Chapter Twenty-Three #2
Memphis appears from nowhere and climbs onto the couch between us with the calm certainty of a dog who has decided this is his spot and dares anyone to argue with him.
Moving sideways to make room, Sophia tucks her feet up beneath her on her end.
Memphis settles in the middle like a large furry mediator and looks at the screen with great seriousness.
The pizza arrives twenty minutes later, and we eat it straight from the box on the coffee table, the way nobody who has a dining room table ever admits to eating pizza, and it is easy. Completely and unexpectedly easy, the way things are between us now, the way the house has started to feel.
“Crazy, Stupid, Love,” Sophia says, remote in her hand.
Looking at her.
“No.”
“You said something I’d actually watch.”
“Something we’d both actually watch.”
“I’m watching it,” she says pleasantly, and presses play before anything else can be said.
I briefly look at the ceiling, then at the screen.
Twenty minutes in, and comments are being made about the unrealistic nature of romantic comedies in general and this one specifically. Sophia is ignoring all of them with the practiced ease of someone who has decided the commentary is simply ambient noise.
Thirty minutes in, and the comments have stopped.
Forty minutes in, Ryan Gosling takes off his shirt, and Sophia makes a small, involuntary sound of appreciation that she clearly hadn’t intended to make out loud.
Memphis looks up from the couch.
“He’s got decent abs,” Sophia says, as if this is a perfectly normal observation to make.
“Decent.”
She glances over. “For a movie star.”
“Right.”
A beat, then I reach down, grab the hem of my T-shirt, lift it in one quick movement, completely straight-faced, and display what is underneath with the calm confidence of a man who has absolutely nothing to be modest about in this department.
“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 soft light 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.
I’m sorry, I think into the quiet. To whom, I’m not entirely sure.
Closing her door quietly, I return to the living room.
Sitting on the edge of the couch in the dark where she’d been sleeping, both hands pressed against my knees, I look at the blank television screen and try to put back whatever just shifted.
But I can’t.
Memphis puts his head in my lap, my hand rests on him, and we sit there in the quiet of the house for a long time.
Not now, thinking into the dark. There’s Mexico. There’s the mission. There’s Quill’s one week. Everything else waits.
***
In the morning, she makes breakfast.
Coming back from feeding Memphis, I find Sophia at the stove in her dressing gown, hair still loose from sleep, moving around the kitchen with the ease of someone who has stopped counting the days she’s been here and started just being here instead.
Coffee is already poured, and the mug is sitting exactly where it always does.
She slides the plate across the island when sitting down, eggs the way I like them, which she’d figured out without being told somewhere around the second week, and goes back to her own without making anything of it.
“Sleep well?”
She looks up. “I don’t remember falling asleep, actually.”
“You were out before the credits.”
She smiles, slightly embarrassed, slightly not. “The couch is comfortable.”
Her eyes drop to the plate.
“Yeah.”
Not telling her she hadn’t woken up on the couch.
Picking up the fork, I eat the eggs, drink the coffee, and listen to Sophia move around the kitchen in the morning quiet and letting myself have it, the flowers on the island, the painting on the wall, the coffee already waiting, this woman in her dressing gown making breakfast on a Sunday morning like it is simply what happens here now.
Not now.
There’s Mexico. There’s the mission. There’s Quill’s one week. Everything else can wait.
For now, I eat the eggs and say nothing at all.