The next day, I make sure to put more effort into my appearance. Now that I'm fully aware that I'll be seeing Silas again; with how nervous I was yesterday in his presence feeling as sweaty and gross as I was, I want today to be different.

I put my hair up in a sock bun to keep it all neat, and I use a little bit of hair spray and some bobby pins to keep my baby hairs from becoming flyaways. I apply my deodorant after lunch, and I keep it on the dresser so that it's ready when it's time to go meet up with Audrine and Silas tonight.

Yesterday caught me by surprise, but I'm going to be ready for it today. Although I don't have an extensive wardrobe here in my suitcase, it still takes me a long time to decide what to wear.

I'm staring at two different dresses trying to decide which one to wear, but I'm interrupted by my phone's beeping sound.

"Bonjour, butt smasher," the message reads. Silas's username is boring, just silas.daniels00. Which makes me feel even more embarrassed about my username. "Ready for dinner?"

"Oui," I respond to the message in one of the only words of French that I know and then I add, "Leaving soon."

Now knowing that I'm keeping them waiting, I have to choose quickly. In the heat of the moment, I grab the floral sundress and my denim jacket, thinking that it might cool down by the time I get home tonight.

I wish that I brought more makeup with me now too. I do enjoy doing my makeup when I'm at home, but it wasn't a priority when I was packing. I only grabbed some foundation and mascara, which I'm wearing now, but I definitely wish that I could spruce it up some more with a liquid eyeliner and subtle lipstick. Maybe once I get my bearings in this town, I'll find somewhere to buy makeup.

After sliding on my favorite dress out of my small selection, I reapply my deodorant one last time and make sure that my bun is secure. Feeling as confident as possible, I leave my hotel room and start making the walk toward the restaurant.

Silas had messaged me earlier to tell me that the side door is open and that I can just come up. The restaurant is open, so I have to pass the customers on the patio and squeeze passed a waiter to get to the side of the building. The smell of fresh baked bread fills the air and makes me even hungrier than I already am.

Up the stairs, the smell of bread starts to turn more warm and herby; my mouth is starting to water. I see Silas in the kitchen, standing at the stove, when I walk in.

"Hi," I greet him as I walk in. "It smells amazing in here."

"Hopefully it tastes as good," he says as he ladles something from the pot on the stove into two separate bowls and brings them both to the table. "What do you want to drink?"

"Just water is okay," I notice that he isn't filling another bowl with food, so I ask, "Is it just the two of us?"

"Yeah, Audrine is working the bakery downstairs tonight," Silas informs me as he fills two glasses of water and places them at the table as well. As I walk closer to the set table, the food in the bowls looks like a brothy chicken stew full of vegetables. "Is that okay?"

"Sure," I sit down at the table and place my purse on the seat beside me. Even though I say that it's okay, when I realize that it's just going to be the two of us, I start getting clammy. This feels very much like a date now, even though I know that's not the case.

"This is called coq au vin," he says as he sits across from me at the table. "Chicken in wine. And you look nice, by the way."

The compliment takes me by surprise; I wasn't expecting it, and he says it with such a calm voice, like it was just a quick note at the end of him talking about the chicken.

"Thank you," I say after a much too long pause.

"Have you read any of the letters that you brought over?" Silas asks me as we start digging into this delicious-smelling stew.

"I just read a few. It felt kind of wrong to read something that wasn't meant for me like that," I answer him, and then I take my first bite of chicken. It's a magical combination of herbs, wine, and perfectly cooked chicken. "Why do you ask?"

"I'm just really curious," he shrugs. "She's been reading them nonstop since yesterday, except when she has to go to work. I never thought of her as much of a romantic-- she only got married because she got pregnant, and that didn't last very long. I don't think that I've ever seen her in love with anybody like that."

"I didn't think my grandpa was a romantic either," I admit to him. "He loved my grandma while they were married, and they were always kind to each other, but they always kind of seemed like they were just friends to me. And they divorced too. After that, he spent most of his time working and then after he retired, spent all of his time helping out with me and my brother."

