No amount of punching or adjusting would make that pillow any more comfortable.
“Only with you. Only because to really know and understand a person, that person has to want to be known and understood. Which you didn’t. Which you probably never will.” Boone sounded like he was shuffling around to get comfortable on the carpet. “So there.”
As I continued my stare-a-thon with the ceiling, a smile started. So there had always been Boone’s and my way of bringing up a grievance with each other, speaking our piece on the topic, and moving on. Our way of not getting hung up on the details when there were no shortage of much larger issues impeding our relationship. So there had been spoken between us so many times, it had been responsible for saving us from at least a few hundred potential fights.
A few hundred and one now.
“Hey, Boone?” I whispered a few minutes later. He hadn’t moved or so much as fired off one of his go-to grunts, but I knew he was still awake.
One of those grunts sounded.
“Thanks for having my back down there,” I said, rolling onto my side. The side facing him. “It’s nice to know there’s one person in this house who’s in my corner. Even if it’s the one I had to pay to stand there.”
“When it comes to you and your family, I’ll always have your back.” From the change in his voice, I knew he’d turned in my direction as well. “And that has nothing to do with our present business arrangement.”
I buried my head deeper into the pillow, finally feeling comfortable. “So there.”
His chuckle was the last thing I remembered hearing before falling asleep.
“Clara Belle? Wake up already.” A pattern of sharp knocks outside the door and just as sharp words roused me the next morning. “It’s almost eight o’ clock. Breakfast is on the table in ten. It would be nice if you’d grace us all with your appearance. That’s what Mom said.”
I groaned and threw a pillow over my face. A three-hour time change, five hours of sleep, and too much tequila were not the recipe for putting the “good” in good morning. Not to mention the snappy sister probably tapping her foot outside my door.
“Thanks for the wake-up call, Charlotte,” I replied, my voice muffled by the pillow. “We’ll be down in a few minutes.”
“Yippee,” she replied, though her tone was the opposite of what her word choice suggested.
Giving myself a few seconds to blink my eyes awake, I rolled onto my side. “Hey, Boone,” I said around a yawn. “Time to rise and shine.”
It took every scrap of strength and determination woven inside me to level my tone and expression and make it seem like I was as unfazed at waking up with him in my room as I could have been. Like rolling out of bed to an ex was a weekly sort of thing I scheduled into my calendar. When he didn’t say or grunt anything, I scooted farther onto the edge of the mattress to see if he was really asleep or just giving me a hard time by ignoring me.
My eyes about burst out of their sockets when I peeked down at him. Throwing myself back onto my mattress, I tried to flush the image from my head, but the damage had already been done. No amount of flushing would erase it.
“And you clearly already are rising and shining.”
A single-noted chuckle vibrated in his chest. “Quite clearly.” His voice was extra smoky, heavy with sleep.
I clamped my eyes closed and hummed Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in an effort to distract myself from what I’d just seen. “Could you clearly take care of that please? So I can get up and get ready for breakfast before my family decides to break through that door and drag me down?”
“Would you like to assist me in taking care of it, or would you like me to take matters into my own hands?”
I wasn’t looking at him, but I’d long ago memorized the smirk I knew was holding his expression captive right now. “Control yourself. For once.”
Another chuckle rattled in his chest. “Come on, Clara. Chill out. It’s perfectly normal.”
“No, that most certainly is not normal.” Why couldn’t I stop picturing it? Why did it seem the harder I tried, the more it pressed into my mind?
“You’re right. It’s above average.”
I snatched one of the pillows on my bed and fired it in his direction. “No, it’s abnormal.”
My eyes were still clamped closed, but I heard him moving around. “When I fell asleep last night, I don’t recall it being around a pillow and blanket.”
I cleared my throat. “When I woke up in the middle of the night, I had a weak moment, seeing you all curled up on the carpet and shivering. Sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“I’m used to sleeping in eighty-degree temperatures and eighty-percent humidity. This air conditioning should be renamed Arctic Blasting.”
I’d never been a big fan of the air conditioning either. I didn’t like feeling sealed up and shut in, trapped inside something that created an artificial environment.
“You’re welcome,” I said as Boone let out a loud yawn.