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Phoebe awoke to soft morning light streaming through the window.
Though she blinked the sleep from her eyes, she didn’t lift her head, instead electing to keep her head pressed to Silas’s chest as it rose and fell beneath her. She had snuck into his room last night after everyone else had gone to sleep, and he had been waiting up for her, somehow predicting her plans without prior warning. After all, her room had been rather stuffy, and she preferred to fall asleep to the gentle thud of Silas’s heartbeat when she had the option.
She often awoke before him like this. On some mornings, she had to leave before he was conscious enough to notice her missing, with some assignment from her superiors to report to. But on slower mornings, Phoebe liked to wait for Silas to wake up too, though she would often end up drifting back to sleep and waking for a second time only to find him wide awake and waiting for her instead.
Since they were out in the countryside for Orion’s wedding, she wasn’t particularly worried about waking up. Instead, she propped herself up on her elbows, peering down at Silas’s sleeping face. He always looked so peaceful when he slept, his usual pinched expression relaxed and his face oddly bare without his glasses.
That weightless feeling rose inside her chest again. She screwed her eyes shut, breathing in deep. It had been well over a year, but she still wasn’t used to this. It was hard to remember a time when Silas hadn’t loved her in some capacity, just like it was hard to remember a time when she hadn’t wondered if she might love him back in some way. The sweet outward facing side of her that existed to keep the peace certainly thought she ought to. It would be easy that way, after all, and all that girl wanted was ease and peace, and she knew Silas could give her that.
But that girl wasn’t the only side of Phoebe that existed. Though she squashed them down as best she could, the parts of her she kept behind one way mirror glass reminded her that Silas didn’t know them. As she reflected the version of herself she thought he would like best, those parts of her whispered about him where he couldn’t hear. Though they predicted his repulsion when he inevitably found out about them, they fixated on other things too, hoarding snapshots of moments. His glasses sliding down his nose as he focused on the road while driving. The pink flush that spread across his cheeks when she tucked a piece of his hair behind his ear.
Eventually, she began to hoard moments that weren’t real, too. She would let herself stare at his lips for too long while he focused on the road and begin to wonder how they would feel against her own. She would go to adjust his glasses and suddenly want to cup his face in her hands and make him look at her until he saw everything. Sometimes when he hugged her, she wanted to let him keep holding her so she could bury her face away and stop acting, at least for a little while. None of it was quite real, but Phoebe wasn’t quite real anyway, so she didn’t mind that much.
But then it became real, and suddenly she was pulling him closer by the hair with her lips on his while he cupped her face with a fresh bruise forming on his cheek. She hadn’t realized he had wanted her like that. She had hardly let herself want that. But now, whenever Silas’s parents traveled for work, she would make her way in through his bedroom window. Now, she said as many intentionally terrible things as she liked until his cheeks flushed pink and his dimple showed and he let her kiss him senseless. She wanted to hoard every single moment away because all of it was so real, and she didn’t think she had had anything this real before.
She opened her eyes again. Silas was still asleep, his chest rising and falling with barely audible breaths. She lowered herself back down, gently kissing his cheek before tucking her head into the crook of his neck and pulling him close. Her chest hurt. Her heart felt so full she thought it might be easier to simply rend it from her chest.