"Why didn't your brother come along on this trip with you? Or your parents?" Silas asks me curiously.

"My grandpa didn't want me to tell anybody that he loved Audrine as much as he had. And that he was still thinking about her until the day he died. I think he was worried about hurting my mom more than anything. I'm not sure why he chose me out of all of his kids and grandkids, maybe because he knew that I'd follow through with it."

"So what does your mom think that you're doing here?" he continues to ask questions, which I don't mind because it gives us something to talk about while we eat.

"I told her that my grandpa spent some time here when he was younger, and I just wanted to come see what it was like for him," I say, and then take another bite of the chicken. I wonder if there's a recipe that he followed, or if this is just some great intuition. "So some of the truth, just not all of it."

"What was he like?" Silas asks me. "Your grandpa, I mean."

"He was very kind, and selfless. I always felt like he understood me more than anybody else in my family. My parents are always striving for better, for themselves and for me and my brother. Better grades, better awards, whatever I accomplish, there's always something better. But my Grandpa Charlie was always just happy for me and didn't care about what could be better. Everybody loved him, he was the best," I realize that I'm starting to get too emotional now and if I keep talking about how great he was, I might start crying and make things weird. I take a sip of my water so that I'll stop talking.

"We kept looking through the storage upstairs yesterday, and we actually found an old diary from the same summer that Charlie was here. I was only allowed to read some of it, but mamé talked about him like he was her sun."

"I wish he would have told me more about their time together before he passed," I say between bites of food. "This all feels so surreal being here, I just wish he could be here too."

"Yeah, it would have been nice for them to meet again after all of this time," he agrees with me. "Especially since they were both single."

I try to eat dinner quickly so that we can get upstairs, because I'm so curious about what other things I might find up there today. Maybe more paintings, or letters, I'm not really sure what to expect really.

"I found these yesterday too," Silas tells me as we walk into the room full of storage. He picks up a stack of photos off of one of the shelves and hands them to me. I barely recognize the man in the old black and white photo that I'm holding. Wearing plaid pants and a polo shirt, my grandpa is standing in front of a house. It's hard to recognize him at first, but when I look closer, I know that those are his big round eyes. Even though he's fifty-seven years younger, I can still recognize those eyes, his wide chin, and pointed nose. He has longer, darker hair in the picture whereas I've always seen him with a balding head of gray hair.

"You look like him," Silas says as I'm staring down at the picture. I definitely have his eyes, and maybe his nose. I can definitely see the resemblance. Especially since he's about my age in this picture too.

The next photo in the stack is one of Audrine, I assume. She's very pretty in her shift dress, block heels, and knee high socks. Her hair had tons of volume with a flip at the end and her smile was glowing.

"She's so beautiful. And they look so happy."

"Yeah, they do," he agrees with me.

"I keep thinking about how sad it was that they never really got to be together, but I don't think most people find a love that is as passionate as what theirs seemed to be. I don't know, maybe they were lucky to even get those few months."

"Or maybe it was so passionate because a few months isn't long enough to get out of the honeymoon phase, and it didn't have enough time to fall apart or grow into an actual relationship."

"That's more pessimistic than my idea," I say with a small laugh as I continue to look through the pictures. There are some of them together, but mostly it's just one or the other. I don't want to handle the pictures too much because they feel so fragile already, so I take pictures of them with my phone and then place them back on the shelf.

"Yeah," he agrees. "But also probably more realistic. I mean, you know how it is. Those first months of a relationship are always seen through rose colored glasses."

"Sure," I hesitantly agree with him, even though I don't really know. I've never been in a relationship that lasted for more than four months. "I still think what they had was special though."

"Care to elaborate?"

"I mean, I dated a guy for a few months and I feel like we were head over heels for each other, but once it ended, I was surely devastated, but I didn't spend years writing letters to him and I don't think about him anymore, so I know that I definitely won't be thinking about him on my deathbed."

"Why did it end?" Silas asks me as he's moving boxes around on the other side of the room. I start doing the same thing, moving boxes around to get to the bottom of the stacks thinking that anything from my grandpa will be near the back of the junk.

