Page 98 of Reckless

‘Don’t get carried away,’ I sign back to her.

She laughs, already shaking her head as I pull up the lesson module and angle the monitor so we can both see it. We settle into it, working through the first few signs before she reaches across the desk and quietly adjusts my hand again.

I glance down. ‘I’ve practiced that one.’

She grins at me, shaking her head. ‘Poorly.’

I furrow my brows at her. ‘I’ve practiced it!’

She reaches over and quietly adjusts my hand again, rotating my wrist a fraction before separating two fingers I’d let drift together. The movement is almost imperceptible.

The meaning isn’t.

‘Better,’ she signs.

‘I was close,’ I defend.

She gives me a look. The kind that makes it very clear she and Sage share more than DNA. ‘Close isn’t the same as right, Ghost.’

‘No,’ I admit. ‘It’s not.’

For a second, she watches me. Then she folds her hands on the desk and looks at me with an expression I’ve started to recognize over the last few weeks. It’s the same look Sage gets right before she asks a question she already knows is going to make my life considerably more complicated.

‘You know something’s wrong with her.’

I hold her gaze for a second before I answer. There is no version of this conversation where I pretend not to understand what she is asking, ‘Yes.’

‘She won’t tell you.’

‘No.’

‘Doesn’t that bother you?’

I let the pause sit there because the honest answer costs me something to give, even to a twenty-six-year-old kid who has known me for three weeks. ‘Yes.’

Piper leans back in the chair, arms crossing, and for a moment, she looks so much like Sage that it catches me somewhere under the ribs. Same tilt of the head when she decides how much to say, and the same stillness right before she says it anyway.

Piper signs slow enough that I catch every word without asking her to repeat it. ‘She’s been doing it her whole life. Puts herself between everyone she loves and anything hard. Even when she shouldn’t…’ she pauses, her hands settling in her lap for a beat before she continues, ‘I’ve been watching her do it since I was five.’

I wait. More is coming, and I have learned not to rush her when more is coming.

‘She never learned to let anyone stand beside her,’ Piper signs. ‘Only in front of her.’

Something settles heavily, familiar enough that I recognize it, unfamiliar enough that I leave it alone.

‘What does she need?’ I sign back.

Piper holds my gaze for another second before answering. I’ve learned that silence isn’t hesitation with her. It’s deliberation.

‘Someone who doesn’t let her keep doing it,’ she signs, plain and direct, no softness around the edges of it.

‘I’m working on it.’

‘Work faster.’

I huff out something close to a laugh, and Piper’s expression shifts in quiet satisfaction.

Somewhere along the way she’d started treating every genuine reaction she managed to get out of me like a small victory.