Page 72 of The Someday Daughter
This time, there’s no reeking Los Angeles alleyway. There’s no unidentified liquid underfoot. It’s not humid and I’m not angry and when Silas reaches for my zipper, I don’t feel anything except his fingers on my skin.
“This almost made me pass out the first time,” he tells me. We’re in my room, door shut tight, and the bedside lamp casts a warm glow. “Just so you know.”
“My zipper?”
“Mmm.” He pulls it down, trailing one fingertip above it along my spine. “You were so mad and your skin was on fire and you were the most beautiful person I’d ever seen.”
Silas smooths his palms through the unfurled sides of the dressuntil his fingers are splayed across my ribs. His thumb brushes a ridge of muscle in my back and then his lips land at the nape of my neck, the top of my shoulder. I shiver, goose bumps blooming down my bare arms.
“I wanted to kiss you so bad,” he whispers.
“You didn’t even know me.”
“No,” he says, and I lean back until I meet his chest. The motion of it pushes my dress up his arms and the rest of the way off, so it puddles at my feet. “And now that I do, I want to kiss you even worse.”
Blood roars in my ears. Silas is warm in a way that swallows me whole. He doesn’t turn me around for a moment—we just stand like that, his arms around my bare waist, his lungs rising gently into my back.
But then I lift one arm to wrap it around his neck, and we crash together in a rush: my body spinning to face his, his hand rising to my hair, his lips meeting mine. One warm palm pressed between my shoulder blades.
I reach for the hem of his shirt and he pulls it over his head, hair curly and wild as he leans back in to kiss me. I’m drowning in a way that feels like filling my lungs. I’m one, big feeling.More.
When his fingers skim the line of my bra I reach back and unhook it myself. Silas tips me toward the bed and I reach for the hem of his sweatpants, brushing my fingers against the soft, warm skin underneath. His breath catches and I watch him swallow.
“Hey, we can go slow.” His eyes scan mine, pupils wide and dark. “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
“I don’t want to go slow,” I whisper. Ethan always made me feel like this was something we weren’t ready for, but I know now thatEthan not being ready didn’t mean I wasn’t. I was. I wanted this with him, once. And I want it now, in a way that feels like being set on fire. “Is that okay?”
“Yeah,” Silas says, and when I lower the waistband of his pants he swallows again. “Yes.”
I tilt my chin up and he kisses me, one hand around my ribs and the other in my hair. I feel him kick his pants off, the thin fabric of his boxers on my bare thighs.
“Audrey,” he whispers. “You’ve done this before?”
I’m scared to say it, but this is Silas. So I say it anyways—quietly, like a confession. “No. Have you?”
His eyes move over mine, dark in the lamplight. His thumbs brush the sensitive skin between my ribs and my pelvis. “Yeah,” he says eventually. Watching me carefully, like I might be hurt. But I’m not—he’s here with me now, and it’s enough. “But you—this is your—” He breaks off, drawing a big breath that I watch move through his rib cage, his chest. “Audrey, are you sure?”
“Silas.” I take his face in my hands—the same one that I saw tight with anger on Lake Michigan, blank with shock in Nashville, now so worried and so careful. “I’m sure. Of you and of this.”
“Okay,” he says. He kisses my shoulder, the curve of my neck. I feel him against my leg and something clutches inside me, a whole new room in my body opening up.
“Then you have to talk to me,” Silas says, his lips beneath my ear. “All right? You’re the boss.”
I’m scrabbling for the waistband of his boxers but he stops me, lifting my hands to his chest. He traps them there under his own.
“Audrey,” he says, in a way that makes me feel like I’ve never heard my own name before. His eyes track over mine. “Okay?”
His lips are swollen and pink. I draw a steadying breath. “I’m the boss.”
“You’re the boss,” he says again, softly, and carries the words to my mouth.
Later, Silas turns off the lamp and kisses my ribs over the faint ghosts of his fingerprints.
46
“What’s next?” Mom says. We’re in a hidden lounge at the Miami airport, all plush leather seating and built-in phone chargers. Cleo leans on Mick’s shoulder as he scrolls my mother’s socials, and Silas is at the enormous floor-to-ceiling window across the room, holding Puddles up to see the tarmac. Mags and Sadie stand side by side at the bar. I think of Sadie’s book, nestled against my laptop in my backpack.
I scrunch my eyebrows at my mom. “Our flight to Boston?”
