Words were tumbling out of his mouth before he’d made the conscious decision to spill them. “You don’t have to stay, you know.”
Dani’s gaze whipped toward him, her brows cranked down. “What the fuck, Riddick? I’m watching ‘Deadpool’ here. You can’t be all ‘you’re a woman in serious need of a movie marathon’ and then kick me out halfway through the first flick.”
With a little chuckle he held up his hands. “Wasn’t trying to kick you out, D. Stay as long as you like. Just didn’t want you to feel, I don’t know, stuck here. I got it from here.”
“First of all, Mr. Campbell’s Soup Man, you’re only, like, thirty hours out of getting your butt run over. Second, I don’t feel stuck here. I’m happy to help. Now can we get back to seeing if Wade is going to catch Francis and rescue Vanessa or what?”
He smiled despite the soup-related dig. “My Deadpool is your Deadpool.”
They watched the rest of the movie in silence—well, not talking. Dani’s amusement kept it from being anything but silent. Not that Sean was complaining.
And then, finally, Vanessa and Wade were together again, facing each other, as Vanessa saw how much Wade’s appearance had changed for the first time. Dani wore a perma-grin as the scene unfolded. And then Vanessa said a line that was easily one of the best movie lines of all time:
“After a brief adjustment period and a bunch of drinks, it’s a face…I’d be happy to sit on.”
Laughter erupted out of Dani, and she sat rapt through the end of the movie until the credits finally rolled. “Oh my God, Sean, that was epic.” She turned toward him, smiling and recounting some of her favorite lines. Enthusiastic as all hell.
A little bit blown away, he nodded and joked in all the right places. It was just that Dani was always such a bad-ass bull-buster that he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen this funny, laid-back side of her, the one open to his kind of stupid humor. Was it possible that, with all his sarcasm and snark, he’d never given her the chance to show him that side of herself?
And then Dani suggested they watch ‘Deadpool 2’.
Even though it was after ten, he was wasted, and his eye was aching like a motherfucker, Sean was happy to oblige. Because Dani wasn’t interested in this out of obligation or to humor him. She was truly into this.
Which had one of Sean’s favorite lines going through his head: “Your crazy matches my crazy. Big time.”
Not that he was sharing that with her.
Because he didn’t even know the point of thinking it himself.
Chapter Six
The first thing Dani knew was the kink in her neck. The second thing was that her pillow was really hard. The third was that she was not in her own bed.
She flew into a sitting position, her heart taking sudden flight. Hitting the home button on her cell phone revealed that it was four in the morning.
Not late. Okay, not late. Calm down.
Heaving a deep breath, she shook off the haze of sleep and peered to her left, to Sean, who was sound asleep despite her freak-out. He was mostly sitting upright, pillows piled high against his far side to offer support. A sliver of light spilled over his sleeping face from the bathroom, where the light had been left on behind a mostly closed door. The only sound in the room was the soft whirr of the ice machine.
Awareness finally returned. They’d been watching movies. And, oh, hell, ‘Deadpool’ was a freaking riot. It was so totally Riddick’s brand of snarky, innuendo-laden, off-color humor, though she couldn’t deny that she’d laughed more at those two movies than she had in a long time. So clearly it was her humor, too. Which was interesting to her.
Obviously, she and Sean had things in common—prior military, WFC members, a shared group of friends. Typically, all that was overshadowed for her by how much he tended to get on her last nerve. Yet, she’d been the one to push for watching ‘Deadpool 2’.
But after the mostly sleepless night she’d had at the hospital, her eyes had grown so heavy that she’d stretched out on her side of the couch… She didn’t remember falling asleep.
And certainly not against Sean’s thigh.
The light from her phone illuminated something on the floor beside her, and she reached down to find that a blanket had puddled there. The thing was, Dani hadn’t had a blanket when she’d laid down, which meant…Sean had covered her.
Which was something Anthony always used to do.
Dani would fall asleep watching TV or reading a book, and he would grab the blanket off the back of the couch and cover her up. Waking up with the blanket on her always made her smile. Proof that Anthony was thinking of her and taking care of her, even when she didn’t know it.