If only you knew just how safe you make me feel.
I rolled my eyes and stood on my toes to reach his height. “But the kisses were the best part.”
He squeezed me against his hips, leaving me with another breathless kiss before letting me go and moving to his door.
“Come on, Shy,” he called over his shoulder as he strolled down the hall away from me. “I know you can’t say no to food.”
Thirty-Six
November 25, Thursday
Enoch
When I thought back on my life, I could honestly say that I had never suffered any amount of trauma. Sure, my dad was gone for six months at a time during multiple periods of my childhood, and we moved way more frequently than was probably healthy for a stable upbringing, but that was normal for me. My dad had joined the military long before I was born. Deployments were, sadly, a part of my childhood routine. It didn’t mean I missed him any less, but because it was expected and anticipated, it wasn’t something that I would count as traumatic.
So, to watch Shiloh suffering with the trauma of losing her brother and watching him take his own life was beyond the scope of anything I could have ever begun to fathom. And I knewthat it was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to all the horrible experiences that she had lived through.
Each visible scar on her body pointed to another traumatic event, and I wasn’t sure if I’d ever find all the other invisible scars she was carrying around with her. She liked to downplay anything significant, almost like a coping mechanism. The cigarette burns from her dad were ‘nothing’. Her brother torturing her was ‘not a big deal’. She couldn’t even let herself admit how horrifying it was for her to have watched him take his own life. Having panic attacks were ‘average’.
It was heartbreaking, and I wished that I could take some of her pain away. I found myself praying consistently for the first time in a long time—praying that God would give her some peace, give her enough room to breathe. And I prayed that she wouldn’t pull away from me, that she would continue to let me show her how loved she was and could be.
Because despite whatever romantic connotations surrounded the word love, that was exactly what I wanted Shiloh to feel whenever she was with me and with my family. Shiloh needed it, needed it more than anyone I had ever met, and I desperately wanted her to have it.
Watching her from across the room was making my chest hurt with how much I was feeling. I didn’t want this moment to end. I wanted to capture everything about this day and bottle up it. I wanted to gift it to Shiloh so she would have it to relive whenever she was down.
Jae was wrestling Esty for the spatula, dripping with pumpkin pie filling. In the chaos, the liquid had flung across the kitchen and landed on Shiloh’s cheek and chest.
“You dip!” Shiloh gasped out through doubled-over laughter. “You’re going to get Salmonella. It has raw eggs in it.”
“No, I’m not.” Jae whined, but he looked over at my mom with concern. “Right, Aunt Shel?”
My mom laughed and handed Shiloh a napkin.
“Maybe if you eat the whole bowl. But a lick of the spatula won’t kill you.”
“See! Now give it to me, Esty!”
“Ugh!” Esty groaned and went limp, causing Jae to stumble and they fell to the kitchen floor in a heap.
I shook my head as they both rolled onto their backs, the spatula stuck to the front of Jae’s shirt.
“Serves you right,” Esty said as she eyed the mess all over his shirt. “Now you’ve got to clean the spatula because that was the last one and I need it to put the filling into the pie shell.”
Jae rolled his eyes and brought the spatula to his mouth, licking the remaining drops of filling off.
“Could use some more pumpkin pie spice.”
We all laughed at Jae’s theatrics. I couldn’t help but stare at Shiloh’s face as she smiled, her freckled nose wrinkling slightly and her hazel eyes bright and happy.
The oven timer rang, and I moved to grab the pie crust from the oven.
“Okay, now what?” I asked as I placed it on the little remaining counter space I could find.
“Now, take out the beans and we will put the filling inside. Jae, clean that spatula,” my mom said.
Jae hopped up and helped Esty off the floor before doing as he was told. After I had removed the beans from the bottom of the crust, we finished preparing it and placed it back in the oven.
Jae and Esty, at my mom’s request, began washing up the dishes we had used to make the pie and crust. Shiloh and I were sent to the living room to clean up the mess of blankets and pillows from last night’s movie marathon.
