Chapter 4
"What did you say just now?" Noel stepped closer to the table, the scent of bergamot and dry heather hanging heavy between them. "About tomorrow?"
Silas turned his head. His eyes were wide, luminous, and completely devoid of the sharp, suffocating intensity that had pinned Noel against the counter thirty seconds ago.
"We practice," Silas said softly. The cadence of his voice was once again tentative, the vowels slightly slurred at the edges, exactly as Dr. Thorne’s post-operative charts had predicted. "Tomorrow. Eight."
"You... you never ask for a specific hour," Noel murmured, searching Silas’s face. He looked for a twitch in the jaw, a flare of the nostrils, any sign of the imperious prodigy who used to scream at stage managers if a Steinway’s lid wasn't propped to precisely sixty degrees. "You usually wait until I bring you in after breakfast."
Silas reached across the pine table. His fingers found Noel’s wrist, sliding beneath the rolled-up sleeve of his cardigan. His skin was warm from the tea, his touch feather-light. He stroked the prominent tendon running down to Noel’s thumb, back and forth, a slow, soothing friction that made the hair on Noel’s forearms stand on end.
"Eight," Silas repeated. A tiny, faint smile touched the corner of his lips—not mocking, but secretive, like a child holding a smooth pebble behind his back. "Good light at eight."
Noel let out a breath he felt he’d been holding in his lungs for three years.
*Good light at eight.*
Of course. The south-facing bay windows in the music room caught the morning sun between eight and ten, cutting through the North Devon fog before the midday overcast rolled in from the Irish Sea. Silas wasn't remembering a schedule. He wasn't waking up to some buried, vengeful consciousness. He was simply reacting to ambient warmth, like a housecat finding a patch of sunlight on the rug.
"Yes, my love," Noel whispered, his chest slumping in a wave of pathetic relief. He laid his free hand over Silas’s, pressing their palms together. "Good light at eight. I’ll make poached eggs on toast first."
Silas didn't answer. He simply allowed Noel to stroke his hair, leaning his temple against Noel’s hip as Noel stood beside his chair.
Noel closed his eyes, burying his fingers in the thick, dark silk of Silas’s hair. Beneath the strands, just behind the left ear, his fingertips grazed the jagged depression in the skull—the bone flap the surgeons had removed to relieve the intracranial pressure while Silas lay in a medically induced coma at Taunton General.
Every time Noel touched that crater, his stomach hollowed out.
He remembered the smell of burnt rubber on the wet gravel. He remembered the rain plastering his hair to his forehead as he dragged himself through the shattered driver’s side window, his own collarbone cracked, screaming Silas’s name into the pitch-black abyss of the ravine. The headlights had still been burning, twisted upward into the dripping pines like twin searchlights hunting for God.
Silas had been folded into the footwell like a discarded marionette, his arm pinned beneath the warped steel of the transmission tunnel, blood pooling in the hollow of his collarbone.
*You did this to him,* the rain had whispered against the smoking radiator. *You wanted to keep him. Now look at him.*
"Tea," Silas murmured against Noel’s ribs, his breath warm against the wool.
"Right," Noel said, pulling himself out of the memory with a sharp jerk of his chin. "Tea. Let it steep another minute."
***
Night fell over Foxglove Manor with the heavy, damp finality peculiar to the Devon coast.
The wind off the cliffs began to howl through the chimney flues around nine, rattling the leaded windowpanes in the master bedroom. It was a cavernous room on the second floor, furnished with an enormous four-poster bed draped in heavy dark green velvet curtains to keep out the drafts that leaked from the old floorboards.
Noel knelt on the braided rug, unlacing Silas’s soft leather slippers.
Silas sat on the edge of the mattress, clad in his striped flannel pyjamas. He watched Noel’s hands with passive interest, his knees slightly parted, his shoulders rounded in that perpetual, defensive posture he had adopted since the crash.
"Lift your foot, sweetheart," Noel said.
Silas lifted his right foot. Noel pulled the slipper free, setting it neatly beside the bedpost. Then he took Silas’s pale heel in his palm, rubbing his thumb into the arch. The skin was smooth, entirely uncalloused; Silas hadn't walked more than half a mile at a time since the winter of the accident.
"Cold," Noel murmured, bringing the foot to his mouth and breathing warm air against the toes. "I should have put two hot water bottles under the duvet instead of one."
Silas tilted his head. He reached out, his long fingers tangling in the hair at the nape of Noel’s neck.
Noel froze.
Silas didn't usually initiate touch unless he was frightened by thunder or confused by a sudden noise. But now, his hand was firm, his fingers threading through Noel’s curls with a slow, possessive pressure. He pulled Noel gently upward.
Noel rose to his knees, his hands finding Silas’s thighs through the flannel. "Silas?"
Silas didn't blink. In the amber glow of the bedside lamp, his dark eyes held a strange, liquid depth. He leaned forward until their foreheads touched, his breath smelling faintly of the mint mouthwash Noel had helped him rinse with ten minutes ago.
"Noel," he said.
The sound of his own name on Silas’s tongue always felt like a minor miracle. Before the crash, Silas had said *Noel* with a drawling, careless disdain—*Noel, the tempo is dragging; Noel, where is the score for the Scriabin; Noel, tell the stage manager I won't play until they fix the humidity.*
Now, the name was round, soft, and weighted with absolute reliance.
"I’m here," Noel whispered, closing his eyes, intoxicated by the press of Silas’s brow against his own. "I’m right here, Silas. I’m not going anywhere."
Silas shifted his hand. His fingers slipped around the side of Noel’s neck, his thumb coming to rest directly over Noel’s carotid artery.
The touch was feather-soft, yet Noel felt instantly paralyzed. He could feel his own pulse pounding frantically against the pad of Silas’s thumb—*thump-thump, thump-thump*—a terrified, guilty rhythm exposed under the hands of the boy he had broken.
Silas didn't press down. He merely held it there, feeling the blood surge beneath the skin, his head cocked as if he were listening to a metronome ticking inside Noel’s flesh.
Then, with agonizing slowness, Silas’s thumb began to move.
*Press. Release. Press-press.*
A short tap. A pause. Two short taps.
Noel’s breath caught in his throat. A strange, cold shiver raced down the length of his spine. "What are you doing?"
Silas didn't answer. He leaned in further, his lips brushing Noel’s cheek, tracing a slow, burning path toward the corner of Noel’s mouth. The kiss, when it came, was not the sleepy, receptive peck of an invalid being put to bed.
It was deliberate.
Silas’s mouth was warm, parted, demanding entry with a slow, firm insistence that sent a shockwave of heat straight through Noel’s lower belly. Silas’s other hand came up, grasping Noel’s shoulder with a strength that made Noel gasp—and into that gasp, Silas deepened the kiss, his tongue sliding against Noel’s with a supple, practiced grace that belonged entirely to the man Silas had been before the metal crushed his skull.
