grabbing a handful of boob. She giggled and swatted me away, distracted by the movie.
"This is River, isn't it?" she asked, pointing toward the actress on the screen.
"Yeah, that's her," I said.
"She's gorgeous."
“Can you believe my fucking brother is with her?” I asked.
“I can,” Tempest said, giving me a wicked grin. “A guy that hot? I’d do him.”
I ran my hand over her breast again. “You better not,” I said. “These are mine.”
Tempest laughed. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’re the better looking twin.”
“I’m going to have to watch leaving you alone with him," I said, shaking my head. "She moved back here with him and everything, completely walked away from Hollywood."
Tempest pulled herself upright on my lap and turned toward me. "Do you think people can really do that?"
"Do what?" I asked, but I already knew what she was talking about. I just wanted to hear her say it. I wanted to know she was thinking about me and her.
The truth was, I fucking knew what I wanted.
I'd known since I was seventeen years old. And being back here with her, pushing the pause button on the outside world, was only confirming everything I felt.
"Do you think it's possible to just leave everything behind?" she asked. "The way River did for Elias?"
"Isn't that what you do?" I asked.
She shook her head. "I don’t understand,” she said. “What do you mean?"
"The woman with a thousand identities is asking me if it's possible to reinvent yourself?" I asked.
She exhaled heavily. "That's not the same thing," she said.
"No, it's not." I took a strand of hair from where it fell in front of her eyes and tucked it behind her ear. "It's easy to just take a new identity. It's a lot harder to come back home. Reinventing yourself and becoming someone else is simple. Owning who you are, that's the hard thing, Tempest."
She looked at me for a long time with soft eyes, before she spoke again. "I've never had a home, Silas."
"I'm not talking about a place, Tempest," I said. "My parents- you already know how they were. My father was a drunk asshole and my mother was...well, she tried her best to get between you and I back then, to stop anything else that might have happened between us. And most everybody in this town thought my brothers and I were the white trash spawn of my no-good parents."
"But you came back here," she said. "You still feel like this place is your home."
"No," I said, shaking my head. "You know that's not what I'm talking about, Tempest. It's not this place."
She trailed her finger along my shoulder for a while, following it with her eyes, before she finally looked up at me. "West Bend is the only place I'd ever been where I felt like I belonged," she said.
Exhaling heavily, I wrapped my hand around her wrist gently, stopping her from distracting herself by touching me. "You are the reason this place felt like home, Tempest."
"I get...restless," she said, shaking her head. "I've never stayed in one place."
I kissed her on the lips, sliding my hand back to the nape of her neck and pulling her to me. I wanted this girl more than I'd ever wanted anything in my life.
Closing my eyes, I inhaled deeply the familiar scent of her. I wanted to drink her in.
I wanted to love her.
I just wasn’t sure if she’d let me.
***
TEMPEST
I lay on my stomach in Silas' bed, wearing his t-shirt and nothing else, kicking my feet up in the air behind me. Silas and I had decided to press the pause button on everything outside of this place.
I'd never done something like this before.
I wasn't sure I could.
When I'd said I had to go back to the little bed and breakfast where I'd been staying, I was sure that Silas thought I was taking off permanently. He'd kissed me long and hard, his hands trailing up my back and through my hair, the kind of kiss you have with someone when they're leaving and you're never going to see them again.
It was the kind of kiss you leave someone with, hoping that will be the last thing they remember about you.
On the entire ride over to the bed and breakfast, I thought about how easy it would be to just leave, ride off on my bike into the sunset and forget about Silas.
The same way I'd done before.
Except it never had been that easy to forget about him. I'd done a shit job of it. Silas had never left me – he was always there, a part of me. I might have walked away from West Bend, but I had never really left him behind.
I told myself that it was stupid to stay here. I should rip off the bandage and leave now, before it was too painful to do it later.
And then I'd checked out of the bed and breakfast, turned my bike around, and come right back here.
Back to Silas.
Silas came up behind me, crawled into bed, and slid his arm across the small of my back. “What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing,” I lied, changing the subject. “I was just looking at your bed. It’s so beautiful, just like your other furniture. Is it something local?”
“I made it,” Silas said.
I slid up to a sitting position and reached out to run my fingers along the headboard. “You made this,” I said. “Yourself.”
