Brightly Burning Bridges by Ivy Wild
“Hey, everything okay back there, Sky?”Johnny shouted at me from the large cooktop in the kitchen where he was pouring pancake batter.
“Uh, fine,” I managed to say, trying to catch my breath. I felt like I’d run a marathon, my heart was beating so fast I was worried it was going to beat right out of my chest.
“I saw that guy follow you into the freezer,” Johnny shouted again and I sighed.
“It’s fine, Johnny. He’s a friend.”
“We don’t normally let friends into the walk-in freezer, Sky,” he chided. I knew it was all in good fun, but I didn’t have the energy to banter back with him like usual.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “I gotta grab the coffee,” I said quickly, coming up with an excuse to leave the area. I knew Johnny was going to try and confront me about all this later, but right now I needed to not be talking about Silas Jenkins.
Or the way him pressing me against those cold shelves made my body heat up.
I tried to shake the dirty thoughts out of my mind. I’d given up on Silas when I was eighteen and I had no intentions of going back on the vow I’d made to myself as far as he was concerned.
I hated that he knew where I worked now. Knowing him, he was going to show up here as often as possible just to mess with me. That was just his way. Even more, I hated him knowing that I’d managed to amount to a waitress. I somehow felt like I’d let him down. I could see it on his face when he looked up at me. He was never able to hide things from me.
I took a deep breath and tried to calm my nerves as I poured his coffee. My hand was shaking so badly I was surprised I hadn’t spilled the damn thing all over the place. How I was going to bring it out to him, I had no idea.
I fervently wished that I was not the only waitress on duty that evening. If there was anyone else working, I could ask them to cover my table. But Tuesday evenings weren’t a big hit with the pancake crowd so the restaurant only ever had one waitress on the roster for evenings like tonight.
I put the coffee on a tray and grabbed the cream and sugar to place next to it. A thought about whether my hair looked okay crossed my mind and I internally slapped myself. I was not interested in looking any way for Silas. I was going to serve him coffee, whatever else he ordered and then hopefully never see him again.
Taking a deep breath, I grabbed my tray, plastered a smile on my face and made my way over to his table. But when I reached the empty booth, I almost dropped the tray altogether. I looked around the small restaurant, but Silas was nowhere in sight. On the table sat a business card next to a fifty dollar bill.
I picked up the heavy piece of parchment and turned it over, trying not to wish for a note from him.
There wasn’t one.
Which made sense for Silas.
He expected people to do what he wanted without asking.
And usually, he got his way.
I laughed to myself. Except with me. I dunked his business card in the coffee I was planning on serving him and pocketed the fifty dollar bill. Maybe someone with a stronger moral compass would donate the money to charity, but I wasn’t that person. I needed cash right now and I wasn’t above taking it, even from someone like Silas.
I saw a cab pull away from the front of the restaurant out of the corner of my eye and somehow I knew Silas was in it. The moment I felt him leave, I breathed in a sigh of relief. I sincerely hoped that he wasn’t planning on coming back.
And he certainly wasn’t going to be getting a call from me, since that’s what I knew he wanted. I swirled the card around the hot cup of coffee a few more times to ensure that I wasn’t tempted to pull it back out and write down the number. The black ink swirled with the black liquid, giving physical form to my thoughts surrounding Silas. I pulled my phone out and snapped a quick picture of the odd sight before I got pulled away.
“Hey, can we get a refill?” one of the teenage girls sitting in the front booth shouted over to me.
“Sure,” I said, walking over to grab her glass, leaving the coffee cup and thoughts of Silas Jenkins behind.
At least for the moment.
“You sure you’re alright?”Johnny asked as I waited for him to lock up so we could walk out back to our cars together.
“Yeah, fine,” I said again, pulling my coat tighter against my body to ward off the season’s evening chill.
Johnny gave me an odd look as we started walking to our cars. “You don’t look fine. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“We all have ghosts from our pasts,” I said, trying to brush off how accurate his comment was.
“Yeah, but some ghosts are Caspers and some haunt us. Which one was this?”
I scrunched my face at Johnny as I approached my Prius. I loved Johnny. All of the waitresses did. His ginger complexion, scraggly beard, slightly overgrown hair and heavyset build coupled with his overprotective nature made him a natural papa bear. “I know you’re asking because you care, but honestly I’m fine. I was just a little startled to see him after all this time. That’s all.”
Johnny gave me a look that said he knew I was lying, but thankfully let it go. “Yeah well, if he shows up again and you don’t want him around, you just say the word and I’ll knock him on his ass.”
I laughed and reached forward to give Johnny a hug. “Thank you for threatening someone with violence for me, Johnny. You know just how to get to a girl.”
He chuckled and wrapped me in a big bear hug before letting me go. “Drive safe,” he said.
“Give a kiss to Melissa for me,” I said as I climbed into my car, referring to his wife.
He smiled and nodded before closing the door for me.
The drive back to my loft was thankfully short. I’d done a pretty good job of keeping my mind off of Silas during the remainder of my shift. Of course Johnny had to bring him up at the end of the night. I knew he meant well, but damn, I wish he hadn’t asked again.
