Page 236 of Across His Line

She looks up at me. Her eyebrows come together. I shake my head of hair, splashing her with the water. She closes her eyes, pushes against me and wails, turning away from me. I lie down next to her on my side, facing her. She laughs and wipes the water off her face, then she looks at me.

She turns on her side and puts her face against my chest with her hand flat on my back and rubs slowly up and down, between my shoulder blades.

I put my arm over her and leave it there.

“Thank you,” she says into my chest. “For Kylie.”

I murmur, “You said.”

“I’m saying it again.”

She picks up my hand off her hip. She lays it flat on the comforter between us and puts her fingers between mine, one at a time.

“I liked seeing you with them,” she says. “Nash and Koda. Today.”

“Yeah?”

“You laughed on the ice a lot.” She looks at my hand instead of my face. “I’ve never seen you laugh like that.” She looks up at me. “Ever.”

I don’t know what to say to that, so I put my mouth on the top of her head where the braid starts and leave it there.

She falls asleep with my hand still in hers. Ten minutes, maybe. Her breathing slowing down against my shirt. Her fingers going loose between mine and not letting go.

I lie awake and watch her for a while.

I don’t know when this happened.

Apparently a lot of shit happens before I notice it.

33

Apparently I Sit Here Now

Tessa

Rafe cheats at Spoons.

I’m sitting right next to him at the long dining-room table, close enough that our elbows keep knocking, and I watch his hands the entire round. He just passes his cards along to me, flat and bored, one after the other, like he doesn’t care, like he’s barely paying attention.

And then, out of nowhere, there’s a spoon in his hand.

I didn’t see him reach. Nobody did. There are six spoons in the middle of the table and seven of us, and one second there’s six and the next second there’s five and he’s sitting back in his chair with a spoon held up between two fingers and that look on his face, the flat one, that means he’s laughing on the inside.

The whole table explodes.

Koda dives across the table so hard his chair goes over backward. Kylie screams and gets one. Nash gets one off the corner and nearly takes Mrs. Waleska’s hand off doing it. Mrs. Waleska, who is playing because she said it was Christmas and she was not going to be left out of her own dining room, gets one too, and yells “Ha,” right in Nash’s face. I get one. I don’t know how. I just grab.

Koda ends up on the floor in the tipped-over chair with nothing.

“He cheated,” Koda says from the rug. “Waleska had it the whole time. He was sitting on it.”

“I wasn’t sitting on anything.”

“You were holding it like you do with the fucking puck.”

Nash snorts.

Kylie and I glance at each other.