Page 38 of When Grumpy Met Sunshine
Even though neither was true. She was fine, she was calm, she was totally normal. And then for some unaccountable reason she felt him push his entire hand deep into her hair at the back, like right into it with all his fingers, and honestly the only thing she could do to stop herself from pushing right back into that absolutely glorious sensation was shoot her own hands out and grab something, hard.
She just wished the things she’d grabbed weren’t his fuckingthighs.
Because yep, that was exactly what she had done.
She had gotten ahold of him.
Really high up.
In the worst possible place.
And apparently she had done it so hard that he made a noise when she did.
A loud one that sounded half shocked and half annoyed and all something else, something familiar that she didn’t want to name or even think about, but she found herself doing so anyway.It was the kind of noise someone makes when you suddenly give them a blow job they weren’t expecting, her mind helpfully informed her.
Then she vowed from that moment on never to let her mind talk again.
You are a dipshit, she told it.
And she was right to do it, too.
Because he did not seem to be feeling the least bit sexy at all.
“Mabel, you appear to have latched on to me like a frightened cat,” he said after what felt like the longest thirty seconds of her life. Then even more horrifying: “So if you could tell me what it was I did that induced this state in you, I would be grateful. Because then I can stop doing it, and you can hopefully relax your fingers enough to detach them from my thighs.”
At which point she had two choices:
She could tell him he’d given her a sexy feeling.
Or she could say something that would not mortify her to the end of her days.
Though really, when you thought about it, that was no choice at all.
“I think you just snagged some hair,” she said.
Then held her breath.
Waiting to see if he would buy it.
Kind of sure that he wouldn’t.
Until he did.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” he said lightly. “Think I went in too deep.”
And now instead of feeling relieved, she had to think aboutthatphrasing for the next hour. While he carried on doing her hair in just as excruciating a way as he’d gone about it before. Only now she wasn’t allowed to grab anything. Because if she did, the thing she grabbed might be his thighs.
So she just had to resist the leaning, somehow.
She had to hold on as he brushed and stroked and fussed.
And finally, plaited. Because he did that too. Deftly, like he’d done it a thousand times before. Then she felt him fasten the braid back with pins she hadn’t even known he had, in a way that felt familiar even as he was doing it. Though it took until he was finished for her to uncover what he had done.
She put her hand to it, and there it was.
A circle at the back of her head.
Like Princess Leia inEmpire, she thought, and was so surprised and delighted that she turned without thinking. She looked at him, one hand on this thing he’d done, and with a question finally on her lips. After all the ones she’d fought back and decided against, finally there was one here that she could actually let out.
