Page 70 of I'll Look for You, Everywhere
His knuckles still for a moment, soaking in my words. And then Theo’s face erupts in the most blinding smile I’ve ever seen. It’s so intense that I lose my breath, so taken by his utter beauty.
‘You’re warm,’ he muses, resuming his gentle strokes against my cheek.
‘It’s summer,’ I reply. ‘That tends to happen.’
‘No.’ His voice is gruff. Unsteady. ‘It’s this hair. There’s so much of it. Turn around for me.’ I look at him a second, confused before turning around so that I’m facing the rows of book spines. His chest brushes against my back with each breath.
‘When I saw you the first night I got back to Chivasso, I couldn’t see your face properly in the dark because of all this hair. Couldn’t see that cute freckle above your eyebrow.’ His breath fans the side of my face, making me shiver while his hands continue exploring, fingers combing through the strands before splitting it into three sections.
‘I’ve been meaning to get it cut.’ I feel him overlapping the pieces in a continuous pattern until he tugs on the end. Is he braiding my hair?
‘Your hair is beautiful.’ His voice is deliciously deep as he pulls on the braid, tilting my head until my neck is exposed to him. ‘But I’ve thought about doing this since the moment I saw you.’ He lowers his lips to my neck and kisses me lightly at first. I stifle a moan, lost in his scent of clean laundry and sunscreen.
‘Anika is in the store somewhere.’
‘Baby, she left almost the minute she walked in.’
‘What?’ He continues kissing down my neck and, when I go to bend my head forward, he pulls the braid again, kissing me until he reaches my shoulder.
‘The second you were far enough into the store, she walked right out.’
I laugh loudly and he covers my mouth with his large hand, muffling me. Then, without warning, he bites down on my shoulder.
‘Mhm,’ I moan into his hand, feeling the bite all the way down my spine. My body heats deliciously, and I squirm, needing more of him. Needing all of him. But he keeps himself at a distance so the only parts of us that touch are his hand on my mouth and my back pressed against his chest.
‘Magdalen, you should know better than to yell in a bookstore.’
‘That rule only applies to libraries.’ My voice is still slightly muted from his hand over my mouth, so I tentatively graze my teeth across his palm and bite down, mumbling into his skin. ‘You’re not the only one who can bite.’
‘Fuck,’ he growls and drops his hand to my throat, loosely holding it there, running that thumb over my neck again. ‘Do you have a hair tie?’ he asks. It takes a moment for my brain to remember he had braided my hair. That we weren’t just biting each other in a bookstore. My mind is whirling between the heat of his body and hearing him curse in my ear to now being asked to speak.
‘On my wrist,’ I swallow.
‘My good girl.’ He dips his finger underneath the hair tie on my wrist and slides it off.
As he ties the ends together, I tentatively ask, ‘So where did you learn to braid?’
Pausing a moment, he doesn’t say anything right away. When I’m about to tell him it’s okay, that I don’t need to know, he whispers, ‘Had to do Anika’s hair some mornings.’ I mull over his words as I feel him securing the band in place.
‘Why? Where was Cinzia?’ It feels like a dangerous question, but my curiosity gets the better of me. Desperate for anything he’ll give me.
‘She had a hard time for a while,’ he says softly, twirling his finger around the loose strands at the end of the braid. ‘Mornings were the hardest. Something about having hours of darkness to then facing the daylight, she couldn’t always do it right away.’
‘She was depressed?’ I press.
‘Probably still is. I don’t talk to her enough to know.’
‘Why don’t you? Talk to her, that is.’
He plants a soft kiss on my shoulder, then leans his forehead on me, letting the weight of his head push down on me. ‘Because I’m afraid she’ll tell me I’m right. I don’t like thinking about her sad.’
‘I understand,’ I say, and I do. I’ve missed a lot about the Sinclairs.
‘It was either learn how to braid or let Anika go to school with a bird’s nest growing in her hair.’
‘You’re a good brother.’ I say it without thinking.
He tenses behind me, dropping the braid. ‘I could be better.’
