Page 16 of Call My Bluff
“Sit here and lean forward,” she said, pointing to a chair she’d turned backwards beside the table. He threw one leg over it and crossed his arms along the back rail before resting his forehead on top of them. Olivia assessed his hair again, this time moving more slowly than she had before.
Noah found his eyes drifting closed.
“The dish soap should help open your follicles and release the excess color, but it’ll still take at least a week. You’re lucky you aren’t blond; you’d look like a blueberry lollipop,” she said. “The staining on your skin is going to take some scrubbing, though.” She brushed her hands over his neck again and tipped his ears forward to check behind them. Then she tugged the neckline of his shirt back, as if she were peeking between his shoulder blades.
“I can take that off if you want,” he murmured, and she smacked the back of his head in a playful way.
“I’m just checking the damage!” she insisted, and Noah grinned, though he knew she couldn’t see his face. He wished he could peek back to see hers; maybe he’d finally gotten her to blush.
Her hands moved away, and Noah heard her step closer to the table. He opened his eyes and looked down at her socks, which were red and had little pom-pom things around the ankles. He didn’t remember seeing her take off the boots she’d been wearing when she came in, but he was glad she’d decided to make herself at home without asking. There was something about that that he liked—a lot.
Noah raised his head and eyed the supplies she’d laid out on the tabletop: rubbing alcohol, Q-tips and a bag of fluffy cotton balls. She pressed a piece of white fluff to the top of the alcohol bottle and tipped the whole thing over and back in one quick motion.
“This will be cold,” she cautioned.
Noah put his forehead back down on his arms. “I can handle it,” he said, but he flinched when she pressed the cotton ball to the nape of his neck.
Olivia chuckled before scrubbing the soft material along his hairline. “I thought you could handle it.”
“Well, yeah, but you’ve had that in the freezer!” he declared.
“Just my car, and only for the drive over,” she countered. “Now stop whining and be a man about it!”
Noah grumbled quietly, though not with any real irritation. He liked the way she always gave as good as she got; it kept things interesting.
They both lapsed into silence as she worked the cotton ball in tight circles across the back of his neck, replenishing the alcohol periodically. He waited for the quiet to start crawling up his spine like ants, the way it always did when no one had anything to say, but the sensation never came. Instead, it felt comfortable—familiar, even. It was a phenomenon he couldn’t explain.
While she wasn’t being particularly gentle, there was something about the pressure against his neck that was oddly soothing. Noah felt the muscles in his shoulders gradually uncoil as the minutes stretched on, and finally, a long breath escaped from his chest.
Olivia chuckled. “Well, who knew?”
“Who knew what?” Noah mumbled.
“Who knew the best way to find your off button was to dye you an unnatural color? I would have tried this weeks ago.” She laughed. “By the way, you’re normal all the way to here.” She ran her fingertip in a horizontal line halfway down the left side of his neck.
Trapezius muscle, his brain automatically filled in. It was apparently still working even as the rest of his body was being lulled into a coma. He grunted in acknowledgement, content to let her work her magic for as long as she wanted. He let his head loll to one side and cracked his eyes open, hoping he might be able to see her over his shoulder, but he couldn’t.
Olivia kept working until she was apparently satisfied with the results, at which point she dropped her last cotton ball onto a growing pile on the table. It landed with a damp thud. “All done, I think,” she said, and she gave the tops of his shoulders a quick squeeze. “You can work on your hands yourself.”
He groaned again and pushed up to a sitting position, surprised to find he wasn’t tense from being half slumped against the chair rail for so long. He rolled his head in a circle and stretched his arms toward the ceiling. Then he stopped and watched as Olivia packed her supplies—though she left the alcohol behind for him.
“Don’t you ever think these practical jokes are a bit childish?” she asked after a minute or so.
“Oh, all the time,” he answered truthfully. “But the way I see it, I’m gonna have to be an adult forever. I’ve got plenty of time to make good choices and use my prefrontal cortex to its full capacity, but right now I can still have some fun and get away with it... so why not? I’ll be a grown-up when I’m thirty.”
“Thirty, huh? Is that when boys finally become men?”
“Give or take a decade. My mom’s brother is forty-two, and he still draws body parts on dirty car windshields, so it’s not guaranteed.”
Olivia laughed and turned around, leaning on the counter with the heels of her hands. “Do you know how you’re going to get Conner back?” she asked.
“Not yet,” he admitted. “But I’m open to suggestions.”
Olivia pulled her bottom lip between her teeth and worried it in a way Noah found incredibly distracting. He momentarily lost his train of thought, instead following a completely different set of tracks that ended with him pinning her in place against the cabinetry.
“I have an idea,” she said, “but it would have to wait until tomorrow.”
It took Noah a few seconds to get back to the topic at hand, and he blinked several times to clear his mind. When he did, the only word he really retained was “tomorrow,” and it suddenly didn’t matter what the idea was. “Fabulous, it’s a date!” he declared.
