Page 89 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
That’s when I see him.
Silas is stepping out of the downstairs guest bathroom.
The sight of him stops everything in me so completely that for a second it feels like my body simply forgets how to move. It’s late enough that I had assumed everyone in the house was either gone or upstairs. I did not expect him down here. I certainly did not expect to look up and find him in the doorway while I stand half-dressed in the kitchen, my shirt pinched away from my chest, a spoon in one hand and a tub of rocky road in the other.
He stops too.
He looks like he’s just come from either the shower or the gym or some miserable marriage of both. His hair is damp around the temples. A hoodie hangs unzipped over his shoulders, beneath it the skin I can see is marked with fresh bruising, ugly purples and dark shadows blossoming along his ribs and lower stomach where boxing has clearly gotten more from him than usual. One hand still has a wrap wound loosely around it, stained through in places where the blood must have seeped past whatever protection he bothered with. In the other, there’s a flask.
The flask should probably be the thing that unsettles me most.
It isn’t.
It’s the way he looks at me.
His gaze falls first to the spoon, then the open ice cream tub, then the wet spot spreading through the fabric over my breastwhere the rocky road has soaked in. It isn’t a hurried glance. It isn’t exaggerated either. It’s slower than it should be, and because it is, every inch of it registers.
By the time his eyes lift back to mine, my whole body has gone still.
On the phone, Kadin is still talking. I can hear his voice faintly, but it has gone strange, like water in my ears, reduced to fragments.
“...Octavia?”
I don’t answer.
I can’t.
Silas hasn’t said a word. He hasn’t moved beyond stopping in that doorway with the flask hanging from his fingers, his bruises half-hidden in shadow. But the silence between us feels dangerous, loaded with everything from the last two weeks that never got named. His absence. My waiting. The questions that have been multiplying in the dark.
“Octavia?” Kadin says again, sharper now.
Still, I just stand there.
The spoon is growing slick in my hand. The ice cream is melting faster than I can keep up with it. Cold sugar clings to my skin beneath my shirt. Somehow that only makes the heat rising through me feel humiliating.
Silas’s eyes hold on mine with an unreadable steadiness that unsettles me far more than anger would have.
Suddenly the kitchen feels much too small for all three of us.
Silas is the first one to move.
The spell of the moment breaks not because the tension eases, but because he decides to act like it doesn’t matter. He crosses the kitchen with that same quiet, deliberate way he does everything now, opening the fridge as if walking in on me half-dressed in the middle of a phone call is the most ordinary thing in the world.
“Don’t leave pretty boy hanging,” he says, the words low enough that Kadin can’t hear them, but not low enough that I can pretend I imagined them.
The comment lands like a spark against oil.
He pulls out a bottle of water, twists the cap off, drinking half of it in one go. His throat works with each swallow. Water spills at the corner of his mouth and runs down over the bruised side of his ribs where the hoodie hangs open. He doesn’t bother wiping it away. He just keeps his eyes on me over the mouth of the bottle, watching with an intensity that makes every inch of exposed skin feel suddenly overexposed.
Kadin says my name again through the phone. This time I force my voice to work.
“Yeah, Kadin, I’m still here,” I say, though the words come out thinner than I mean them to.
Silas lowers the bottle slowly.
His gaze drifts over me, not hurried, not crude, but uncomfortably thorough. He takes in the tank top, the bare legs, the fact that I am standing in my parents’ kitchen at midnight in little enough clothing that I suddenly wish I had grabbed a blanket or a robe or literally anything before coming downstairs. The awareness of it burns under my skin. Not because he’s seeing something new, exactly. Because he’s seeing it now, like this, after two weeks of distance sharp enough to feel intentional.
Stepping toward the counter, I try to reclaim some control over my own body, my own breath, my own kitchen. My shoulder nearly brushes his as I move past him.