"My mom didn't like him," I answer him, facing the wall that I'm trying to clear. I glance through each box that I move, but if the items look newer than the 60s, I move on. I don't want to pry too much on this family that I don't really know.

"So?" he questions me. "Is that the only reason?"

"Yes," I answer slowly. I did really like the guy that I was dating last year, but when I brought him home and my mom said that she didn't like him, I just ended it. She made it make sense by saying that he didn't have big dreams (he wanted to own his own car repair shop) and that our future just didn't make sense together. Too afraid of disappointing my mother, it didn't take very much convincing to get me to end it.

"Well, maybe if you weren't writing him handwritten letters after it ended, it just wasn't meant to be," he responds, and I can't tell if he's joking or not. I laugh just in case.

"I think that if it had felt like the real deal, I would have fought for it more," I say as I'm opening a box of clothes. Uninterested, I close it again and move to the next one.

"How do you know if it's real or not if you don't fight for it?" Silas questions me.

I have no idea how to answer him, and thankfully I don't have to. In the corner of the room wedged between the wall and an old nightstand, I find an old wooden box. When I open it up, I see an old pile of oil paint tubes. "I found something," I announce as I move to the center of the room to show Silas what I found.

The old tubes are covered in paint and they're all half used and clearly very dated.

"Oh cool. I wonder if they're still usable."

"Probably not," I pick up one of the tubes and squeeze it around to investigate the quality. "It feels kind of clumpy. I kind of want to try to paint with them though."

"You paint too?"

"Sometimes," I shrug, still shuffling through the old paints. "My parents don't like it when I spend too much time painting, but I try to squeeze some time in for it. It was a hobby that my grandpa shared with me and I really got into it."

"Do you ever do anything without your parents' permission?" Silas asks me with a short laugh.

"No, not really," I admit to him. "The most defiant thing I've ever done is go on this trip. And even for this, I didn't book the flight until I had their permission. But it took a lot of convincing."

"Wow, you had to convince them?" he sounds very shocked, but I can tell that he's just teasing me. "What a rebel."

"Okay, maybe I'm lame for listening to my parents so much, but it's just because I trust that they have my best interest in mind," I try to explain myself, even though I know that I sound so sheltered and goody two-shoes.

"It's not lame," Silas assures me.

"It is lame," I insist with a laugh. "But I don't know, it just works for me. Listening to my parents and always trying to make them proud, it's worked for me I think. It got me into Brown."

"Wow, impressive," he nods his head and then looks up at me. Once his bright blue eyes meet my gaze, I have to look away. I shut the box of paints, sit them on the shelf near the pictures and start going back to digging through the clutter. "Is that what you want?"

"What?"

"Brown," he elaborates. "You chose that school?"

"Well..." I trail off as I try to find a way to word it to make it seem like I did choose to go to Brown, when in reality it was my mom who wanted me to go to Brown because they have a good Economics program, and it's where both of my parents went (and where they met). "It's a good school," is the best that I can come up with.

"Yeah, it is," Silas agrees with me. "It must have been a lot of work to get accepted there."

"It was," I confirm. Even though I'm going to the school that my parents want me to go to, and studying what they want me to study, it doesn't mean that I am just living by their rules. Brown really is a good school, and Economics can be interesting. So I really don't mind following through with what my parents want for me, because I truly do believe that it's what's best. I don't really want to explain all of this to Silas though, because I don't know him very well and I'm not sure if he'd understand.

"Well, I don't mean to sound judgemental. I'm probably just jealous, honestly. I wanted to go to culinary school, but had to stay here to help with the restaurant," he explains to me. "I think I probably learned more here than I would have in a classroom though, so I guess it worked out."

I don't really know what I should say to that or even what he's trying to say, so I'm glad that I don't have to respond with anything. Audrine walks into the room to break up the silence.

"Oh good, you're here," She says with a smile as she walks in, holding a tray of madeleines. "I brought you two a snack. Have you found anything?"