Silas nodded. “Don’t sound so surprised,” he said. “You don’t know everything there is to know about me.”
“Clearly,” I said. “You’re a man of mystery, Silas Saint.”
“I’m like the James Bond of West Bend, Colorado,” he said, winking.
“So you really made all of this?”
Silas shrugged. “After you left, I was pissed off at everyone and everything,” he said. “I threw myself into wrestling, and Coach Westmoreland knew my parents weren’t the best, so I ended up spending a lot of time at practice and stuff. He and his wife started letting me come home for dinners, that kind of thing. They didn’t have any kids – I don’t think she could have them- so they treated me like their own. Better than my parents did.”
“Your coach is the one renting you this place now,” I said.
“Yeah, his wife died a couple years back – I wasn’t here then – but I know he took it pretty hard. This was the first place I came right to when I came back to West Bend a few months ago. I didn’t even go to see my mother for a while after I got here,” he said. “I just came to see Coach.”
“What about the furniture?” I asked. “Is he the one who got you into making it?”
“Oh, yeah, the furniture,” Silas said. “It was Coach’s thing. He had his whole garage set up as this workshop, and he’d go in there and hole up and make things. After you left, he got me started in doing it. He said I needed to have something other than wrestling to occupy my mind, and wood-working was just relaxing.”
I wanted to tell Silas that he wasn’t the only one who had been devastated when I’d left. But instead, I touched the headboard of the bed, let my fingers linger on the surface of the wood that had been painstakingly carved and sanded until it was soft and smooth. “This is really cool, Silas,” I said.
“It’s aspen,” Silas said. “It’s local.”
“You should make pieces like this and sell them. You’re really good.”
He waved his hand dismissively. “Nah, I could never do that.”
“Why not?”
Silas shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “People aren’t going to buy that stuff. Not from me, anyway. It’s just a hobby.”
Stretching back out on the bed, I pulled Silas down beside me to face me. “You could do something really cool with this,” I said. “When you have talent like that, you shouldn’t waste it.”
“The talent I have is beating people up,” Silas said. “And even that isn’t exactly talent.”
“Is that what you’ve been doing?” I asked. I suddenly realized that Silas had been probing into what I’d been doing for the past seven years,
pulling information from me piece by piece. Meanwhile, I knew only what I’d assumed about him, and that was turning out to be different from real life.
“What, since you left?” Silas asked. “I haven’t been doing anything much. Nothing important.”
“Tell me anyway,” I said, my hand smoothing the fabric of his t-shirt over his chest, feeling the harness of his muscles as they flexed underneath his shirt in response to my touch. “Did you get that scholarship you were up for in high school? The wrestling one?”
“To Oklahoma State?” Silas asked, his face reddening.
“What?” I asked. “Did I say something wrong?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I mean, yes, I got the scholarship. No you didn’t say anything wrong. It’s just – I got kicked out.”
“You got kicked out of college?” I asked.
“It happened at the beginning of sophomore year,” he said. “After that I went to Albuquerque, worked some odd jobs and got on the fight circuit out there. There’s a lot of unofficial stuff in that area - MMA, boxing, that kind of thing. I’d fight anyone and anything, didn’t matter what it was.”
“Why’d you get kicked out of college?” I asked. “What happened?”
Silas exhaled heavily. “I beat up this guy,” he said. “And I got kicked out for assault. It shouldn’t have been that big of a deal, but the kid had money. His parents donated a wing of one of the buildings or something. They didn’t end up pressing charges, but only because of what happened being public.”
“What do you mean?”
“We were at some party, and he was arguing with this girl – I didn’t know who the hell either of them were, but he hit her. The girl had a fucking bloody nose; I mean, she was bleeding all over the place. And someone was standing there with a cell phone recording. So I kicked the shit out of him, and took the girl to the hospital.”
“So they kicked you out of school for that?” I asked. I hadn’t been to college, but it seemed to me that they wouldn’t want someone who was hitting their girlfriend to be a student.
“Money talks,” he said. “You of all people should know that better than anyone. Anyway, what the hell would I have done with a degree? You don’t need a degree to fight in the ring.”
“You’re one of the smartest people I know, Silas,” I said. “You were always reading all those books when we were in school.”
