I give her a sidelong glance. “What?”
“When I was sixteen, I was at your place and your grandmother once asked about the violin and where I was planning to take it. I told her I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to say something too big in case it didn’t happen. She looked at me and said, ‘Say the big thing. Small thinking is a waste of a good brain.’”
I close my eyes briefly. “That’s her.”
“I wrote it down,” Piper says. “I still have it somewhere. I should find it.”
She sets Gerald aside and lies back on the far end of the mattress, looking at the ceiling with her hands folded on her stomach.
“Say the big thing,” she says quietly. “Small thinking is a waste of a good brain.” She turns her head and looks at me in the dark. “What’s your big thing? The thing you haven’t said yet.”
The question sits between us. I look at her. The dim light from the window edge finds the line of her face, her eyes, the steadiness with which she’s looking back at me.
There are a few answers. I pick the one I can say right now.
“Coming home. Building something in the right place this time. That took longer to say out loud than it should have.”
She holds my gaze. “It’s a good big thing.”
“What’s yours?”
She looks back at the ceiling. A long moment passes. “I think I’m still finding it.”
“That’s okay.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I think it might be.”
We don’t say anything after that. At some point, the breathing on her end slows. I know without looking that she’s fallen asleep, her feet still tucked up at the end of my bed, Gerald somewhere between us with his impartial expression.
I look at the ceiling, close my eyes, and think of my grandmother’s words.
Say the big thing.
Twenty-Four
I wake up feeling better than I have in forever.
I notice it before the light hits my eyes. It’s a bone-deep sense of rest I haven’t experienced in so long that my brain takes a moment to recognize the sensation.
This is what sleep is supposed to be. I’ve been missing this.
Then I register the warmth along my entire left side.
Something comfortable. Something soft. Something that smells like—
Wait. Why is there hair in my mouth?
I open my eyes to find Piper in my arms.
She’s fully out. Her face is pressed against my chest, one leg thrown across my body.
And I am rock fucking hard.
I’m experiencing an undeniable morning situation directly under the thigh she has draped across me.
My left arm is hooked around her shoulders. My right hand is resting on her bare thigh. Her sleep shorts have ridden up, so I can see the lower curve of her left ass cheek, and my brain is currently giving it an involuntary review that I need to shut down immediately.
I look at the ceiling.
