I think I catch Silas’s face fall a little. “Okay, no problem. I’ll walk you to the stop, though?” he asks with a hopeful ring to his voice. I nod a tad too emphatically.
We walk to the end of the street and linger beneath the bus stop sign silently for a few moments. Think of something to say, Rosie. Anything.
“You can come to dinner again tonight,” I say. Silas shakes his head.
“I’d love to, really. But I actually have plans. Catching up with an old friend from school for an elegant meal at Burger King,” he says sarcastically. “Though any other time—are you okay?”
“Me? Oh, yeah. So you have a hot date?” I tease him, hoping he can’t detect just how far my voice fell. Of course Silas has a date. Silas always had a date. He stuck through high school, unlike his siblings, Scarlett, or me, and was the type never to be short of female company by the time his senior year rolled around. It frustrated Scarlett to no end, hearing that he was out on a date instead of hunting with her.
“No. Not a date at all,” he says firmly, as if it’s important I believe him. “Just a friend from high school. Named Jason. And come on, Rosie, don’t you think that if I were going on a date, I’d go somewhere better than Burger King?”
I laugh in both relief and amusement. “I don’t know. You always had a girlfriend before you went to San Francisco.”
“Not hardly. I lost touch with most of my high school friends a year before that, right after they all went to college. Couldn’t you hear me crying at night from the loneliness?” he teases, shouldering me.
“Oh,” I say dumbly. I guess I wasn’t paying attention, but then, it had never occurred to me to pay attention to Silas Reynolds before. “Why did you lose touch?”
“Well,” Silas says thoughtfully, “when it came down to it, we had nothing in common.”
I raise my eyebrows. “I know how you feel.”
“Lucky for me, I seem to have enough in common with the March sisters to keep me afloat without… you know, friends or family,” he says.
“Hey, we count as your friends,” I interject.
“Also my family, it seems. Er, sort of,” he adds quickly. The bus rounds a far corner and rumbles our way.
“Anyhow, I have to admit, Rosie—you’re a better cook than the guys at Burger King, so I’m sort of sad that my non-date is tonight. Or rather, that my non-date is with someone else, or… right. Never mind,” Silas says.
I smile as the bus’s air brake squeals and the door opens, a rush of AC casting my hair back. “You should be sad—I’m making cookies. Though it’s just ramen for dinner, so you aren’t missing out on much there.”
“Cookies? Damn—” He’s cut off by the bus driver’s impatient glare. “I’ll see you later, though, right, Rosie?”
“Right,” I say softly, trying not to trip as I’m getting on the bus. I slide into a seat by the air conditioner and close my eyes so I don’t stare at him as we drive away.
I can make only eight things, if you don’t count ramen noodles and sandwiches. One of them is meatloaf. Another is Oma March’s chocolate cookies. I smash the chocolate into one of her green glass mixing bowls and beat it carefully. I like using Oma March’s kitchen things; it makes me feel closer to her somehow. Scarlett is nowhere to be found, but I suspect she’s running again. I think she’s trying to become as fast as a Fenris or something. Good luck.
I lean against the oven, waiting for the cookies to bake. I made too many. So many that I could probably take some over to Silas’s house.
Would that be weird? It’s just bringing cookies to an old family friend. No big deal. Yes, do it now, before you change your mind.
The oven buzzer sounds loudly, and I dump the hot tray of cookies into the basket, then fold the corners of the cloth over the edges. They probably won’t stay warm, but still, they look prettier this way. I stop in the bathroom to brush my hair behind my ears and adjust my shirt. It’s just Silas, I remind myself.
I’m secretly both afraid and hopeful that I’ll hear his car coming up the street behind me as I walk to his house. He lives in the middle of the forest that seems to start all at once, the road going from sunny and hot to dark and cool in a matter of moments. With the limbs swaying together in the breeze, it’s almost like being underwater. Birdcalls seem to echo off the trunks, all of which are wide and impressive.
Silas’s house emerges like a castle built by nature itself. The logs surrounding the front door are heavily carved with lifelike images of bears and rabbits and turtles, almost as if they were once real animals that were frozen here. One of Silas’s brothers carved them—Lucas, I think, or maybe Samuel—one of them was good with a rifle, the other at carvings, but it’s hard to keep the Reynolds boys straight. It’s obvious the cabin was originally small, but now rooms stretch high into the trees and off to the sides. That was Pa Reynolds’s rule: if you want your own bedroom, build it yourself. The top rooms of the house have broad decks that reach out into the upper tree limbs, a few with sketchy-looking tire swings hanging off the railings. Even Silas’s sisters, who weren’t in training to become woodsmen, had to haul timber to have their own space before they went off to boarding school. I barely got the chance to know them, but Pa Reynolds was scared at the prospect of raising three girls alone after Silas’s mother died.
His car isn’t in the driveway, but I knock on the door anyway. No answer. I run my hand along the back of a carved wooden bear and then place the basket of cookies in front of the door. I linger for a moment longer…
Someone is here.
Behind me, I hear faint breathing. I spin around, hands darting to my waist, and I’m instantly grateful for Scarlett’s obsession that I always carry my knives.
“So sorry, miss. Didn’t mean to frighten you,” a young man says calmly. He looks at me from heavy-lidded eyes and presses his perfectly shaped lips together. He’s not alone—another man stands silently behind him, hair hinting at gray, face mature and chiseled, something like an older movie star. The younger man is in an artistically torn T-shirt, his hair tousled like some sort of rock star. I’m suspicious, though—most people don’t come out this far, unless they’re bill collectors or Fenris.