"Oh, that's easy, dove. The night you came into Clover with your friends. You were wearing a pink princess dress, looking all about as if you thought you were going to be trafficked right there in the middle of the dining room. That was the inciting incident."
Silva's shoulders were shaking in laughter before he'd even finished speaking. "No, it wasn't! You aresosilly. That was literally the very first time we met. And we didn't even properly meet, not until later that night! And I wasnotworried about being trafficked!"
His hand had moved back up her spine, fingers pushing into her hair and cupping her scalp, nails dragging against her lightly before reversing course once more. "No, dove. That was it. You walked through the door and the first domino fell. That was the moment I knew I was done for."
The buzz of her phone beside her head startled her awake, the tingling melody of her ringer forcing her eyes to open. She'd come staggering in once the rideshare had dropped her off, dropping to her bed and going right to sleep. She hadn't even washed her face.
That evening with Tate, on the night she’d come trudging in feeling sad and defeated from the disastrous book club, played in her head like a movie. If she closed her eyes, Silva could still feel the weight of his palm against her lower back, his fingers in her hair, the shiver of her spine as his nail dragged against it with a feather-weight pressure.
Her phone buzzed again, shrill and insistent. She struggled to sit up, answering it weakly. Unsurprisingly, it was Tannar.
She wanted to tell him no. She wanted to tell him that she would see him tomorrow, that he could have a conversation the next morning, anything to make him go away. You would just have to face it tomorrow instead, she reminded herself.You already feel like shit now anyway.
Silva staggered her way down the cook’s staircase once more, meeting him in the driveway warily. She let him take her hand, leading her to a bench in the side garden. It was a beautiful night. Weather reports were promising a hot summer, and from the balmy air of early spring, Silva believed it.
"I just . . . actually we never get a chance to talk, you know? Just the two of us. There's always something around, or we're at the club, or at work. I never get the chance to just hear from you. Are you doing okay? I gotta be honest, Silva, sometimes I think you're really not doing okay."
She wheeled for a moment, forcing herself to get her head back in the game. One had to be flexible, needed to be able to shift and slide, pivot to a new tactic to land their story, in order to make their hustle stick.You can do this.It wasn't as if she had any shortage of things going wrong in her life.
"I'm having a hard time adjusting to being back at work," she admitted. "I'm barely assigned anything, so I spend the whole day just feeling useless and in the way. I don't really have much in common with the girls at work anymore. I-I haven't been feeling very well." She tripped over her words, wondering when this laundry list was going to be sufficient.
"You haven't been feeling well for a while," Tannar put in, his eyebrows drawn in concern.
She swallowed hard.Tread carefully."Yes, well, it's because —"
"You're pregnant."
Her head rose, forgetting herself for a moment, eyes widening in shock. All around them, the sounds of spring were a cacophony. Crickets sang from the bushes, while tree frogs peeped from the trees. A group of small birds chipped and chirped in a nearby bush oblivious to her panic.Fly away, little dove. Her mouth dropped open, no sound coming from her to add to it.
"The ginger. Our housekeeper growing up, she was a goblin. Had like, six kids. And every time she was pregnant, that's all she would sip, for months on end. Ginger water. Ginger tea. I noticed it when you came back to work, but you didn't say anything, so I didn't want to assume . . ."
There was nothing for her to say. She had never said it aloud to herself as it was. She didn't even know for certain. She'd not been to the doctors, and had fast discovered that Ris was right — everything in the stores was for humans, and somehow, she’d never even noticed. Having access to the MediSpa at the club her whole life meant she’d never needed to go to the general pharmacy, but the privilege had left her ignorant of the world outside Cevanorë's gates, and she certainly wasn’t about to gothereto find out why she’d been throwing up since autumn, what this flutter beneath her breast was.
"Silva —"
Her eyes filled with tears, realizing she was playing out of her league. This hustle was above her pay grade, and she would have to accept whatever it cost her.
"Silva, I'll marry you. I don't care."
Her breath vanished. If he would've pushed her even just the slightest bit, she would have gone tumbling off the bench, mouth hanging open in shock the whole way down. The frogs in the trees had gone silent, the crickets pausing their song. It was as if the whole world waited, the silvery white moon above them holding her breath, listening to hear what she would say.
Tannar only shrugged.
"I've wanted to marry you since last year. My very first week in the office, I saw you in the break room with your little juice jug, and I told Edzin, "There she is. That's her. That's the girl I'm going to marry."
"But — but if you know I'm —"
"Silva, I was with my ex for a long time," he cut her off. "I told you that once before. Like, three years in school, another two years after that. She never got pregnant. Never even had a close call. Not once." He shrugged again. "It's what our parents want, right? The way I see it, I get to be with you regardless. And we're saving ourselves the hassle and heartbreak that everyone else goes through. Your ex . . . you said he was Elvish? I saw some of your pictures on social media, but . . . but you never had any of the two of you together, or his face. Just the places you were . . ."
She blinked slowly. She had put Tannar on her restricted viewing list the moment she'd accepted his friend request. Unless he was looking at her social media through someone else's account, he'd only ever seen a tenth of the things she'd posted, and even then, she had a certain blog aesthetic she liked for her photo feed. Everything got the same blush-toned filter. And he was right. She'd never posted anything with Tate's face. It had felt a little like a violation of his privacy at the time, and now . . .
"Yes," she heard herself blurt. "Silmë, like me." It wasn't technically a lie.
Tannar pushed to his feet, holding a hand out for her, one she gladly took. "Look, it's late. I don’t want to keep you up, it’s important for you to be getting your sleep. I just wanted to make sure you were okay. I-I’ll come by tomorrow, okay? We can talk about this tomorrow, after you get some sleep and some food in you.”
When he bent to capture her lips, it took all of her willpower to keep from cringing away.This is a lifeline.Tate told her not to wait for him. Told her to live her life. It was a half life without him, but it was all she had.Whatever you need to do to survive in this world. Silva of the Daytime was a mouse, just happy for the crumbs they threw her. She let the kiss deepen and disappeared inside herself.You're my heartbeat, Silva. I’d like to see the cunt who will make you scream that way for him. She felt him there, close enough to reach, close enough to touch —
Tannar gasped, pulling away, his hand going up to his mouth where she’d bitten him. Silva reeled.
