When You Come Back to Me (Lost Boys #2) - Emma Scott Page 0,134
short and swept off his brow. He’d been nearly eighteen then, stronger and bigger than me. Now he glowed with health, his body filling out his clothes, standing tall when he’d been so broken in Alaska.
“Silas,” I managed.
“Hey, Holden,” his own voice thick. “It’s been awhile.”
I rose on shaking legs, part of me wanting to run away as the demons of Alaska whispered. Memories returning, one on top of the other. But now I had tools. Weapons to fight back. It had taken two years and the work wasn’t done yet—it might never be done. But when the cold reached for me with icy fingers, I remembered Silas’s kindness instead. When I shivered in that drafty cabin until I thought my bones would shatter, he’d lain on that hard floor and put his arms around me, sharing what little warmth he had. For a few moments, I’d been safe.
Silas tried for a grin, but his eyes were shining, and suddenly I was rushing around the table at him. We embraced hard; he held my shaking shoulders and I felt his chest hitch with shallow breaths.
We pulled away quickly, wiped our eyes, laughing and crying and then hugging again.
“Shit, it’s good to see you, Holden. You look great.”
“So do you. I feel like I’m dreaming. What are you doing here?”
“I was searching online for something to read and saw your name. I couldn’t believe it was you; I even doubted the author photo on the back. But then I read your book and—holy shit—I cried like a goddamn baby. Alaska was all there. Even in the scenes where it wasn’t.”
“I had to get it out.”
“Did you?”
“It will always be a part of me. I’m just getting better at not letting it control my every waking fucking moment. You?”
“Same, but it’s been a goddamn journey.”
“Tell me about it. My parents disowned me about eight seconds before I took the stage.”
Silas’s eyes widened, and he shook his head. “Then I’m even more proud of you. Is it too soon to say that?”
“I’ll take it,” I said with a grateful smile. “Let’s go somewhere. I want to hear everything.”
Although I had an after-party and photo op, I canceled it all, and Silas and I went to a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant in Midtown. I ordered Kung Pao chicken and watched Silas fumble his chopsticks through a giant bowl of chow mein. We talked a little about my book and he told me he’d taken his family’s vast pharmaceutical fortune and used it to clean up the opioid crisis it’d helped to create.
“I’m going to guess you didn’t pick that as your cause by accident,” I said slowly. “You’re the one who asked me about addiction at the Q&A.”
“It had me for a while. I needed to feel something, even if it was manufactured. But Alaska was even stronger than dope. It taught me it was better to feel nothing than something ‘wrong’ or ‘unnatural.’ I lived that way for a long time. Like a robot in human skin.”
“I went the other way, I said. “Everything they told us was wrong, I did. Like a sad, little rebellion that hurt me more. But I felt possessed sometimes, by forces beyond my control. They were always whispering that I was no good. Not worthy of anything. So when I met someone who was the physical embodiment of good, I sabotaged it.”
Silas’s eyes lit up. “You met someone?”
I nodded. “But I’m pretty sure I thoroughly fucked it up. I’ve seen him once in three years.”
“Why?
“My therapist says I grew up in an ‘atmosphere of deprivation.’ River was an infusion of everything I’d gone without—a disruption of the status quo. Being with him was too good.” Tears threatened. “I fought us every step of the way.”
“This River was good to you?”
“The best.”
“I like him already.” Silas took a bite of spring roll. “But why not give it another try? You’re not in the same place you were the last you saw him.”
“True. I’m off the booze. And I’ve been celibate for two long years which, if you know me, is as improbable as a lunar eclipse, Halley’s comet, and meteor shower all happening at the same time.”
My breath caught as a meteor shower and my perfect night with River—our first time—came rushing back to me…
“That’s not nothing,” Silas said, echoing my own thoughts from earlier.
“Once I got a little bit of clarity, it was easy,” I said. “I never wanted anyone after River. I still don’t.”