Page 41 of Relapse

Heat rushed into my cheeks. “You’re a fucking drama queen!”

Silas pushed his hand forward again, refusing to let me ignore his request.

I rolled my eyes and took hold of his hand.

Silas closed his fingers around mine tightly, and yanked me from the elevator. I stumbled after him.

He led us down a darkened hallway, one with motion sensor lights that came on as we walked by. Each room was made of glass doors, hallways filled with little offices hidden behind glass window portraits.

A sign labeled, “THORNE” trickled in silver, hung at the end of the hallway on big, brass double doors, beckoning us forward.

I watched Silas, the way he looked back over his shoulder with a little grin, and couldn’t place the feeling. Our hands were intertwined like a couples’, and even though the rest of the floor was empty, allowing him to walk with me like this made me feel so exposed.

He was right, I had been in his bed…shit, I’d been in his mouth, but something about this—hand holding—seemed much more difficult for me to do without caring. I didn’t want to care. I just wanted to be. Right now, more than ever, I just wanted to float atop my high all night and forget about the world and all of my problems.

Silas pushed the doors to his office open, stepping to the side so that I could enter the room next to him. What I saw took the air from my chest faster than when he choked me.

Two big balloons. A two and a zero hung in the corner of the room, adjacent to the wall of glass looking out over the city, thirty floors up. On the table, a bottle of wine, a cupcake, a candle, and a gift box. I gazed around the space, dumbfounded.

“Happy Birthday,” Silas whispered.

My pulse spiked. I swore I could feel my heart ramming against my ribcage. Silas couldn’t be serious right now. I gave the items in the room a once-over again. And again.

I hadn’t planned anything for my birthday. Shit, I forgot my birthday entirely. I spent so much time in the trenches after David’s attack, that it hadn’t even dawned on me that my birthday was approaching.

“I knew you wouldn’t let me take you out properly,” Silas said softly. “So I thought, why not get fucked up together? I could bring you here. We could shoot the finger at the city, from the penthouse level.”

Silas squeezed my hand. I had forgotten we were holding them.

“Do you like it?” he asked, a hint of uncertainty in his voice.

I turned to look at him. It was the first time I’d seen a softness in his eyes, a warmth amongst those cold plains of ice. When Silas exposed emotion it was either at a distance, or too close for comfort. It was nothing or everything. Isolation or rage. This emotion was more like a question, words unsaid, a pause, a yearning. A need for confirmation.

From me.

“I—” My next words were so important, this I knew. I was so afraid to fuck them up. What if I said the wrong thing? What if it wasn’t enough? Do I dismiss the gesture entirely? Or worse, do I show my honest feelings and risk building this into something else—something beyond just a friend with benefits, something that represented a part of my life that I wasn’t willing to lose?

Holy shit. What…what was this exactly? Panic started to bubble up into my chest. Silas went out of his way to do this for me. He wanted to do this for me. Something deep down inside of me screamed… this was more than what it was before. My mind continued to ring out:

This is more.

“It’s…amazing, Silas, thank you,” I croaked out, desperate to fill the silence. “You didn’t have to do anything for me.”

His shoulders relaxed with…relief? That was good for him, because I felt more tense than ever.

“I’m glad you like it.” He relinquished my hand, crossing the room, and I felt a wash of relief myself. I wasn’t good at intimacy. I hated how it made me feel.

I could fuck. I could whisper sweet nothings into ears that would bring pleasure and release. But I couldn’t show emotions that involved my vulnerability, even when I was alone with someone who I trusted more than anyone.

Silas knew me too. He knew my fractures. Even so, there were times where I didn’t want him to see, and didn’t want him to pry me open. On the other hand, there were times that I wished he could destroy me utterly, prevent my shell from ever sealing, allow me to be free from the poison crevices of my mind. He drowned out the parts of me that shrieked out my uselessness, that ached with past pain and haunted my heart with memories of betrayal.

Part of me felt at peace when he did that. Made me forget.

Silas broke my panicked train of thought when he ushered to the back table and said, “Open your gift.”

With measured steps, I followed him to the desk where the gift sat. Tentatively, I picked up the box and carefully began to open it. Silas observed with a quirky smirk.

“No, really, go slower,” he teased.