Silas was like secondhand smoke. Once you breathed him in, there was no way to get him out of your system. I’d learned that the hard way. It’d been ten years since I’d last seen him, but the moment I saw him I knew, he’d been circulating in my veins all this time.
I parked the car behind my third story loft and let my head fall on my steering wheel. It’d taken a lot for me to get Silas out of my system the first time. In some ways, it wasn’t even my choice. I’d moved away for college and I’d never had a phone in high school, so I never got his number. Maybe I could have gotten it, but I didn’t have the heart to reach out to him after everything that had happened.
It had also shown me that Silas was never going to make the first move. It had been ten years since we’d last seen each other and I’d received precisely zero messages from him since that time. He could have easily gotten my number if he’d wanted it. It’s why I knew him stumbling on me this evening had been a complete accident.
Or at least, that’s what I was telling myself.
I blew out a heavy breath of frustrated air and climbed out of my car, slamming the door behind me. I ran up the outdoor stairs to my loft, trying to give myself an excuse other than Silas for my quickly beating heart and threw my door open.
I didn’t bother switching on the lights. I wanted a shower, a tee shirt and bed, in that order. My loft was small but that didn’t matter to me. I loved it and the little lady that I rented it from had continued to give it to me at a discount. Without Alison’s generosity, there was no way I would ever have been able to afford living in the Northwest section of the city. This area was way overpriced and I was barely making ends meet as it was.
I was such a screw up in life it wasn’t even funny. My attempts to go to drama school had only succeeded in putting me into debt. I’d transferred back to a Washington D.C. school to be close to my mother, but I secretly hated Washington D.C. I really thought I’d be able to make it in New York, but things never turned out the way I planned. I was cursed that way.
It had taken me a few years to save up enough to afford more classes. I thought a marketing degree might help me land a job, but of course I had to graduate at a time when the country was going through a complete upheaval and the economy was in the shitter. That meant most people were being laid off and no one was looking for entry level hires. Unless, of course, I wanted to work as an unpaid intern. Companies were always looking for impressionable, wide eyed young people of which they could take advantage. Unfortunately, a trust fund didn’t fall out of my mother’s womb when I was born, so I had to make my own way.
Which meant working.
Which meant no time for donating free labor to companies that could easily pay me.
Which meant I was stuck.
I turned the radio to my bedside alarm clock on. Seven Devils by Florence and the Machine started to play, which was perfect for reminding me just who I was dealing with.
I tried not to let out a strangled cry of frustration as I stepped into the hot spray of the shower. The plastic of the stall around me tinged with the sound of the water bouncing off of it and I tried not to let my mind drift.
Who was I kidding? There was no way I wasn’t going to be able to think about Silas. I let out a breath. It probably was worth just letting myself go there so I could just get him out of my system.
My mind was still a jumbled mess when it came to him. I still never understood where we stood, then or now.
Silas Jenkins.
He wasn’t a friend, until he became an enemy.
He wasn’t warm, until he became cold.
He wasn’t kind, until he became vicious.
He was everything to me and nothing to me all at the same time.
And I felt everything for him and nothing for him all at the same time.
I shivered as I turned off the water to the shower. The boiler to my unit had a limited life span which meant showers were generally on the shorter side. Probably for the better. Showers were for thinking about your past and I needed to not think about my past very much.
I toweled off and climbed into bed, pulling the covers over me to try and warm myself up. I hadn’t felt cold while I was in the freezer, but the moment Silas left, the cold seeped inside of me and had refused to leave all evening.
I pulled the covers up over my head and swiped my phone open to check my notifications. I’d uploaded another post on Instagram in the morning before I’d left for work and I’d been so caught up during the day, I hadn’t had a chance to see the responses until now. Well, I’d be lying if I said I cared about all of the responses equally. There was always one in particular that I looked for.
He’d been the first one to ever comment on my designs. I didn’t know who he was, but it was clearly a guy. Sometimes you could just tell. He never liked my posts, only commented. But his comments always made me smile. They were raw, unfiltered and honest. Not many people today spoke like that. Most people were always crafting their sentences in order to achieve some personal gain. That was especially prevalent in the Nation’s Capital.
I’d never tried to message him and he’d never messaged me. For the first year or so, I’d always expected an icon to appear with a message from him, but I’d been disappointed. Well, at first, anyways. Now I preferred it this way. I liked not knowing who was on the other side. My art and his comments were our own form of communicating. Me through images and him through truths.
But not him. He was the one person who I felt was truly honest with me. Not all of his comments over the years had been positive. If he hated something, he said so. If it made him sad or upset, he said that too. But that only made the times where he said he liked something that much more special. Because I knew that those feelings were real.
In a world of people pleasers, finding someone who was brutally honest was near impossible. But I guess I hadn’t found him. He’d found me. Whomever he was.
I opened the Instagram app and scrolled through the various likes and comments, responding to each in turn. I frowned as I realized he hadn’t commented.
But, almost as if on cue, a notification slid in at the top of my phone and I bit my lower lip and smiled.
@dontaskmyname: “Fucking love this.”
