Mia's clumsy nature has her no stranger to messes, but this is something else entirely.
She just wants to get her ex-boyfriend and long-time family friend, Colin, off her back. That's why she lies and says Silas, the guy she just met, is her boyfrie...
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They don't get to see each other much during the week, what with classes and homework and her job at the coffee shop.
Silas sees her briefly on Tuesday, when he stops by her work in hopes of sharing her short break with her. But her grumpy manager is there, so he takes the drink Mia makes and hangs out at a table for a bit to make a little progress on his homework in her presence. He doesn't get much done, though. His attention somehow manages to keep drawing back to her.
He notices the way she smiles, and how it's different from the one he sees when they're together. This one is wide and friendly and beautiful, but it's for the customer, and not from her heart.
He also notices her lips, the way they move to shape the words she speaks. This is something she's rarely done around him, simply because she doesn't need to. But he finds himself wishing she would, just so he can have an excuse to look at her mouth more.
And then there are her eyes. They flicker to him frequently, and he feels them every time. A barely-there touch, almost like a whisper. Like a feather across his skin, raising the hair on his arms.
He wonders if his presence makes her nervous, because in the fifteen minutes he stays, she knocks over a stack of lids, spills ground coffee on the counter, and over-whips two people's drinks.
It could just be her, though. She tends to be a bit clumsy. But there's the slight possibility that it's him and that he's inadvertently making her look bad in front of her already irritable boss, so he gathers his things, sends her a teasing text that she probably won't get a chance to read for a while, and sneaks out of the shop.
He doesn't see her again until Friday morning, when they load up her car and set off for the weekend. They don't get the chance to communicate much during the drive, for obvious reasons –hands on the wheel and eyes on the road- but that's okay. They've shared their thoughts so much via text over the last week that there's really nothing vital left that he needs to know before they get there.
They've texted about everything and nothing, and Silas thinks he knows Mia pretty well at this point. He knows that she now knows him better than anyone else. He's told her things that he's never told anyone else before.
Things about his childhood. About how he's never been able to hear -not so much as a train horn or a jet engine- and how there was never really enough money around for groceries and rent let alone for cochlear implants which may or may not have even made a difference.
He's told her about how hard he worked to learn how to read lips, how even now there are things he misses because some consonants just look too familiar. Like B and P.
He's even told her how when he was in middle school, he desperately tried to learn how to speak, which is a difficult feat for someone who's never heard how words sound. He spent hours, days, weeks shaping the letters, words, sentences in his mouth. His mom was so proud. And then, after all his practice and hard work, when he tried speaking with some of his classmates, they laughed at the way his voice sounded. And that was the end of that. He's never attempted it since.
