Page 28 of The Someday Daughter
“Whoa, girl,” he says, grabbing her two-handed around her rib cage. He’s been reading next to me, some mystery novel with a worn cover and a big crease in the spine. “No water for you.” He glances over at me. “She can’t swim.”
“Well,” I say, not looking up from my book, “I guess we have one thing in common.”
There’s a pause, and suddenly Silas is right next to me, craned over with his whole face in my space. “You can’tswim?”
I lean back, catching a whiff of him—salt sweat, the sunscreen I watched him rub into the back of his neck when we got here, something deeper and clean and good. I think of Fallon, reading to me from a paperback romance novel in our dorm room this spring:He smells of sandalwood, of early summer mornings and hope.The huge, characteristically Fallon snort she’d let out as she turned to me and said,That’s how you identify the love interest, Audrey. He smells like something insane. Human beings smell like BO or nothing.Fallon loves romances: the tropes, the comfortable predictability, all those sandalwood-smelling men.Ethan smells like pine trees, I’d told her, and she’d gagged.
“Camilla never taught me,” I say now, shifting on the towel to put more space between us. I don’t need to be close enough to Silas to smell him, preferably ever again. “She was too busy, and then I went away to school.”
He’s watching me, open-mouthed. He scrambles for a couple different words, lips moving until he finally manages to whisper, “Wow.”
“Cool,” I say. “Thanks for making me feel like a specimen.”
Silas laughs, adjusting Puddles in his lap. “Sorry. It’s just hard for me to picture growing up without this.” He spreads his hands in front of us. “Swimming in lakes and pools and smelling like chlorine all summer.”
I look over at him, try to imagine him small. “Did she teach you to swim?”
His brows twitch together. “Sadie?”
I shake my head. “Your mom.”
He hesitates, looking away from me, and I could strangle myself. What iswrongwith me? “I’m sorry,” I say quickly. “I shouldn’t have—that was. It’s not my place.”
“No,” he says, smiling softly, “it’s okay. I’m just trying to remember—it was so long ago. It feels like something I’ve just alwaysknownhow to do, if that makes sense.” He rakes a hand through his hair, leaving it messy. “But yeah, I’m sure she did—my dad was always working, so it must have been her.” We’re quiet for a minute, watching Mick splash Cleo on the riverbank. And then he says, “I’m impressed that you have the stomach for it, going to an ICU like that.”
We look at each other, textbook falling shut as I turn toward him. I’ll lose my place, but I leave it. “What?”
“Sadie told me you were going to the ER this morning. Or the ICU—I’ll be honest, I don’t know the difference.” He smiles. “But it’s pretty badass, either way. I can’t do hospitals after what happened.”
I blink at him, trying to decide where to start. I don’t think anyone has ever called mebadassbefore. I didn’t know Sadie and Silas were talking so much about our plans this summer. But what comes out is— “Was she sick?”
“Yeah.” He runs a hand down Puddles’s back. “For a while, sowe spent a lot of time in and out of places like that.” He looks up at me, draws a big breath. “Breast cancer. GG had it, too, but she’s all right now.”
My hand twitches on my lap, like I’m going to—what,reach for him? He glances at my fingers, like he saw it, too. “Silas,” I say, swallowing hard. “I’m so sorry. That’s terrible.”
“It was,” he says, one corner of his mouth lifting in a small way. “Thanks. It put me off hospitals as kind of a general rule, so I’m glad there are people like you. Still signing up to save the world.”
“I don’t know about saving the world,” I say quietly, nudging my palm into the corner of my textbook’s cover. “Hopefully a few people, though.”
“A few would be enough,” he says, and when I look at him it feels dangerous, like a great hole opening up. Something dark and unfamiliar to fall into. I blink, and Silas clears his throat, and over the sound of Cleo’s laughter I hear him say, “Was there a picture you wanted to show me?”
“Oh.” I reach for my bag, pulling out my phone and opening up the text thread with Ethan. I hold it out to Silas, that photo of us filling the screen.
I watch him study it, dark eyebrows knit together, one hand curved over the screen to shade it from the sun.
“This is what I’m talking about,” he says finally. I brace myself, Ethan’s words echoing in my head.It looks... suggestive. Silas holds the phone up so I can see it, pointing to me there. “Resting mathematician face.” His mouth cracks into a grin and I swipe the phone out of his hand, burying it in my bag.
“It’s not so bad,” he says, leaning over to nudge my shoulder. “Kind of cute, if you’re into that sort of thing.”
I rub my arm where it made contact with his, try to get this conversation back on the rails. “It’s invasive.”
“The photo?” Silas says. “Or me calling you cute?”
Shit. Shitshitshit. “I—” When I finally look at him he’s still smiling, but when he sees my face his lips flatten out, everything about his expression closing up.
“I’m sorry,” he says, leaning out of my space. “I didn’t mean to, um—”
And here’s the thing. Here’s the stupid, nonsensical thing. I don’t want him to be sorry. I don’t want him to feel bad. I don’t want that so much I almost don’t say what I say next—but I do. In the end, I do.
