Finally he turns until his head is in my lap, more or less, and looks up at me.

“Are you staying?” he asks.

“Of course,” I say.

* * *

Everyone else isaround the fire: Wyatt flanked by Gideon and now Lainey, who waves hello. Levi and June together on a log, even though I’ve seen plenty of chairs around here. As if everyone is afraid of comfort, of settling in. Like we’re all on edge and the thought of feeling better is impossible.

“I meant to tell you earlier,” June says, eyes still on the fire. “Search and rescue guys are coming up tomorrow, early.”

“They listened?” Silas says.

“I had to ask very nicely,” says Levi, who doesn’t sound happy about it. “I think it’s mostly a favor.”

Sitting on the grass, Wyatt cracks a knuckle, his nostrils flaring.

“He’s disappeared before,” Silas tells me, voice low. “Not for this long. Never for this long, but… you know.”

“Oh,” I say. I feel hypnotized by the fire. I think we all do.

“When you call out search and rescue and then the missing person shows up five hours later saying he just wanted to see what Bloodroot Meadow looked like under a full moon, they’re less excited about coming out the next time,” Silas says.

“He told us, after that,” Wyatt says. “He always told us.”

Lainey gives him a side hug, pulling his head against her shoulder.

“We should all go to bed,” Gideon says. “No use being awake. May as well get some rest. You two staying with me?”

“If you don’t mind,” says June, and Gideon snorts.

“Of course I don’t mind,” he says. “Why do you think I asked?”

Then there are hugs. Everyone hugs everyone else, maybe more hugs than I’ve received at once in my entire life, and normally it might be overwhelming but here, in the firelight, in the circumstances, it’s nice.

I hug Levi last, and when I do, he holds on for an extra second.

“Thank you,” he says, so quietly that no one else can hear.

“Of course,” I tell him, and when he pulls back he gives me a quiet, secret smile, like he’s pleased by my response.

Back in Silas’s cabin, he clicks on a lantern on a crate next to the bunk beds. It makes the small space look oddly bigger, makes shadows loom, makes it feel like this one room is the only place that’s real and everything outside is dust and fog. Like we’re together at the end of the world.

He falls onto the bottom bunk, lying on top of a blanket, then covers his face with his hands.

“No,” I say, and he groans. “Come on. Up.”

He stands again. With the light at this angle, from below, he looks different than I’m used to, almost like he’s someone else: shadows and angles going the wrong direction, but he looks down at me and gives me the ghost of a smile and lets me pull his shirt off before getting his pants and shoes himself.

I do the same, turn off the lantern, and then crawl into the same bed as him. It’s even smaller than a regular twin, I think, and I’m crammed between Silas’s broad back and the wooden wall of the cabin, but I wouldn’t be anywhere else. I wrap one arm around him, feeling the raised edge of his broken bottle scar. My face is buried in the base of his neck.

I think he’s asleep, but then he speaks.

“I don’t know what to do if we don’t find him,” he says into the dark.

“We keep looking,” I say.

There’s a long pause, and I wonder again if he’s asleep, the darkness in the cabin so deep I don’t know if my eyes are open or closed.

“I love you,” Silas says. “I didn’t say it before.”

“It’s okay. I knew.”

He takes the hand that’s wrapped around him, raises it to his lips, softly kisses my palm, and I breathe into the silence.

Tags: Roxie Noir Romance
Source: readsnovelonline.net