The market was a sea of tables, carts, and tents filled with secondhand products and quirky knickknacks. Sellers shouted for attention and customers hollered at deals, but Silas ignored everything as he searched.
He scanned the crowd, weaving in and out makeshift aisles, dodging people carrying rugs and fragile objects, sidestepping pets and strollers, and disregarding calls from vendors.
Forty minutes passed, and he started to feel certain he’d missed her. The sun had been relentless this entire time, so he was also sweating. He couldn’t make a declaration of love looking like this. Maybe giving her a call or a text was the way to go. They could set up a nice meeting in an air-conditioned restaurant. But just as Silas had thought of this alternate plan, he saw her.
Raven. Her head above the rest.
She was speaking and laughing with someone, and she looked breathtaking with her big bouncy hair and bright-colored dress.
Before he could think better of it, he bellowed in the middle of the market, “Raven!”
Many people looked his way, but so did she, and when their eyes met, he felt the world make sense again.
* * *
“I don’t know if I like the shape,” Raven said to her friend as they studied a vintage bar cart.
“Yeah, the wheels make it look like a wagon,” Gwen said.
The friends had been perusing the market for all its offerings for the last hour but had yet to find anything worthwhile.
They stopped at a vendor who was showcasing and selling their paintings, and a particular rendering of the French Alps grabbed Raven. She assessed it for a moment before realizing why it had her transfixed.
“This reminds me of Cedar Lake,” Raven said, mostly to herself, but Gwen approached to study the painting with her.
“It’s beautiful,” Gwen said.
Raven nodded, moving on to another painting. But her friend took the opening to ask, “How are you doing?”
“Good,” Raven said. “I feel a little more like myself every day.”
Which wasn’t totally true, but she’d grown tired of being sad and exclusively listening to slow songs by Solange and Sade. Also, she couldn’t bear to see her mom or Gwen look at her with pained expressions anymore. So she’d decided to fake it until she made it.
That meant concentrating on the good stuff happening in her life, like this current trip to the flea market, or the apartment she was very close to signing a lease on, or even the website design work she’d been getting from burgeoning musicians after she’d done Doc’s band’s website.
All things considered, she was doing quite well.
“What do you think of this?” Gwen asked, pointing at a cable spool that had been turned into a table.
“I see the vision, but this price…” Raven said, showing her friend the tag with the hefty cost.
“Oh, never mind. Let’s go,” Gwen said as they laughed and moved along. They were standing at another stall, when from across the way, Raven heard her name.
Someone had shouted it loudly enough to cut through the babel of the flea market, and she looked out and around the crowded area. Raven wasn’t a completely unique name, so the idea that another Raven was being hailed was possible, but she felt oddly compelled to locate the source. When she locked eyes with the last person she thought she’d see today, she froze.
“What’s wrong?” Gwen asked.
“You see him too, right?” Raven asked, grabbing her friend’s arm.
“The giant man jogging toward us? Yeah,” Gwen said. “Who is he?”
“That’s Silas.”
Gwen looked at her with wide eyes. “Silas,Silas?”
“Yes, now, what do I do?” Raven asked hurriedly.
“We can leave right now and disappear into one of the aisles.”
