“It’s almost noon,” Sienna says, standing over me.
My eyes crack open a little more, slowly, until they adjust to the light. She’s wearing the same white shirt and pink shorts she changed into yesterday, and the same beautiful smile and splash of freckles that I can’t get enough of. Girls with freckles drive me crazy, but this girl, with freckles like a work of rare art, makes me mental.
I rub my eyes hard with the palms of my hands, my fingers curled rigidly into claws. “Noon?” I’m still not registering, but it’s slowly coming to me.
“Yeah, I’ve been up since nine.”
Awareness floods into me like a bolt of lightning. “Nine? Why didn’t you wake me up earlier?” I start to sit upright, but a pain shoots through my lower back and I stay put for a second longer.
I can’t believe I slept this long, especially on this piece-of-shit sofa. And I don’t recall waking up once in the middle of the night even to take a piss, much less to toss and turn, because a good night’s sleep has been alien to me for a long time.
“You looked so comfortable,” she says. I don’t know how she came to that conclusion, but I go along with it. “But I figured if I didn’t go ahead and wake you up now, you’d sleep all day. Not to mention,” she goes on with a growing trace of sass, “you didn’t make my complimentary breakfast and I’m going to have to take one star off when I rate this … establishment.” She sits on the edge of the coffee table, facing me.
Shit! I can’t believe I didn’t get up to make her breakfast. Feeling like a loser, I shoot straight up into a sitting position and drop my legs over the side of the sofa. Grimacing, I reach behind with both hands and knead my lower back with my fingertips, but now the ache has spread upward all the way to my shoulders.
“Hey, I never said what time breakfast was around here,” I counter with a crooked smile, and she narrows her eyes playfully. “This is Hawaii, remember? We’re on an entirely different time scale than the Mainland, and I don’t just mean that we’re a few hours behind.”
She cocks a brow. “So what are you going to do about breakfast, then?”
I try to hide my smile when I catch her checking me out.
I run my hands over the top of my disheveled hair and then raise them out to my sides and stretch until I hear my joints and spine pop and crackle. More pain shoots through my back, and although it’s not unbearable and I know I could easily get off this couch and do front flips if I wanted to, I decide I’d rather play Sienna at her own game and use it to my advantage.
“Damn, my back is killing me,” I say, grimacing and reaching behind me for my muscles again. “Sleeping on this sofa is brutal.”
Sienna’s face falls under a little veil of guilt and pity.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says. “Is it bad?”
No.
“Yeah, it’s pretty bad.” I groan deeply for added affect. “I should’ve crashed in Seth’s room—would have if I’d known he wasn’t coming home last night.” Truthfully, I’m not sure of that; Seth might be in his room and I just slept so well through the night that I didn’t hear him when he came in, like I usually do.
“Now I feel bad,” she says and stands up from the coffee table, her long, lightly tanned legs stretching for miles underneath the thin fabric of her cotton shorts—damn, she is sexy; the things I want to do to her right now. “I’m not really hungry anyway, so don’t worry about breakfast. I was just messing with you.”
“Nah, don’t feel bad.” I wave it away like it’s nothing, while at the same time still kneading my back with the other hand. “I’m going to make you something … but you could help me out by walking on my back.”