Chapter 13
Silas's POV:
The gym at the villa takes up most of the third floor, and no one has ever used it but me. Dumbbells, a bench, a cable machine my mother had installed the year she decided the family needed a hobby, and one wall of glass that turns the room into an oven by eight and gives back the whole skyline at night.
I had been in it since half past six, and when I finally racked the last set my arms had gone heavy and good, the veins sitting up along the forearms, my shoulders wide in the mirror and holding the shape I had put into them.
I stood there longer than I needed to. Camilla had spent most of last week asking for a photograph of my body. She asked in the roundabout way she asks everything, joking, then again without the joke underneath it, and both times I had typed something flat and put the phone down and left the ask sitting in the chat unanswered.
So now I picked the phone up and turned toward the glass and started taking them. Front, then the side with the light on it, then a lower angle that made me look like a fool, then a set of four where I twisted at the waist and got the shadows in the right place along the ribs, and I deleted about as many as I kept.
I did not send any of them. I put the phone down on the bench and told myself what I genuinely believe, which is that a man who trains four mornings a week and eats like it should keep some record of what he built, in case he ever wants to know what it cost. Then I took the towel off my neck and went down.
The staircase in this house is the reason I am on time for nothing. Marble, wide, four flights of it, and by the second floor my ankles had started to complain. I was two steps from the landing when a door opened ahead of me and Felix came out of his room already dressed and already smiling, which at seven in the morning is not a natural state for any man who was on the internet until three.
"You're up," he said, delighted, as though I were the one behaving strangely.
"I've been up since six. Move, I want the kitchen."
He moved, and fell in beside me down the last flight, and his hair was flat on one side and he was holding his phone in both hands like something breakable.
Downstairs the kitchen runs cool and white, and I opened the refrigerator and stood in front of it. Eggs, half a loaf from Tuesday that was still soft in the middle, two tomatoes, a bag of spinach going limp, butter, and a jar of something a client had sent my father that had come down to me and never been opened.
I took the eggs out and put the pan on the burner and reached for the oil, and Felix said, "I talked to the girl from yesterday. The one hosting the game."
"The one you spent two hours losing to," I said, cracking the first egg against the rim of the bowl.
"I was not losing. I was participating." He came around the counter and leaned on it, well inside the space where a man's elbow belongs, and his face had arranged itself into an expression I had seen four or five times before, always in the same season and never for longer than a month.
"I'm serious, Silas. I woke up this morning and she was the first thing in my head, before I was even properly awake. I think my luck's finally turning."
"From what?" I said, and put the second egg against the rim.
"She's in New York. She goes to school in New York. Out of everyone I could have ended up in a game with, it happened to be her — don't tell me that isn't a sign."
"Two nights ago you were talking to a woman at the bar. Same city, same night, same room, and you had her number in your phone before midnight. If proximity is a sign, that one came with a burning bush."
Felix laughed, without a gram of shame anywhere in it, and waved his hand in front of his face as though clearing smoke. "That's finished. Done. We don't mourn the dead and we don't dig them up to check."
He leaned in further, one hand flat on the counter beside the tomatoes. "Can't you be happy for me? Once? For one morning, for the length of one breakfast?"
"I'll be happy for you in three weeks if it's still standing." I looked at him until he blinked. "I give it eleven days."
"You are a dried-out, terrible human being," Felix said, with enormous fondness, and then, because he has never in his life let an advantage pass him, "You lost a whole night's sleep over somebody and now you're standing here lecturing me. I wonder who posted a very nice picture of his face on his page so Camilla could admire it. That was a great deal of work for a man with no interest."
I set the bowl down and kept my voice flat. "Did I send it to her privately? I posted on my own page. Whatever you have decided it means is your own construction and you can keep it."
I took the fork out of the drawer and beat the eggs, and the sound filled the kitchen for a moment. "And you know what she wants from this better than I do. Do you think I'm stupid enough to walk into a thing I can see coming?"
Felix tilted his head, and the grin went out of his face entirely, which was worse than the grin. "You've got a lot to say about her all of a sudden," he said. "Two weeks ago I said her name and you gave me two words and a look."
He tore a piece off my bread and did not apologize for it. "And even if she's running an angle — how do you know there wasn't one minute of it that was real? People aren't one thing the whole way through. Not even the ones who want your money."
