come and a steady line to trace myself through it.
“I don’t think we do,” Silas says. His voice softens. “I just want to know you, Audrey. Now. I want you to know me, too. We can figure out the rest later.”
It hits me then that Silas has seen me from the start. Not as someone he can mold into what he wants me to be but as someone he wants already, just as I’ve been from that moment in the back alley in Los Angeles. I squeeze my nails into my palm.
“Silas, it’s going to hurt.”
“What is?”
“All of it,” I say, shivering so hard now that my voice shakes. “Being away from you at school and not knowing if we’ll wind up in the same place and just—I mean, if it ends, I just don’t—” I break off, stare up at him.
Because part of me knew that I could do it, with Ethan. That I could be apart, do a relationship like that, have him in fits and starts. I could stomach the weeks and months of separationpunctuated by frenetic weekends linked by train. I’ve already lost so much of him this summer, and I’ve survived it.
But the way I am with Silas—the hook in my belly when he’s close to me, the indefensible way I’ve needed him so much just this summer alone. It would be torture, wouldn’t it? To have him only halfway. A greater torture still to have him and then lose him.
“Yeah,” Silas says slowly. “We could get hurt, I guess, but doesn’t this hurt?” He reaches for me and then stops himself, and in the moment before his fingers freeze next to mine I think,please. “Don’t you hurt? Because I do.” He swallows, his voice going soft and small. “I really fucking do.”
I do. I do, Ido. I squeeze my eyes shut. Thunder rumbles from the ocean.
“Can we try something?” Silas says, when I still haven’t spoken. “Can you tell me what you actually want? Not what you’re supposed to want, or what’s going to set you up for some other thing.” I open my eyes, and he takes a deep breath, and I realize he’s scared to hear me answer. “Just what you actually want. Right now. Right this second.”
I’m not brave. I can’t say it so plainly, what’s pressing at the roof of my mouth.
“I think you know,” I whisper, echoing his words.
And he echoes mine, too. “Tell me.”
I fill my lungs. I squeeze my elbows in my fingers, set my shoulders to stop the shaking.
And I look at Silas, who’s wanted the truth of me from the start.
And I tell him.
42
The knocking wakes me slowly, distant but persistent. I open my eyes to the dark office, blue light just inching around the edges of the boarded-up windows. We slept on the floor, linens and pillows pulled from the bedrooms while we waited out the storm. It sounds quiet now, outside—but the knocking comes again.
There’s something heavy and warm on my stomach; as my eyes adjust to the light I clock it as Silas’s arm, thrown across me. He’s sleeping right next to me, much closer than the polite distance where we fell asleep, his chest rising and falling rhythmically. I stare at his arm: tan from summer, a few ropy veins racing up from his wrist to his elbow. His fingers are splayed over my hipbone and when I sit up his fingertips press into me for just a moment, a reflex. Puddles is wedged into the space between our bodies, her face buried in Silas’s neck. Mick and Cleo sleep a few feet away. Mom and Magnolia are gone.
When I check my phone, still without service, it’s 8:03 in the morning.
I slip out from under Silas’s arm as delicately as I can, and when he turns onto his back Puddles wiggles after him to keep her spot.Her big brown eyes track me out of the room.
The house is still dark, hardly feels like morning. The knocking continues, and I grab a flashlight from next to the office door and use it to make my way across the foyer. I wonder, briefly, where my mother is. But then I swing the front door open and every single thought drops directly out of my brain.
“Ethan.”
He’s standing on the front steps in khaki shorts and a rumpled Yale T-shirt cut by black backpack straps. A duffel bag rests at his feet.
“Hi,” he says. The one syllable sounds absurd, hanging in the humid air between us. It occurs to me, distantly, that the sun is out.
“You’re here.” Behind him, a landscaping truck sits in the driveway. There are at least four people picking up debris in the yard. My thumb is pressed to my pinky finger, silently counting.
“I took a bus,” he says. He looks exhausted: purple smudges under his eyes, dark hair uncharacteristically unkempt. “And then another one. And then, um, a cab.”
“I didn’t think you—” I break off. My brain is hardly working at all. “When your flight was canceled, I didn’t think—”
