Then, she’s up, walking to the bathroom like it’s nothing. I lay on the air mattress by myself, brain still trying to put everything together to figure out how all this happened.
When Wren comes back, she presses a kiss to my temple, then falls into the bed, sighing and cuddling into her pillow before promptly falling asleep.
***
Luckily, I’m able to use my normal nitpicking to my advantage.
When Mom finds me in the laundry room the next morning, I claim the blankets smelled a little stale, and I thought I’d wash them. Not something out of character for me.
When I return to the basement, Wren is still fast asleep, her face impossibly peaceful, her hair ahugerats’ nest around her head. Like she’s been spinning around all night—which I know, from the number of times that she shifted against me—that she was.
I’ve shared a bed with quite a few people, but nobody as clingy as Wren. When I rolled over, she wasted no time in forming her body to mine, making me her little spoon.
Now, I fight with myself about the best way to wake her up. After what happened last night—the boundaries we crossed—I’m not sure where we stand. Or where to go from this.
Why didn’t we include a rule in our agreement that we wouldn’t sleep together?
Maybe because including the rule would have been admitting that we wanted to.
Wren saves me by opening her eyes on her own, one at a time, squinting at me even though it’s not that bright in here.
“Well,” she croaks, stretching out, her shirt riding up and showing a strip of skin on her stomach. “Good morning.”
I can’t stop staring at her. What the hell is wrong with me?
“Good morning,” I say, trying to keep my voice as low as possible. Clearing my throat, I ask, “Should we—well, we should probably talk about last night—?”
Wren pauses in her stretch, her arms held distractingly over her head. I can see her nipples pressing against her shirt.
“What about it?”
How can she be so nonchalant?
“I mean, it probably shouldn’t happen again, right?”
She shrugs, starts to try and run her hands through her hair. It’s definitely not going to work—she needs a brush at the very least. Some detangling solution. Without meaning to, I think about countless mornings of Sloane crying, Mom trying to brush through her knotted hair.
And I think Wren should braid it before going to sleep. It would protect it from damage, keep it from getting so messy.
“Okay,” she says, shrugging again and meeting my eyes, like this is painfully funny and unimportant to her. “So we won’t do it again, if you don’t want to.”
I grit my teeth. Iverymuch want to—in fact, it’s the only thing I’ve been able to think about since the moment I woke up spooning her, rock solid against her back. Fucking Wren again was the only thing on my mind while I snuck into the laundry room to start a load. While I stood there, staring at the washing machine. Even while I had a cup of gingerbread coffee with my Mom, chatting about the weather and the snow and Dad’s health.
Wren has been in the back of my mind all morning, and here she is, rolling, stretching and exposing the small of her back like it’s not making the whole situation worse.
Sloane appears in the doorway to the movie room, still in her Christmas pajamas, which stretch ridiculously over her belly. Her eyes dart back and forth between Wren and I as if she looks hard enough, she’ll be able to hear whatever we were talking about before she showed up.
Wren raises her hand, waves to Sloane, and says a sleepy good morning.
Sloane returns it, then, “Come on. Time for presents.”
“Presents?” Wren asks, turning to me when Sloane is gone. “I thought we did presents yesterday?”
“Those were presents between us,” I say, watching her face as she takes in this information. “Thisis presents from Santa.”
“Oh.” She nods and worries the edge of the blanket. “Right.”
I can tell this is a lot for her. That my family’s Christmas is different from what she’s ever done before. But when we go upstairs and Wren finds a stocking with her name written over the front, I think that at least part of the look on her face might not be just a performance.
