Page 17 of Lost and Found

“That’s too bad,” he says. “Guess I’ll let you go.” His grin turns smarmy, like he is preemptively smug about his next line. “Again.”

“Ha ha. Good seeing you, Shane.”

“Yeah, yeah. See ya, heartbreaker.”

I wiggle my fingers at him and beeline toward the front door. I’ll order a ride when I hit fresh air.

Except I don’t hit fresh air when I step onto the front porch.

I walk straight into a cloud of weed smoke so thick it stings my eyes. I fan it away and lock onto something gold.

Someonegold. A golden boy who has fully grown into a man, perched beneath some string lights bathing him in a yellow glow, and wearing Silas Byrd’s face.

He’s half seated on the porch railing, long legs kicked out to brace him, and taking a drag from the joint between his lips.There’s another guy in conversation with him, but Silas has homed in on me.

Snap.Right between my ribs, right when our eyes snag.

We’re three hours away from Spunes, but seeing him right now feels like crossing the big green bridge that leads into town, that first glimpse of the Point and the sharp hills and turns that welcome me home. Familiar and exhilarating all at once.

He doesn’t say anything, just stares me down with a hot gleam in his eye, then takes the joint out of his mouth and lifts it my way, pinching it between his middle finger and thumb.

“Interested?” he asks, smoke tendrils curling out from his crooked grin, the light catching on the gold chain around his neck. He looks like the devil himself, asking me if I’minterested. Interesting word choice, indeed. My heart hiccups over the memory.

“Sure.” I say it as airily as I can, but the smile taking over my face is a feral thing.

His friend notices me now and gives me a quizzical look. “Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere?” he says.

“Not sure,” I reply, though I am positive I’ve never seen him in my life. Warm brown skin, shoulder-length black hair, and nearly black eyes. I take the joint from Silas and pretend it doesn’t set off sparklers beneath my skin when his fingers brush against mine. “What’s your name?”

“Ravi,” he says with a winsome smile, doing a slow, intentional perusal of me. “You go to Willamette?” he asks.

I angle myself Ravi’s way and give him a coquettish look, blowing out some fragrant smoke. In my peripheral vision, I see Silas cross one ankle over the other. “Nope,” I tell Ravi.

“Are you from Eugene, maybe?”

“No,” I laugh, handing him the joint next.

“Somewhere nearby, then? Come on, I wouldn’t forget your face.” He takes a long, deep pull and winks at me. “Or that hair.”

“Maybe you know me from porn?” I offer flatly.

Ravi’s eyes round before he dissolves into a coughing fit so loud and violent I can barely hear Silas cackling over it. But the golden man finally pushes himself up and lifts me into a hug, molding and pressing me against him. He smells like minty soap and smoke and something else I can’t pinpoint. It makes that homesick ache of earlier burn all over again.

“It’s good to see you, Red,” Silas says, chuckling into my hair.

“You two know each other?” Ravi spits before he starts a new hacking spell.

“Why are you here?” I say into Silas’s collarbone. And why did the sight of him bowl me over with fresh loneliness? Between feeling disengaged in school, the gnawing worry over Stephen and Merritt, and Merritt’s strange distance lately, I am . . . I don’t know what I am. Suspended in a state of directionless floating? Stuck in a holding pattern? And why is my throat going tight? How strong is that weed?

“I just finished the fire academy out here,” he says, his palm running a quick circuit over the back of my head down to my mid-back. “I’ve been living in Eugene for the last four months.”

Stepping out of the hug feels like letting blood return to a limb that’s fallen asleep. Mildly painful but necessary. Tingly.

“Four months?! You should have called me,” I say.

His head cocks, an amused frown pulling at his mouth. “I should have?”

Yeah . . . I suppose that might’ve been a little weird. I’ve only seen him back home a handful of times over the last four years, and typically, our interactions have been limited to a wave or a nod across the crowd at Savvy’s. Maybe a quickHey, hi, how are youat O’Doyle’s. Brief, polite smiles when we pass each other by at Spunes’s summer festival.