Page 45 of Glorious Ruin
Meanwhile, I was slumped in the driver’s seat with my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird and my hands shaking against the wheel. I felt like I’d just survived a fifteen-minute iron-man match.
When we finally pulled into the parking lot beside the Boardwalk, I had to sit for a while to allow my adrenaline to ebb and my face to return to a non-tomato color.
“Silas.”
“Yeah?”
“Can I confess something? But you have to promise you won’t laugh. I’m serious. You promise?”
Silas paused, looking over at me. “Okay, I promise. What is it?”
I took a deep breath, feeling a little like the twenty-two-year-old kid I’d been when we first met. “I…I’ve never done that before. The road thing. And I can’t decide if it was one of the hottest things we’ve ever done or the single stupidest thing we’ve attempted.”
Silas’s eyes softened, his smug smirk melting into something much more genuine and tender. He reached across the cab and cupped my jaw, his thumb stroking my cheek.
“Nah,” Silas whispered, his voice thick with a promise that made my stomach flip. “The hottest thing we’ll ever do is fuck on our front porch. Under the moon, where the only thing that can see us is the trees and the stars. That will be the hottest, babe.”
The mention of the porch, the heart of the Reed land, the place where we’d stood hundreds of times, had my mind doing backflips. The idea of claiming each other there, in the open air of our home, had my brain short-circuiting for the second time in less than an hour.
“Our porch?” I breathed.
“Our porch,” Silas confirmed, giving me a final, lingering kiss that tasted like victory. “Now get out of the truck,Deadlock. Your sisters are waiting and Evan is trying to carry three coolers at once.”
Everyone gathering on the beach was a true exercise in organizational chaos and public humiliation.
Evan was already struggling with a massive pop-up tent, his face red from the heat. “I have a college degree!” he yelled as we walked up. “Was this thing designed by a sadist? Cal, for the love of God! Help me, before I throw this into the Atlantic and claim it as a maritime loss!”
“Maybe if you read the instructions instead of trying to use your Floridian intuition, it would actually work,” I countered, grabbing the other side of the pole and snapping it into place with one hand.
“My intuition is fine. It’s the engineering that’s flawed!”
After rescuing Ev from a mental breakdown over nylon and plastic, I finally got a chance to see my sisters in the light of the beach. April was organizing the cooler like it was a military operation, barking orders at Sarah and arranging the drinks by size. Heather was to her left, looking at Silas with a quiet, lawyer-like approval. As the sharpest one of us all, it was a look that told me he passed the Donovan test. And of course Sarah, the baby of the family, who was already dramatically complaining about the sand being, and I quote: “too sandy.”
“Silas, thank you for the invite,” Heather said, stepping up to us as we set down the chairs. “I think Cal needed a reminder that life exists outside of Philadelphia and wrestling rings. Even if he looks like he wants to hide under a rock.”
“He’s doing great..” Silas smiled, throwing an arm around my shoulder. “He’s even starting to like the heat. He only complained four times on the drive over.”
“Liar,” I muttered but leaned into him anyway.
Drifting over the scene, my eyes landed on Lena and Cadence, who were walking down to the water together, carrying their boogie boards and laughing. I noticed a newfound closeness developing between them. They whispered and smiled as if they'd been friends for decades and seemed to have formed their own little found-family-unit within the Reed chaos.
Huh, I wonder if anyone else noticed, or if I was just being an “overprotective dad”, seeing shadows where none were.
For the next hour, Silas and I play-fought in the surf, laughing and joking like we were teenagers again. We tried to maintain a professional distance, truly, but every time I shoved him into a wave or he caught my waist to keep me from falling, the tension was undeniable.
“You’re getting slow, Reed!” I yelled, splashing him as a wave broke over his head.
“Slow?” He laughed, lunging for me and dragging us both under.
“Get a room, you sea-hags!” Evan yelled from shore, glaring at a bottle of sunscreen. “You’re scaring the tourists and local wildlife!”
Eventually, when the saltwater wore me down, I stretched out on my towel. It was like a load off, to be officially off the clock and doing absolutelynothingbut watching my future husband.
Closer to the shoreline, Silas was in the middle of a fiercely competitive game of volleyball with Sarah, Heather, and April. He was drenched in saltwater and sweat, his light brown hair clinging to his forehead in waves, and every time he jumped for a spike, the muscles in his back would coil and flex.
I reached up, pushing my dark sunglasses into my hair so I didn’t miss a single detail. I let out a slow, weighted breath. ThankfuckI was lying flat on my stomach, because my body reacted entirely on its own, and I was currently sporting a very obvious, very inconvenient, problem.
A shadow fell over my face, blocking my view. Evan dropped onto the sand next to my towel. The move kicked up a cloud of white dust as he aggressively cracked open a canned seltzer.
