Page 43 of What We Don't Say: Part Two

“I was nineteen and had just learned several words that made me unbearable.”

I laugh, and he looks down at the book with a small movement at the corner of his mouth.

“I probably disagreed badly,” he says. “He probably made more sense than I admitted.”

“You should tell him that.”

Dash keeps his thumb on the edge of the table of contents. “Maybe.”

He closes the book and sets it beside his coffee. After a moment, he asks which class made me want to teach, and I tell him about a seminar in my second year of undergrad where the professor let us argue ourselves into a corner before she openeda book and read two sentences that made the whole room restart.

The story carries us through the rest of my latte.

I don’t check my phone until the cake is gone and the plate has only crumbs left. Mara has texted once to confirm Sunday, and two university emails sit beneath her name. I answer Mara, delete one weather alert, and put the phone away again.

Dash watches me set it beside the bag instead of in my lap.

He doesn’t mention it.

The shop starts quieting around us as the evening wears on. One of the employees stacks clean cups behind the counter, and the last group near the front tables gathers their things. Dash opens the green book again and reads the first page of the essay while I check the pencil marks in the Marlowe introduction.

We stay until the barista begins wiping the tables closest to the door.

On the sidewalk, the cold finds every place my coat doesn’t cover. Dash carries the book bag and my satchel, and I walk beside him with my hands tucked into my pockets. The restaurants along the block have filled since we went inside, sending warm light over the wet pavement and making the evening smell like garlic, rain, and exhaust.

Near the corner, a family comes toward us with two children weaving around their parents’ legs. Dash’s hand settles against my back while we make room, his palm spread steady between my shoulder blades until the children pass and the sidewalk opens again.

He removes his hand.

We keep walking close enough that my sleeve brushes his twice before we reach the parking garage.

“I want to read the essay,” I say as we climb the ramp toward his car.

“The one my brother liked?”

“Yes.”

Dash looks at me while he unlocks the car. The overhead light catches in his glasses, hiding his eyes for a second before he reaches into the paper bag and takes out the green book.

“You can borrow it.”

I accept it with both hands. “I’ll give it back.”

“I know.”

Sloane

Another month disappears into filings, dead ends, and medication before we end up back in the Blackline conference room. It’s been nearly two and a half months without my Beta, ten weeks of pure agony, and the room has three screens, two locked doors, a glass wall Idris can turn opaque from a panel under the table, and still no fucking answers.

I hate the clean table and the secured server dock humming in the corner. I hate the neat rows of legal pads Zana brought with her, each one marked with a different case number orfiling deadline. I hate the bottle of medication sitting beside my untouched coffee as if swallowing one white pill can make this anything less than murder performed slowly with paperwork.

Mostly, I hate that the pill works.

Without it, Callie is pain. She's a hot, torn ache buried beneath the skin of my shoulder, a dragged wire under my ribs, a static pulse that never resolves into direction. I can’t find her. I can’t reach her. I can’t tell whether she’s sleeping or scared or standing in a room somewhere with her hand over my bite and my name turned into poison in her mouth. But I can feel that she exists.

With the medication, she goes quiet.

The doctor called it neurological relief. Zana called it necessary preservation. Idris called it keeping me alive after he found me on the floor of his office two nights ago with blood under my nails from clawing at my own shoulder. They’re all right. None of that makes the silence less obscene.