Page 50 of Fractured Ice

"His preemptive face."

"The one he gets right before something goes wrong for someone else." She glances at Knox. "Knox should probably look up."

I look at Blake. Blake is, in fact, watching Knox with the specific stillness of someone running calculations. Knox is completely unaware of this.

"He's fine," I say again, with slightly less confidence.

She looks at me. "You grew up next door to him."

"And I'm telling you he's fine."

"You're telling me that because you don't want to warn Knox and ruin whatever's about to happen."

She's not wrong. I say nothing. Knox loses the next hand in a way that seems to surprise everyone except Blake, and Sienna sits back with the expression of someone who has been reading Blake Walker since approximately third grade and has never once been wrong about what it meant.

She laughs, a real one, and it goes right through me the way her real laughs always do. I watch her face for too long before I make myself look somewhere else because I'm a functioning adult who doesn't stare. At least I am trying to be that functioning adult who doesn't stare. I obviously am not successful.

Knox, who has apparently recovered from the poker situation, starts telling a story about the pre-season that I've heard before but am willing to hear again because Sienna hasn't heard it. It involves Knox, a fire extinguisher, and a disagreement with a hotel vending machine that goes significantly worse than anyone's initial assessment suggested it would. He's telling it with complete sincerity, including the part where he's fully in the wrong, and Sienna's expression progresses through amusement to disbelief to genuine shock before Knox gets to the part where the vending machine wins.

She loses it.

It comes out of her all at once, this full laugh, and she's laughing so hard she has to grab my arm to keep herself upright. The contact is warm and completely incidental and she doesn't seem to notice she's doing it. Looking at her face, at the way her watery eyes go when she's really laughing, I'm thinking I would do anything to keep her laughing like that.

Knox, clearly pleased with himself, tips an imaginary hat.

"Did you pay for the damage?" Sienna asks, when she can talk.

"I had a conversation with management."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the answer I'm giving you."

She wipes her eyes. "You're insane."

"I'm innovative," Knox says. "There's a difference."

She shakes her head, still smiling, and turns back to the card table, and I'm watching the way she looks when she's relaxed, when she's stopped managing herself around me, when she's just here. It's the version I've been trying to get to for weeks. The one that exists when she's not waiting for me to do something stupid.

God, she's beautiful. It's not even a question of taste, it's just a fact, the kind that sits in the back of my brain at a constant low volume regardless of what else is happening. Right now, with her laughing and relaxed, her hair down and her hand still warm on my arm, the volume's turned up considerably. I'm doing everything I can to act like a person who isn't completely in over his head.

We end up at the back of the room eventually, sitting on someone’s bed, just the two of us, while a video game dispute breaks out across the room that requires the undivided attention of everyone else. It's loud enough to give us the nearest thing to privacy the room is going to offer.

"Your eighth grade biology teacher," I say, picking up a thread we'd started earlier. "Was it Hartwell or Finch?"

"Hartwell. Finch was math. Hartwell was the one who mispronounced 'organism' once and never recovered from it."

"I had Finch for math. He had a coffee mug that said 'mathamagician' on it and thought it was funny."

"It's a little funny."

"It's certainly not funny."

"You're too harsh." She steals some chips from the bag between us. "Finch was fine. You were probably a nightmare in that class."

"I was a delight in every class."

"You were a disaster in every class." She says it without heat, the way she says things when she's settled, and it's different from how she says things when she's braced. Everything's lighter. "You talked too much and you sat in the back and you made the other boys laugh at the wrong times."