“Silas wasn’t thrilled about it,” I answered. “Not at all. At first, he seemed stunned. Then he said thank you, and then he said that he should have given me a better present than the mittens he and Lyra had picked out. But that’s not true,” I told her.“I love those mittens. I’ve worn them every minute that I’ve been outside and even inside, too. It’s freezing in here because Octavia keeps insisting that she’s broiling in the heat of her office, and that it’s a plot to make her sleepy and unproductive. We all have to suffer.” It was a hill she was willing to die on and I had decided that it wasn’t where I wanted to die myself, so I put on my mittens.
Juliet and Octavia had briefly been coworkers at Whitaker Enterprises, and they hadn’t gotten along at all. She made a noise that represented annoyance, but I didn’t want to discuss that problem when I had bigger fish to fry. Not literally, since there was now an even larger sign in the employee lunchroom that just said “NO FISH. PERIOD.”
“I loved the card that he and Lyra wrote even more, because they said the sweetest things to me. Such wonderful things!” I assured her. “They said what a good friend I am, and how much they appreciate me being with them.”
Juliet had seized on something I’d said. “Wait a minute. Did you just tell me that you and this Stone guy are friends? But you’re living him with him?”
“As housemates,” I clarified.
“So, you gave a new truck to your housemate for Christmas?” Her voice had gotten almost squeaky at the end, and I was aware that it was due to her disbelief. My parents had reacted the same way when I’d let them know about the gift that I’d had delivered to Silas.
“A car?” my mom had asked, and her voice had soared even higher than Juliet’s. “You gave him a car?”
That was why I had wanted to talk to someone else to get another opinion. Was it so bad? But during my long relationship with Dax, I had fallen out of touch with most of my friends from high school, and also those from college and the few I’d had in law school. He had wanted me all to himself, he’d said, which I’d thought was kind of cute at the time. I didn’t feel the same way anymore, and I also felt the loss of not having people to talk to about these kinds of issues.
“Silas needs a car because he’s getting his license back,” I attempted to explain. The hearing to restore it was scheduled to happen shortly, in fact, and I had faith that it would go well.
“He lost his license?” she asked, her voice still high, but I didn’t want to explain it further and only said that it was a long story. The details would have given her the wrong impression of him, and she would have ended up thinking that he was a crazy criminal and an insane driver. He wasn’t either of those things, not anymore.
“If someone gave me a car, someone who wasn’t my husband or a family member, and if I hadn’t been dating him for a long time or he wasn’t a friend from forever, then I would think something was weird,” she told me. “I would think it was really strange.”
“It was to be helpful, not weird,” I tried to excuse myself, but I understood her point. It probably seemed to Silas like I was trying to flaunt my good job and nice salary when he was trying to get their lives onto a new track. I didn’t want him to feel thatway. I also remembered how some of Dax’s friends had bought expensive stuff for their girlfriends. It hadn’t been out of love or fulfilling a need. They had only wanted to make themselves look big and important, just like my ex had been trying to do when he’d given me the simulant ring that best resembled a disco ball. I thought about his cousin, the one who’d gone to prison, and how he had presented one woman with a lot of expensive purses and bottles of perfume because he’d wanted to impress and lure her…
“Oh, no,” I said. “I hope Silas doesn’t think that I was trying to buy his affection.”
“He might think that,” Juliet let me know. “Or he might think that you wanted him to feel indebted so that you had a bond. Like that he’s tied to you now.”
I put my palm over my eyes. When I removed it, I saw Zosia and Munir outside my glass wall, staring at me, and then Octavia joined them. She had just gotten back from her cruise with Grosvenor, the lizard, and from what I’d heard today? It hadn’t gone well. Everyone else had been ok over the holiday and no one had seemed overly excited to get back to the office. I was, but only because I’d wanted to escape the tense situation at home.
I turned to look at my computer, thanked Juliet for listening, and also said that I had to go. “Ok, but if I were you, I would think about taking back the truck. If that’s possible,” she added. “Or maybe your parents would use it.”
There was no way to return it and my parents didn’t need a truck—my mom was so small, she would have had a hard time climbing into it, and so would my dad with his mobility issues. Basically, I had thrown my money away. I flipped from feeling ashamed of myself to becoming absolutely furious. It was money that I’d worked hard for, too, money which I could have put to better use than giving a beautiful truck to an ungrateful man who had no car of his own to drive his wonderful sister to the places she needed to go.
“I’m not ungrateful,” Silas had tried to explain to me over the phone on Christmas Day, when I’d tried to get some kind of reaction from him. “I’m overwhelmed and I’m…”
He hadn’t been able to say exactly what he was at that moment, and he hadn’t said it since, either. All I knew was that I had wanted to help him and Lyra, but all I had done was make him think that I was weird. I’d made him act weird, too. He was probably embarrassed because he thought that I was chasing after him and trying to purchase my way into his affections.
That was very humiliating and my instinct was to jump up and yell “no!” But I wasn’t Octavia, so I understood about appropriate volume at the office. When I went home, I would just tell Silas in a rational way that I wasn’t throwing myself at him and that we could give the truck to a charity. But was Juliet right about what she’d said? Had I done this to make him feel indebted and tied to me? I forced myself to take an honest look at my motivations.
I also forced myself to do my actual job. Whitaker Enterprises didn’t give me my salary (a large chunk of which I’d blown on ahateful truck) to sit in my chair and bemoan my stupid choices. I put those out of my head until I got into my own vehicle at the end of the day, the one I’d called the “good” car when Dax and I were together but was nowhere near as nice as the truck…had I bought it to impress him? To try to beguile him? To show him up in front of Lyra? To make myself seem impressive?
I parked behind it in the driveway, where it had sat since Christmas, and I walked into the house. I could hear Lyra and Boris playing in the basement and Silas was in the kitchen at the stove, tasting something from a pot. It smelled delicious but I barely registered that.
“I gave you the truck because I thought you needed it and I hoped you would like it,” I announced. “I wanted you to feel the same way as I did when I saw the mittens that you and Ly picked out. I was happy that you’d thought of me and glad that you knew me well enough to give me exactly what I needed. There wasn’t any sneaky motive behind what I did, and I’m sure of it. I’ve forced myself to really consider my actions and be honest with myself, which is sometimes not easy, but I’m sure now that I only wanted to make you happy. You’re not and I’m not, either. I’ve been upset since Christmas and I think we should give the truck away and then start over, so you’re not mad at me and I don’t feel so…so…wretched.”
Silas put down the spoon and sat at the table. He looked at me in silence and then slowly shook his head.
“What?” I asked. “What?”
“I’m such an asshole.”
“No,” I started to protest, but he held up his hand.
“Yeah, I am. That vehicle out there is the nicest thing that anyone has ever done for me. And I’ve been acting like a dick and making you think that I don’t appreciate it. I do. I really do.”
“No, I understand why you were behaving that way,” I said. “The other thing I realized while I was soul-searching was that it was completely inappropriate. Completely and totally. I shouldn’t have bought it without talking to you first. My excuse is that you’ve helped me so much, and I love Lyra so much—”
“Do you?” He seemed surprised, which surprised me right back.
