Page 168 of Penny For Your Thoughts
“I need to shower. Are you… Do you have plans?”
“On a Sunday evening?” I smirked. “No, Guns. Junk food and TV. Do you want to join me?”
“Yes.” It was in his nervous laugh and the way he wiped his hands on his pants.
He showered.
I sat on the couch but kept the TV off as I waited, tucking my feet under my ass. A comfortable calm enveloped me. I tugged Boone’s ring from beneath my shirt and polished my thumb over its surface.
“It was enough for me, D.” But it wasn’t enough for him anymore.
When the water cut out and the shower curtain rang on its rod, I tucked the ring away.
Diem landed on the couch beside me a few minutes later. “I thought you were watching your shows.”
“Changed my mind.”
“How come?”
“I want to hear about your trip.”
“Oh.”
It was in the way he turned his focus to a loose thread dangling from the hem of his T-shirt. It was in the tremors that made him fidget. It was in the way he wet his lips.
“Did you catch anything?” I prompted when he didn’t speak.
“No.”
“Did you have fun?”
He nodded.
Diem carried more emotions than his oversized frame could handle. Some people might say he felt too little, but the struggles he encountered in life were a result of feeling too much. Too much anger. Too much despair. Too much fear and heartache and love. For Diem, those emotions were hard to process and even harder to express.
I’d always been adept at reading his body language, the subtle things people missed. I heard all he said in the spaces between words, and I listened to his silences.
When he took my hand and looked at me the way he’d always looked at me, I knew. He didn’t have to say a word.
I waited because Diem needed patience.
He wet his lips but remained silent.
He took in a great lungful of air but expelled it again. Silent.
He stroked his thumb over mine. Silent.
He trembled.
“Should I just say yes and put you out of your misery?”
He chuckled, knowingly. “Shut up, Tallus. Stop reading my mind. Let me do it.”
“Okay, D. I’ll wait for as long as you need me to.”
And the night fell.
And the moon rose.