“Yeah, but knowing a bunch of shit about history and philosophy doesn’t pay the bills, does it?” Silas asked, his voice bitter. Then he smiled, and touched my arm. “Water under the bridge, right? No use crying over spilled milk and all that. Is there another cliché I could use that would be appropriate here?”
I laughed. “The past is the past?”
“Exactly,” he said, his hand cupping my ass. “Why don’t you distract me with the present, instead?”
“Mmm,” I said, as Silas leaned close and kissed me. He started pulling on the sides of my shirt, but I stopped him. “Wait.”
Silas shook his head. “What’s this waiting you’re talking about?”
“I want to see the workshop,” I said. “Where you built all of this stuff. I want to see what you’re working on.”
“I’ll trade you,” he said, sliding his hand underneath the fabric of my shirt and cupping my breast.
“For what?” I moaned, distracted by the fact that his palm was rough against my nipple.
“You find a way to distract me now, and I’ll show you the workshop when we’re done,” he said. His fingers danced over my nipple, erect to his touch.
“That sounds like a deal for me too,” I said.
***
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
SILAS
“How long has it been?” Tempest stood at the counter, her back toward me, stirring a bowl of cookie batter with a wooden spoon. A pair of my sweatpants, too large for her, hung around her hips; and she wore one of my t-shirts knotted up underneath her breasts, baring her midriff. She looked over her shoulder at me, hair falling messily in pieces from its ponytail, and my heart swelled just looking at her.
“What?” I asked. I was distracted, too distracted by the fact that this girl- this girl who I’d loved for so long, this grifter who’d conned Coker- was standing in my apartment, wearing my clothes, and baking fucking cookies.
Cookies.
Like she was Martha Stewart or something.
Tempest turned around, her back against the counter, the bowl and spoon in her hand. “You’re staring,” she said. “You’re looking at me like…I don’t know what it’s like, but you’re creeping me out.”
I grinned. “Oh, I’m creeping you out, am I?”
“Yeah, I mean, I’m not sure if you’re hungry or -”
“I’m definitely hungry,” I said.
Tempest smiled. “You just had your fill of me this morning.”
“I know. And now I’m starving again,” I said. “What were you asking? I’m too distracted by the fact that I can see right through that shirt you’re wearing.”
“Wait,” Tempest said, turning around and setting the bowl down on the counter. “Is there a cookie sheet here?”
“Do I look like the kind of guy who has cookie sheets in his house?” I asked. “You should have told me you wanted me to pick those up at the store when you sent me for the cookie stuff.”
Tempest sighed. “Do you have a pan, at least?” she asked. “And I was asking, how long has it been since I’ve been here?”
I opened the counter and handed her a flat pan. “The days are blending together, aren’t they?”
Tempest looked at the pan, her face scrunched up. “I guess this will work,” she said. “It’ll just be one giant cookie, right?”
I watched as she poured batter into the pan, the act of us cooking in the kitchen now a regular routine. It had been three weeks since she’d agreed to stay here, since she’d decided to press the pause button on everything else that existed outside of this place. When she left to get her things at the bed and breakfast where she’d been staying, I was sure she wasn’t coming back.
But she’d returned not even an hour later, standing in my doorway.
The next day, I was certain that she’d be packing up and running. But she stayed. And one day turned into three, turned into ten, and now it had been three weeks.
I felt myself getting used to having her here.
She felt like home.
I didn’t want to go back to reality. There were things I knew I’d need to deal with - Elias had called last week after someone had told him I’d gotten arrested, and started to lay into me, so I knew he was wondering what the hell was going on. I needed to rejoin the real world at some point.
But holing up here with Tempest was the closest I’d felt to peace in a long time. And I thought she felt the same way.
My cell phone rang, interrupting my thoughts. I ignored it the first two times, but on the third, Tempest insisted. “Seriously, Silas,” she said. “Answer the damn thing already. Just because we’re holed up here doesn’t mean you shouldn’t answer your phone.”
I chuckled as I walked into the bedroom to get it. “Hello.”
“Where the hell have you been?” Trigg asked. “Shit, man, I’ve texted you and called you. What the hell?”
“I’ve been busy,” I said.
“Too busy for your fucking friends?” he asked. “What, you screw one girl who’s out of your league and you’re suddenly hot shit?”
I was silent.
“Wait,” Trigg said. “Are you still screwing her? You’re not still in Vegas, are you?”
“No, I’m not in Vegas,” I said.