Sandcastle Beach (Matchmaker Bay #3) - Jenny Holiday Page 0,29
swore she hadn’t so much as twitched an eyelid for ten minutes.
But now her knee was bouncing up and down like she was on speed. His first impulse was to put his hand on it. To use the weight of his body to steady hers.
But that wasn’t right.
So instead he pointed to the bouncing knee and said, “A little hyper, are we?”
“Oh, shut up.” She kept jiggling, probably just to irritate him.
Law was an only child. He sometimes wondered if sitting watching soccer in silence with Maya while they suspended their hostilities was what having a sibling would be like. A little sister. Two people who annoyed each other but were frequently in proximity and had learned to make the best of it.
She took out the hair thing that had been holding up her topknot. She did that when she was here. He tried not to stare, but seeing her with her hair down was so novel. He was always amazed at how such a seemingly sturdy construction was held in place by a single ring of elastic. She ran her fingers through her hair and massaged her neck, like it hurt, and let her head fall back against the sofa. Her dark hair fanned out against the pale-blue upholstery and looked like a waterfall with the colors reversed, raven water against blue rock.
Yeah, this was not the way he would think about his sister.
But whatever. He was overanalyzing this.
She stopped jiggling, and he stopped comparing her hair to the wonders of nature. They settled into silence, the default mode for truces.
He could tell when she fell asleep, about an hour later. She’d left her head lolled back on the sofa while she watched, as if it were too heavy to keep holding up, but she’d angled it sideways so she could see the TV. Nothing about her body position changed as she fell asleep, but her breathing became audible and gradually slowed.
He took the opportunity to study her face. He’d thought of it, earlier, as “less sparkly” than usual, but he could see now, now that he had at-peace mode for contrast, that she’d been unsettled before, deeply unsettled.
Should he let her sleep? She was obviously stressed about something.
No. He was getting soft. The match was over, so there was no reason for her to stick around.
He reached his hand out, intending to…What? Intending to what?
If they rarely spoke during truces, they never touched.
Forget truces, they never touched at all. They came close sometimes, usually when she was leaning forward at the bar and getting in his face about something. But it never actually happened. Not even the incidental contact he had with other customers. He always set Maya’s glass on the bar before pouring wine into it, and she always left cash for her bill lying on the bar.
The only times he ever touched Maya were when they accidentally fell asleep in front of soccer. It didn’t happen often, but occasionally, if they were having a truce in the wee hours, after bar closing, the soft couch and the lulling, white-noise effect of the TV would conk them out. When that happened, sometimes he’d wake up with her head on his shoulder, or her legs on his lap. In that case, shifting out from under her was enough to wake her. Or he’d awaken to her violently shoving him into consciousness.
So all right, maybe it was okay to touch her gently to wake her. There was precedent. It was kinder than her shoving method, anyway. Although “kind” wasn’t usually an approach he felt the need to employ when it came to Maya, people were defenseless when they were asleep. Sparring with Maya would be jerky if she weren’t so capable of dishing it back to him.
Okay, then. He was going to do it. His first premeditated touch.
But how? A hand on the cheek?
No. That was weird.
Her hair. He could sort of stroke her head. His hand floated out like it had its own agenda, but he put the brakes on. No. No stroking. Pat her head? He wouldn’t mind touching her hair, actually. It was so rarely down. Other than in her mermaid queen persona, he’d never seen it down except here in his apartment. It was probably soft. But if he patted, as opposed to stroked, would he even be able to tell it was soft?
What was wrong with him? He wasn’t going to stroke her hair. God.