Page 149 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
Cheyenne gets it immediately.
“Want shotgun?” she calls, the joke dry enough to save all three of us from drowning in the sincerity of the moment.
For the first time all morning, a real smile finally pulls at my mouth
CHAPTER 31
Octavia
“Are you going to say anything?”
The question leaves me because the silence has gone on too long and because Maria’s face is doing that thing it only ever does when her brain is trying to outrun a truth it really, really did not expect to catch.
We’re half-hidden in the hallway outside our first class, pressed into that strange pocket of space between the bulletin board and the row of lockers where people always linger just long enough to turn private conversations into rumors if they raise their voices. Students pass in bursts around us, bags slung over shoulders, coffee cups in hand, laughter rising and fading in currents that feel very far away from the small, charged square of air the four of us are standing in.
Maria just stares.
Her eyes move from me to Silas and back again, then land somewhere over my shoulder like maybe the wall behind us will offer a simpler explanation than the one standing right in front of her. Cheyenne, for all her dramatics, has had a full car ride to process. Maria has had all of thirty seconds and exactly one lookat my face to realize that no, this is not some miscommunication, and no, I am not about to laugh and say got you.
“You two?” Maria asks at last.
The words come out half-breathed, half-accusation as she points between me and Silas like she needs the physical motion to keep the sentence from collapsing under the weight of what it means.
Beside me, Silas shifts just enough that the side of his shoulder nearly brushes mine. He doesn’t touch me fully, not in a hallway packed with classmates and the possibility of eyes we don’t want, but the nearness of him feels intentional all the same. His expression has gone flat in that way it always does when he’s bracing for judgment and bored by it at the same time.
“Happily,” he says.
The scoff in his voice does not help.
If anything, it only makes Maria’s eyes widen further, because there is no shame in him when he says it. No awkwardness. No attempt to soften it into a mistake or a misunderstanding or one of those vague almost-relationships college students use when they’re still trying to keep a door open somewhere else.
Just happily.
Like the word itself is a challenge.
Maria’s mouth opens and closes once before she turns back to me. The disbelief in her face is so naked that under any other circumstance I might have laughed. She is waiting for me to save her from this. To tell her he’s being dramatic. To tell her last night got confusing. To tell her we kissed or almost did or crossed some vague emotional line and now everyone is overreacting.
Instead, I feel Silas’s fingers brush mine.
Only barely.
The contact is so small no one else would notice it unless they were already watching too closely, but it grounds me instantly. The warmth of him is there, real and present. For once I don’t want to hide behind half-truths. Not with them. Not anymore.
“I love him,” I say.
The words come out quieter than his did, but they land harder.
Partly because Maria believes me immediately.
Partly because the second I say them aloud in the middle of a school hallway, the whole thing becomes frighteningly real in a new way. Not just a secret. Not just a room and a set of whispered confessions made in the dark. Something I’m willing to claim in daylight.
My hand stays low at my side. His does too. Our fingers barely graze again, a touch so slight it’s almost nothing and somehow more intimate than if we’d just held hands in front of everyone.
“All of it is true,” I add.
The sentence steadies something in me.
Maria looks at me like I’ve just announced I intend to run away and join a traveling circus. Her shock doesn’t read as cruelty. It reads as a genuine failure of imagination. She knew I was hiding something. Knew the blowup yesterday had roots deeper than I was willing to show. Knew Cheyenne came to pick me up this morning and came back different.
