“You think that’s abs. Look at mine.”
Sophia turns to look, and her mouth falls open. It’s not a little or a polite acknowledgment. It actually falls open with that completely unguarded, entirely involuntary response of someone whose brain has momentarily disconnected from their face, her eyes moving over what is in front of her with an expression she has absolutely no control over whatsoever.
The shirt comes back down. Eyes back on the screen.
“Just saying.”
Sophia closes her mouth, looks at the screen, and says nothing for approximately four seconds. Then she says, “That’s not fair,” almost to herself.
I’m not answering that, but I feel the smile pulling at the corner of my mouth and am very glad she is looking at the television.
Memphis shifts between us. We both look at him, and the moment folds itself away into something we can both pretend hasn’t happened.
The rest of the film passes in the charged silence of two people who are both very carefully not looking at each other.
Waking in the dark, the film has ended.
The screen has gone back to the home menu, that dim blue glow across the room, and Memphis has migrated to the floor, apparently satisfied that his services are no longer required.
And Sophia is asleep.
She’d slid sideways at some point and is curled into her end of the couch with one arm beneath her cheek, her hair loose and spread across the cushion behind her. She is completely and utterly out in the way someone who has been running on not enough sleep for too long and has finally let go of it entirely.
I look at her for a moment.
In the dim glow of the television menu, the careful composure of her waking face is completely gone, something younger and quieter in its place. She is breathtakingly beautiful. Her mouth is soft in sleep, the line of her jaw, the particular creaminess of her skin in the low light, her blonde hair loose around her face, one strand fallen across her cheek, rising and falling slightly with each breath.
I can see everything Tracker had seen.
Not just her beauty, though that was undeniable, but the whole of her. The woman who had walked into every room she’d been in and made people feel like family. Who made Jasmine laugh, Rhyder’s face soften, and Quill look at her like she was someone he hadn’t known he was missing. Who had sat at the fire pit and cried quietly into the dark, then wiped her face, and kept going. Who argued about where things went in the kitchen, bought flowers at a market, and put a painting on the wall because the room needed color.
Funny, smart, and stubborn as hell.
And somewhere underneath all that grief, warmth, genuinely and entirely so.
No wonder Tracker had loved her.
I sit there a moment longer than necessary before standing.
Then I stand and switch off the television.
Bending down, I slide one arm under her knees and the other behind her back, and then she is up, lighter than expected and warm.
She stirs as I lift her, a small sound, barely there, the semiconscious movement of someone pulled from a deep sleep. Then she turns her face toward my chest and settles into it with a soft exhale, her hand finding the front of my shirt and holding on loosely, completely unconscious, just a body finding warmth and moving toward it without knowing whose warmth it is.
Everything in me goes completely still. I stand there in the dark living room with Sophia asleep against my chest, her hand in my shirt, and her hair falling across my arm. I feel something shift that has been successfully not examined for a month and cannot, in this specific moment, with her this close, warm, and completely unguarded, continue to be avoided.
She is beautiful.
She is Tracker’s.
And I am in serious trouble.
I make myself move.
I walk down the hallway, carefully and quietly, Memphis padding behind with his nails clicking softly on the concrete. Her door is open, nudging it wider with a shoulder, crossing to the bed, and laying her down as carefully as she’d been picked up, her hand releasing my shirt as she is lowered, that small unconscious grip letting go.
I pull the covers up over her waist, walk to the doorway, and stand there for a moment with my eyes fixed on her. The softlight of the pool through the glass doors, the amber glow of it moving slowly across the ceiling above her, the desert quiet outside, her face is completely at peace in a way it never quite manages during the day, and it transfixes me.
