Page 39 of Lost and Found

Bea

Silas knocks softly on my bathroom door the following morning, bleary-eyed, bed-headed, and hoarse-voiced, still blatantly sleepy. But he offers to help me with my shot again, and I let him. The day after, he’s walking up the stairs with two mugs of tea just as I’m about to send a text to see if he’s up. I’m sore and bruised, now, and hypersensitive. I have to close my eyes and avoid looking at him in the mirror when his calloused hand slides over my skin to move my pajama pants out of the way. The contrast of his roughness to how gentle he is sends a stinging ache down the backs of my legs. I hiss at the shot this time, though, and his reflection finds me, his brow folding and his mouth flattening in a grim line.

“I’m sorry,” he grits. And the proximity of him, the feel of his breath on the back of my neck, the spread of his palm high on the curve of my ass—my body’s wires all get crossed and too many tiny reactions happen in a flash before I can stop them. My lungs hitch, I break out in chills, and my spine arches into him.

“It’s okay.” It’s not.

His hands shake when he deposits the needle into the bin.

Silas was right, though. After his help these first few times, I’m able to administer my own shots the remainder of the week, other than one day I’m too sore to do it. He assists me wordlesslyand avoids looking at me as much as I avoid him, but I still catch his jaw working and his nostrils flaring. I can’t tell if he’s mad at the needle or irritated with me.

I have ten-hour days at the salon, and we still text sporadically throughout, at least at first. But when I see him around the house in the evenings, I act flat-out weird. I can’t stand it, and yet I can’t stop it. It’s like I’m watching myself from outside my body, quieter than normal and standoffish. Nervous, like the intimacy of his help rattled something loose in me. I’ve got to find a way to get a grip. It’s not his fault that his calm competence fired up my dormant crush.

Nor is the furious rush I got out of his reaction to my shorts, or the recurring dreams that make me sweat.

It is now the following Friday, and I haven’t talked to him at all in the last two days while he’s been back to work himself. I am spending my lunch hour at a park around the corner from the salon, watching the clouds do pinwheels above me, and have just taken a very robust bite of my sandwich when my phone pings with a text from Silas.

Are you eating lunch?

I pause chewing and search around the park.Are you stalking me?I send back.

My phone rings. I answer around a full mouth.

“I was just checking because it looks like you left lunch in the fridge,” he says, and I can tell that he is also eating. I picture him in his kitchen in front of his open refrigerator, a wad of food stashed in the side of his bulging cheek. “I would have offered to bring it to you.”

I’m suddenly suspicious. I swallow. “Silas, what areyoueating?”

A beat of silence. “I would have brought you somethingelse, I mean.”

“You just helped yourself to what you thought was my lunch, huh?” I laugh. That nervous thing in me is instantly a little calmer. I might be having a hard time getting used to this closeness between us, but I’d hate it more if he pulled away.

I hear him take another bite. “Sorry, Red, I had to. Chicken parm? For lunch on a regular old Friday? Damn.” He moans without remorse, and I catch myself biting down on a smile. Wiggling on my bench. “Ellis was off, so we had the volunteer cooking at the station, and oh my god, Bea, he can’t even make rice. I was starving.”

I cluck sympathetically before I remember something I overheard last week. The new aesthetician at the salon—who I suppose isnotnew, since she has been renting the room that Merritt used to work in for going on eight months, now—was telling one of the other stylists that she had to call an ambulance for her grandmother last week and how three out of the four paramedics who showed up were tall, beautiful men withBYRDstitched onto their uniforms. Or, in Micah’s case, on hisVOLUNTEERshirt.

“I know who the Byrds are. They’re from Spunes, like Bea,”the stylist, Rachelle, told her, before angling my way.“Bea just had the middle brother in here a couple weeks ago getting a haircut. Bea, you should fix Zoeie up with Silas!”

After clarifying that Silas was the one she had the most interest in, Zoeie sent me her number.“He’s my roommate,”I declared as if that would have any bearing on her interest in him. And what did I care if it did or didn’t, anyway?

Even if I do care, I shouldn’t. I have zero claim on him and should probably encourage him, as his friend, to open himself up to dating again.

“Hasn’t Micah been volunteering at the station?” I ask him now.

“Yeah, he has. And he’s a shit cook,” he says. “How’d you hear about that?”

“Hair salon,” I explain.

“Ah. I forgot. The mecca.”

We slip into quiet other than the sounds of us both eating. And even with the unwelcome flutter in my belly, it’s nice, feeling like I’m not lunching alone. “Speaking of the time-honored tradition of information sharing,” I begin, carefully willing nonchalance into my voice. “I’ve been given a number to pass along to you.” It comes out too monotone to be convincingly carefree. Shoot.

I hear him run his tongue over his teeth and marvel at how I don’t want to leap out of my skin at it. It’s got to be a bad sign.

“Is it the coordinates for the fountain of youth?” he asks. “Did future me find a way to come back and give you lottery numbers?”

“I guess that all depends on how you view women, Silas. Metaphorically, maybe this one could be the equivalent.”

He honks a short laugh.