"Thank you, mamé, they look great," Silas answers her. "We found some paints that look like they might have been Charlie's."

I show her the wooden box that I'd dug out earlier. She places the tray down before getting closer to inspect it. "I gave him this box to keep his paints in, because he didn't have anything else to hold them in. I used it for jewelry and knick knacks before, but he was using this paper bag to carry around his paints, and it was falling apart. I thought that he had taken this with him when he left."

"I found it behind some boxes over there," I motion toward the corner of the room that I'd been searching through.

"Well, I have to get back down there," she says, placing the box back on the shelf. "Let me know if you guys find anything else, I'm curious about what might be up here."

"Dinner is on the stove," Silas tells her.

She pats his shoulder and says, "Merci, mon loulou."

Leaving the tray of madeleines, Audrine disappears out of the room to return to the restaurant downstairs. When she's gone, I ask Silas, "What's that mean?"

"Thank you," He answers me as he takes one of the small shell-shaped cakes from the tray.

"I know what merci means," I inform him with a small laugh. "But mon loulou, what's that?"

"Nothing," he says quickly.

"I feel like if I'm going to be staying for a while, I should probably get better at speaking French," I say to him. The madeleines are absolutely delicious, very spongy, and I hope that he doesn't want very many of these, because I feel like I might start inhaling them soon. I'll have to remember to compliment Audrine on how amazing they are the next time that I see her.

"That's not a common word that you need to know," Silas assures me. "How much French do you know so far?"

I drop the subject for now, but I write a mental post-it to Google Translate that later. "Just basics like greetings and tourist-y questions like 'where is the bathroom?'. I can definitely speak more than I can listen and understand what other people are saying."

"Okay, let's hear it," he challenges me.

I turn to look at him with half of a madeleine in my mouth. "Hear what?"

"Your French," Silas elaborates, looking pretty amused. I don't want to embarrass myself by sounding like such an idiot trying to speak a language that he is fluent in, but his smile is so bright and I have the urge to want to impress him. Even though my French is terrible, maybe just my bravery in attempting it will impress him enough.

"Um, okay," I say slowly, knowing that I just can't say no to him, even if I wanted to. He's very convincing. I try to think out a coherent sentence in my head, piecing together the words and shaping them with the correct grammar. "Je sais dire 'va te faire foutre'."

Silas laughs, so I hope that I got it right. That, or he's laughing at how incoherent it was. I was trying to say 'I know how to say go fuck yourself' and I think it was correct, but even if I got the words right, my pronounciations were probably horrible.

"Did Duolingo teach you that?" he asks me. I feel relieved that he understood it, and that it also made him laugh.

"I learned that in high school, actually," I gloat. My French teacher in high school used to teach us how to cuss in French as rewards for the class getting a good grade on quizzes, and we just thought it was the funniest thing. "It's one of the things that I remember most from French class, honestly."

"Not very useful in everyday conversation, unless you want to get into a lot of fights."

"I know more," I insist, finally finishing the rest of the madeleine that I've been eating. I then return to where I found the box of paints to see if there was anything else there from my grandpa. Looking away from Silas, I try to be more bold in what I try to say this time now that I don't have to face him if I get it wrong. "Je peux dire que vous avez de yeux jolis."

I don't know what comes over me that makes me say it, but as I'm trying to think of things to say in French, it's the only sentence that I could put together in my head. 'I can say that you have pretty eyes' is what I think that I said, and it's definitely more bold than anything that I've ever said in any language. I hope he doesn't think that I'm trying to flirt with him, or make him uncomfortable at all. I should have chosen literally any other sentence.

"Not quite," Silas responds from behind me. "Beauty adjectives go before the noun."

"Well, I'm getting there," I mumble as my face starts to heat.

"Yeah, with charm like that, you'll be just fine here," he says with a light chuckle, and then he shoves an entire madeleine into his mouth before turning back to the clutter to start sorting through it again. 

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This story is available on Radish with daily updates! When you download the app, search my username (writerbug44) and it'll show up. I appreciate all of your support both here and on Radish! <3