That is the worst part of it. Not the suit. Not the waiting. The knowledge of what she’s doing upstairs. The knowledge that the reason she is taking longer has my fingerprints all over it. She is up there getting ready for the formal, yes, but she is also trying to hide me. Concealer. Fabric. Hair. Whatever girls use when they need the world to stop reading a boy’s mouth and hands off their skin.
The thought should make me feel guilty enough to stop looking toward the stairs every few seconds.
It doesn’t.
If anything, it makes the waiting more fun.
Would Stephanie still be smiling at me if she knew exactly why her daughter was running late?
Probably not.
That thought sits hot in my chest while the house stays too quiet around me.
“Look at you,” Stephanie says.
The camera is already in her hands when I turn. There is no pause between her seeing me and deciding I need to be photographed. The woman apparently sees a boy in a suit and immediately becomes a documentarian.
My hand goes up on instinct, palm out, blocking the lens before the flash hits.
The reaction gets what she wanted. A smile tugs at my mouth before I can kill it, small but real enough that her whole face lights up.
“There it is,” she says, delighted with herself. “That smile. Keep that one.”
The almost-laugh that rises in me doesn’t quite make it out, but the effort is enough to make her beam harder.
She lowers the camera, looking me over properly, head tilting as she takes in the jacket, the tie, the watch, the fact that I’m standing in her foyer looking like I’ve done this a hundred times before instead of once under protest. There is something so uncomplicated in her approval that it nearly does me in.
“You clean up beautifully, Silas,” she says.
The sentence lands in a place I don’t know how to defend.
Not because it sounds flirtatious. Because it doesn’t. Because she says it the way mothers say things to boys they’re proud to put in pictures, with an easy kind of fondness that still catches me off guard every time she points it at me.
Jacob steps into the hall a second later, straightening one cuff with the same unhurried composure he brings to everything. His eyes move over me once. Taking in the whole picture, his expression shifts by half a degree.
“Well,” he says at last, “you don’t look half bad.”
The praise is so dry it almost qualifies as mockery.
Almost.
“High praise,” I mutter.
“It is,” he says, completely serious.
Stephanie rolls her eyes, raising the camera again. This time I’m too slow. The flash catches.
“Steph,” Jacob says, but there is no real reproach in it.
“What?” she asks, smiling. “He looks handsome.”
Handsome.
The word sits strangely on my skin.
There are a lot of things people have called me. Handsome is not usually one of them, at least not in a tone this clean. No edge. No expectation underneath it. No hand waiting behind the kindness to take something back. Stephanie’s obliviousness would be easier to manage if it weren’t so genuine.
Another glance goes to the staircase.
