In Your Dreams (Falling #4)(23)

“I love your songs, Murphy,” he says, pulling the headphones loose from his ears.

“That’s not my song, Laney. It’s yours,” she says.

“Noooo,” he says, shy and bashful. Her hand still on his cheek, she tilts his head to look at her and nods yes.

“Did you just make that up?” I ask.

She shrugs, and eventually her hands fall away from her brother. He pulls the headphones back on and goes back to bouncing on her bed.

“It’s part of a song I wrote for him when I was in high school. He had bad dreams,” she says, her eyes flitting to me briefly, then back to the carpet at her toes, which are circling in the threads, pushing them flat into shapes. I sit back down where I had before, on her floor, and try not to stare at her toes.

“What’s wrong with him?” I ask, scrunching one side of my face hearing how my question sounds. “I mean…I don’t mean that in the wrong way, I was just curious.”

“It’s okay,” she smiles quickly, her mouth falling into a soft line—a sweet one. Her lips are pink to match her toes. I swallow and look down at the carpet and begin pressing my hands into the fibers, to make shapes, too. I need to stay away from her lips and toes.

“Lane has Down’s,” she says, and I nod, because that’s what I had assumed. I just didn’t want to be wrong. “That’s why I stuck around the house after graduation. Well that, and I don’t really have a career path.”

I glance up at her just as she looks my direction with nervous laughter, and our eyes lock in a way that makes me feel it in my gut, for just a second. I look back down to the carpet.

“He’s only two years younger than me, but he’s still just a sophomore in high school, and there are just some things that are going to take him a while to get through,” she says, looking up at him with nothing but love in her eyes.

“He seems like a good brother,” I say.

“He is,” she breathes, relaxing her weight into where she sits and turning her eyes back toward me, more certain this time. “You have sisters?”

“Four,” I say, eyes wide. I roll up the right sleeve of the flannel I’m wearing and turn my arm over to the series of marks and scars on that arm. “They’re responsible for most of these,” I laugh, running a finger over the proof of stitches, glass cuts and a burn from the time my oldest sister, Christina, tried to convince me that letting hot oil dry on my skin proved I was a man. All it proves is that yeah, hot shit burns.

“Wow, they seem mean,” she says with one short laugh.

“Nah, I deserved almost everything I got,” I say, rolling my sleeve back down.

“Almost, huh?” she says, her head resting to the side.

“Yeah…almost,” I say, stopping short of unleashing the mountain of shit that is my family life and the disappointment duckling role that’s all mine.

Silence settles in quickly, and soon we’re both poking at the strands of her carpet again. I glance at her toes in my periphery, and it makes me laugh lightly that we’re both nervous now. I pat out the design I’ve been pressing into her floor and lean back on my hands, watching her brother live in bliss.

“What’s he listening to?” I ask.

“Oh, uhm…” she pulls her iPod into her hands and waves at him that it’s okay to keep listening. “Ratatat.”

She sets the device back down and smiles at me.

“You like Ratatat?” I ask, quirking a brow in disbelief. I was expecting maybe Ellie Goulding or Ingrid Michaelson—something more girly, I guess.

“I like everything,” she says, a freeing shake of her head. Her hands move to the twists on either side of her head, and she pulls out the pins holding them in place, her long hair falling in slow motion into glossy purple twists that she rustles out with her fingers. I am mesmerized, and when her gray eyes hit mine again, it feels like someone’s taken the paddles to my chest.

She’s in charge now.

“I’ll remember that,” I say, catching my bottom lip between my teeth. Her eyes flicker in question. “That you like everything.”

Her chest expands with a slow draw of air, and she holds it. I don’t look away before her this time. I work extra hard not to, because I suck at losing, and for a while here, I was. This may have just become about more than music. I might be all right with that. I’m sure it’s a bad idea, but I’m also sure I don’t care.

“I think it’s time,” she says, tapping her brother on the shoulder, eyes fluttering in fast blinks. Nerves—that’s her nerves.

“So what, I just…” I reach to pull the strip away, but she leaps forward, placing her slender hand on mine, stopping me—stopping everything in me. She’s touching me, and I’ve just ceased breathing.

“No, you’ll mess it up if you do it too fast…just…” she pauses with her eyes on mine. I work to be the last to look away again, to win the battle twice in a row. Her tongue makes a small pass along her bottom lip, and I watch it. Paddles to the chest. I lose.

“Let me do it,” she says.

“Okay,” I whisper.

I crawl up on my knees, and she does the same in front of me, placing cool hands along my face. I close my eyes, because I’m pretty sure I have to. When I open them, I catch her looking at my shut lids, moving her attention quickly to the strip on my nose and her other hand.