Page 107 of The Oath We Give

Silas has hands like that.

Which is the most unfortunate thing in the world for me, personally.

This morning while he was making his coffee, which he does every fucking morning, annoyingly punctual with his stupid bean juice, I watched him from Lilac’s room.

Technically, our room since we are sharing because I refuse to share a bed with him. I will bite my tongue and sleep on a bed that sits opposite my seventeen-year-old sister until she goes to college, just so I don’t fall into the one-bed trope. I will prevail.

Anyway, his hands.

It was five in the morning, on the dot, and I had yet to fall asleep. Which isn’t new—I never sleep, and if I do, it’s never straight through the night. My mind wakes me up at all hours just to remind me how scary the dark can be.

I wasn’t sure if Silas had been to bed or if he, like me, has chronic insomnia. Some nights, in the stillness of the night, I hear nothing from his bedroom, and other nights, I hear his door creak open before the basement door unlocks, and he disappears into his cave, not returning until five the next morning to make his coffee.

So this morning, I’m staring at him from my room, a sketchbook in my lap, and all I can focus on is his hands. And back muscles. They ripple and bulge with each movement he makes. Well-defined, evenly spaced as they ripple along his spine into his narrow waist. Golden-brown skin mottled with shadows of sun-dappled light.

Silas Hawthorne has a slutty fucking waist.

But his hands.

Silas’s hands are large, with wide palms and long fingers that move with subtle grace as he makes his coffee. The veins beneath his skin rise up like a miniature mountain range, running across his knuckles and trailing past his wrist to his arms.

They squeeze and hold things with such force but a softness I’ve never seen.

His hands make this feeling knot in my stomach.

Desire to feel them on me, desire because just looking at them makes me remember his touch. Every single second of it.

All morning I’ve spent attempting to clean up my art studio for Light’s charity event today, and all I can think about while hanging decorations is his fucking hands on my body and the night in his office.

When the veil of shadows hid us away and our hands explored dangerous territory. A shiver speeds down my spine, my core tightening like I can feel the cool metal of his gun pressed against my overheated flesh.

It’s been three days.

He’s quietly let me keep my distance, not once bringing it up in casual conversations we are forced to have when we both collide after returning home from work. He usually gets home later than me and always asks the same question when he walks through the door.

“You two eat?”

Lilac is always the one to answer with either a yes before telling him there are leftovers on the stove or a no, let’s order takeout.

It’s painfully fucking domestic.

The two of them have become friends without my consent. Which I hadn’t predicted being a problem before because they are so different. Lilac is loud, constantly in your face with her bubbly personality, and Silas is, well…not that.

Yesterday, I came home and found them in the living room, both sitting on the floor with a chessboard between them. He was trying to teach her while she kept pausing the television to dive into an introspective explanation of each of her favorite scenes fromMove.

Silas was quiet, nodding his head while she talked, and not in the way where he was ignoring her, placating her until she was done. No, when she paused, he’d ask questions. And I could physically see the way my sister would light up to answer.

There is nothing she loves more than people listening to her current theories and fixations. It’s her love language.

And my love language is when people treat my sister well.

It’s the equivalent of men holding babies. It does something weird to my insides.

Before bed that night, I had to remind her this was temporary, and getting attached to him would only make it more difficult for her. He wasn’t a permanent thing—Silas Hawthorne was a fleeting moment in our lives. She knew the deal. But Lilac is…well, she’s her, and she doesn’t listen.

I’ll have to be there to pick up the pieces when this ends and she misses his company.

“Shit.”