Page 99 of The Story of You

I smile. Lakshan is there. The infamous meeting in the coffee shop. Okay. Light at the end of the tunnel. I can make it to the coffee shop with Dad, where Lakshan will be waiting for us.

ChapterThirty

Oliver ~ May 23rd 2009

Darius has been going at the bag hard. He’s sweaty and Rocky Balboa has nothing on his eye of the tiger right now. I should learn how to fight, but no one wants that and it may be even harder to convince them that I should learn self-defense than it was to convince Dad to let me date Julius. They want to be my protectors, but what happens when they’re not there?

“We’ll always be around to protect you, Eaglet.”Hands down that’s what Silas’s response would be, but there was the one time he wasn’t there. It’s not a critique. Silas has stuck to his vow of protection with rigid ferocity. Dad is as close as a human can be to being an actual terminator, but he’s still human on rare occasions.

And I think … I think Aleksander might be his weakness.

It was easier than I expected to lean into the fantasy because I was at my physical and emotional endpoint. I’d looked after my sick mother and had survived the emotional dance that came with that. I had a baby. I’d gotten through high school at warp speed. I’d lost my brother and my father. I needed a yellow light. A pause. My fight had run its course and I hung up my gloves.

My heart sinks. This was Silas’s asylum. I know him, maybe not like how some people know him, but I know he never gives up, sometimes to his detriment. There’s yet another reason he’s doing this; his heart’s already broken. He loved the dad he knew, and he believes he’s still in there. That he can be rescued.

This is all Silas knows: rescuing the ones he loves no matter the cost. Fucking hell, Silas.

Silas gets his serenity. His moments of peace within the chaos. After that first night, things fall into a rhythm for them. It’s an attractive one with easy dance steps.

Aleksander kept his promise—he worshipped and adored me. When he walked in the door after work, I was usually busy in the kitchen. I’d turn just in time for the smile he’d give me. It was a new one—I’d never seen it before—and it was just for me. Instinctively, I’d bite my lip, getting fucking shy, my cheeks heating.

“I’ve got dinner ready,” I’d say.

He wanted to hear everything about my day. He encouraged the friendships I made with Oliver’s little friend’s parents. I was sure that watching The Breakfast Club was the last thing he wanted to do, but I mentioned it once and he made a special trip to the new Blockbuster to rent it.

He brought takeout home every Wednesday.

“You don’t have to do that,” I told him. “You already take me out every Friday.”

“I get two days off per week, you should get the same,” he said.

In the early hours of the morning, he’d whisper how much he’d missed me all day. He found time while he was at work to courier love letters home to me, sometimes with presents.

Saw this and thought of you, butterfly.

Can’t wait to be home with you tonight, butterfly.

Today, my missing you began when I walked out of the door, butterfly.

He could have just called—and sometimes he did—but the letters were romantic. I saved them.

Is Silas a closet romantic? And then … oh, oh! Me and Silas are in Barbados. God, I was a little jerk—an adorable little jerk.

“Don’t like this plane, Baba,” Oliver said.

“I know, Eaglet. Me neither. We’ll be there soon.” Plane rides with an almost three-year-old—not recommended. He hated it. He cried. He was all around fussy.

My desire to be in Barbados wasn’t any keener, but that’s where Aleksander decided to take us for an entire week.

For the first time, Oliver was exceptionally difficult …

At the beach, Oliver didn’t like the sand or the sun, or the water. He cried bloody murder when I slathered him in “icky” sunscreen.

“No! Don’t like it, Baba.” He threw sand at me. He whined for me to pick him up, pissed at all the places the sand stuck to him because of the sunscreen.

I lifted him and therefore his bare feet off the sand and he curled into me. “Hands are not for throwing, Eaglet,” I repeated from a book we’d been reading on manners that wasn’t working too well. “How about we try the water again?”

“No!”