After bows and quivers full of arrows were distributed, it was time for Raven and the other students to combine all his pithy instructions and attempt to hit ringed targets a distance away. Raven immediately found the equipment clumsy and bulky in her hands, and her arrows failed to go in any consistent direction.
Silas was going around to everyone and providing specific and personalized instruction, and when he finally approached Raven, she’d yet to make any real progress with accuracy.
“Let’s see what you got,” he said to her.
Quelling the flutter in her stomach, Raven got in position, lifting her bow and pulling the string back.
“Rotate your elbow away from the bow,” he said, giving her something to do rather than focus on how his dark eyes tracked her movements.
“Too much,” he said, and with the lightest touch, almost phantasmal, he adjusted her arm.
“Now what?” she asked, her voice raspier than she’d have liked.
“Draw and release,” he instructed.
She pulled the string back until her thumb touched the corner of her mouth as he’d shown them, and she let the bowstring slip past her fingers. The arrow flew through the air, landing several feet to the left of its intended mark. It was the best shot she’d taken in the entire class.
“Good,” he said with a polite smile that still managed to do something to her. “Try again, but now drop your shoulders.”
She nocked another arrow, aimed at the target, pulled the string, adjusted her shoulders, and released.
The shot was better, but still off the mark.
“You hold your breath at full draw,” he said, picking up his recurve bow. “Don’t forget to breathe.”
With exaggerated inhales and exhales, he showed her how he paired his breath with each movement, and she was transfixed by how fluidly he moved. The muscles in his shoulders and chest bulged as he lifted his bow and drew the bowstring across his wide body. When the arrow left his bow and whizzed through the air, it landed dead center on the target ahead.
“Make sense?” he asked, turning his eyes on her, and all she could manage was a nod.
He moved on to the next student then, and she was left feeling discombobulated and tense in a weird and unspecific way. All Raven knew was she might’ve spoken too soon when she told her mother she had nothing to worry about.
ChapterFourteen
At the crack of dawn,Silas received a text from his brother:Things have gone to shit. Come over ASAP.
Of course, Silas panicked and called Isaiah while he was shoving his legs into a pair of jeans. But his brother clarified over the phone, “It’s not an end-of-the-word sort of thing. Take a shower, eat breakfast, then come over.”
Silas deduced that something had gone wrong with Maggie and Leon’s birthday party planning, which was not ideal, seeing as the party was that very afternoon.
When he arrived at his brother’s home, he found Victor alone in the kitchen furiously mixing ingredients in a bowl while a baking instructional video played on an iPad perched on top of a row of mason jars.
“What happened?” Silas asked.
His brother-in-law stopped long enough to say, “The dogs got into the cake and decorations in the middle of the night. Isaiah dropped off the kids at their friend’s so we can concentrate on salvaging the party before noon.”
Silas put down the presents he’d come along with. “What can I do?”
“There are leftover toys and candy in the dining room, so if you could remake as many party favor bags as possible, that’d be great,” Victor said. “Then you can take the tables to the yard and start setting those up, and if you finish that, you can figure out how to use the popcorn machine.”
“I’m on it,” Silas said, not thinking too hard about whether the list was accomplishable in the time frame.
He situated himself in the dining room in a one-man assembly line, making decent headway by the time his brother showed up an hour later with shopping in hand and despondency all over his face.
“There were no more yellow balloons, so I got green and red balloons. Our circus theme has officially turned into a Christmas celebration,” Isaiah said.
“No one is going to think Christmas when they see that photo board cutout with the contortionist and clown.”
His brother nodded, briefly mollified, until his husband shouted from the other room, “Fuck!”
