“Here.” His hand brushed my arm as he handed it to me, and I shivered. “I’m not stopping you. Sometimes I feel like arguing, though. I don’t know why.”
I had patted myself off and wrapped the towel around my body, so I pulled back the curtain slightly so I could look him in the eye. “I would guess that you feel like it’s just been the two of you for four years, and it was going ok even if you knew there were things to work on. But now, here I am, intruding. That’s how she feels. You were a team and I’m the interloper.”
“I asked you to move in,” Silas protested.
“Emotions aren’t rational,” I said. “I know that for sure.”
“Like you being smart, but crawling around after your ex-boyfriend whose personality traits are most similar to a mako shark,” he suggested.
“Crawl? I didn’t crawl! And how could someone crawl after a shark?”
“You’re right,” he agreed. “I should have said ‘doggy paddle.’”
“Can you please leave so that I can step out of this bathtub?”
“Go ahead,” he offered.
“I’m only wearing a towel and there’s not enough space for two in this room. Please leave,” I said, and he did.
When I got dressed and came downstairs, they were both already eating. At least, he was, and Lyra was scraping carrots around her plate. “This makes my tummy hurt, Silas,” she announced. I could feel her looking at me but I sat down and focused on my own carrots, which tasted very good.
“You could try one,” he suggested.
“No.”
“Lyra, how do you think I got to be so big? I ate good food,” he told her. “I used to be the size of Flat Stanley.”
She laughed and I asked, “Who’s that?”
Silas started to tell me about a book but according to his sister, he was getting parts wrong. They had read it together a long time ago and she magnanimously acknowledged that old people forgot stuff. She took up the thread of storytelling and when he put a carrot onto his own fork and gave it to her, she ate it without noticing too much.
“I’d like to read that book,” I said. “Could you show it to me at the library?”
“How come you didn’t read it already?” she wondered. She picked up some chicken and ate it. She hadn’t used a fork, but she had chewed and swallowed without claiming that she thought it had been poisoned.
“I didn’t read a lot when I was your age,” I said. “I mostly watched TV.”
“We don’t have one.”
“My grandmother had an ancient box that weighed more than Lyra, but it was broken,” Silas told me. “We watch some animation. Some very good movies.” They looked at each other and both started to hum, and Lyra smiled.
“I love movies,” I said. “But not action or scary stuff.”
“No simulants,” he agreed, and I frowned.
“I love made-for-TV movies, especially the ones about the holidays,” I clarified. “They’ll start showing new ones in the fall and then I’m glued to—well, I used to watch those on my old TV.”
“But someone broke it,” she put in, and I turned to her, concerned.
“You don’t have to worry about someone coming here and breaking things,” I told her seriously. I thought that she might have been scared after she’d seen my former apartment, since I had been. I was still looking over my shoulder all the time, and I jumped at every loud noise.
“I know that no one’s coming to this house,” she said casually. “Silas wouldn’t let them.” Then she continued to eat some of the food on her plate, up until her brother had to go to work.
Before I’d moved in, he’d put her to bed early but then let her read for as long as she’d wanted while a teenager from the next block had babysat for a few hours. But when that girl had left,Lyra had been alone in the house until he’d returned, something that I didn’t like at all. Silas worked Thursday through Saturday at Château Moderne, but he was busy on the other nights of the week, too, loading at a warehouse. He also worked days as a mover, for a company that didn’t seem exactly right to me. I hadn’t ever looked into Michigan moving regulations, but I was aware that licensing…anyway, he hadn’t told me to bug off when I’d asked a few questions about it, but I knew how Dax had gotten annoyed when I tried to get involved in his business. I wasn’t going to do that again.
We both walked him to the door when he left for the club, with Lyra talking a mile a minute about what they were going to do this weekend and with me listening and watching them. They really seemed to enjoy hanging out together, and he wasn’t telling her that he would be sleeping in and then he would need to watch a football game/go shopping/play basketball. Those were the activities that had prevented Dax from hanging out with me. My ex-fiancé hadn’t liked it when I’d suggested that he do those things while I was at my desk at Whitaker Enterprises, and he’d gotten mad when I’d said that I wanted him to make more time for me. But breaking into his business was hard, and he’d been tired which had made him crabby.
Despite all his various jobs, Silas was now nodding and suggesting that they could go to the library, go to the park, swim at the pool, and do a lot of other fun things together. “Write our plans in your notebook like Harriet the Spy,” he advised.
