“Will you tell me about her?” Nicole asked softly as her hand traced around my ear.
I looked up at her, staring into her eyes and searching for something though I didn’t know what. No one ever asked me about my mom, which was probably because almost everyone in the town had known her. I never talked to anyone about her before, and I realized I actually wanted to tell Nicole about her.
“She played the piano,” I told her. I tucked my head back into the pillow. “And she wrote plays. She wrote musicals and even wrote the music to go with them. None of them were really popular or anything, but lots of different theatre groups performed them. Everyone always liked what she wrote.”
“I’d like to see some of them,” Nicole said. I looked back up at her.
“You would?”
“Yes, I would.” She smiled a little, but it didn’t last.
My mind swirled around and tried to come to terms with…well, with everything. I was having a really hard time just not staring at her. I was trying not to think too much about how I was in her bedroom, lying on her bed with her hand touching me, and how her dad apparently was gone until morning.
“She really liked plays, then?”
“Yeah.”
“Is that why you can quote Shakespeare?”
I nodded.
“She loved Shakespeare,” I said quietly. “She’d read it to me all the time. When I was little, we would act some of it out with the other kids in the neighborhood.”
“That sounds like fun.”
“It was.” I found myself smiling a little as I remembered a kid from down the street. I couldn’t remember his name, but he was so funny when he started singing the Hamlet lines he had heard on an old episode of Gilligan’s Island.
My eyes closed again as her hand trailed lines through my hair. Her fingers were warm, and I could feel exactly where they touched, even when she didn’t take the same path every time. I opened my eyes again and found her looking down at me. I didn’t understand her expression, and I wondered if she was regretting her decision to let me be here with her.
“I can really stay?” I asked for clarification and also to give her an out if she wanted it. I didn’t want her to want it. I didn’t want to leave.
“You can stay,” she said with a nod, “on one condition.”
“What’s that?” I asked, as if I wouldn’t agree to absolutely anything she requested. That knowledge didn’t stop me from being a little worried about what she wanted though.
“You have to eat something,” she said with a completely serious expression. “I have the feeling you haven’t eaten all day.”
I smiled a little and nodded.
“I made Mexican,” she said, and I watched her cheeks turn a little pink, and she bit down on her lip again. “Do you like enchiladas?”
I laughed through my nose, trying to hold it in, but it wasn’t quite working.
“Yeah,” I said, “I do.”
“Mexican rice and beans?”
“Definitely.” As if I needed an exclamation point, my stomach rumbled in appreciation of the whole idea. More amazing than the return of my appetite on this day was the realization that I was also strangely relaxed in her presence.
Shakespeare’s words flooded my head: “Her voice was ever soft, gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman.” Somehow, Nicole had managed to calm my mind.
Now how did she do that?
CHAPTER 7
PENALTY
Damn.