The Search for Lily Myers ✓

28 | Sun After the Rain

She'd already forgotten what it could feel like to wake up next to another person, for the first thing she recognized as she slowly regained consciousness to be the softness of someone's breathing nearby. A warm, steady weight at her side.

Amelia's fingers drifted along the sheets that didn't belong to her, the clothes that weren't her own. She gradually turned her face towards him and opened her eyes.

Henry was still asleep. He looked—well, angelic probably wasn't the word. Angels probably didn't sleep with their cheeks slightly smushed against their pillow, lips parted, hair sticking in a confounding number of directions. A tiny spot of something that may or may not have been drool near the corner of their mouth. But he seemed so relaxed in his sleep that it made her start to smile, relieved that he was getting some rest.

Her dilemma now was not wanting to disturb him. She probably could have stayed there and watched him for hours, but he probably wouldn't have wanted to be stared at for an extended period of time, and she worried that if she remained there in bed with him she might get restless and start stirring too much. So Amelia extracted herself from the blankets as quietly as possible—her legs had gotten rather tangled up in one of them, so she hoped she hadn't managed to completely yank it away from him while they were asleep—looked at him one last time, and snuck slowly out of the room.

She wasn't sure how she wanted to fill the time before he woke up considering that she didn't actually know how much time there'd actually be to fill, but it occurred to her as her feet touched the cool floor at the bottom of the stairs that the polite thing to do would probably be to go make the guest bed that she'd slept in for the first part of the night.

The hinges of the door whined as she pushed it open, then stood there for a moment to watch the light stream in through the window. The room felt different to her in the daytime, placid and insignificant. The only part of it that looked disrupted was the bed, with its blankets crumpled and pulled back. Amelia tucked them back up towards the pillows and smoothed them out with her hands as well as she could.

In the corner of the room was a bookshelf that she hadn't given any mind to before—she hadn't precisely been in the mood for reading last night—but now it lit a spark of curiosity. One could learn quite a lot about what went through someone else's mind by looking at their books

She had to tilt her chin up just a smidge to read the titles on the top shelf. The bulk of them seemed educational—there were a couple on ASL, an Italian-English dictionary, some pharmaceutical and anatomy-related ones for his schooling. Lower down she spotted some familiar mysteries, some memoirs.

Carefully, she removed the first of the ASL books from its perch. The cover was slightly dusty from lack of recent use; she brushed it off and sat down on the bed with it.

The first spread of pages past the table of contents was predictably dedicated to the alphabet. Amelia lifted her hand and attempted to sign her own name, which came more easily than she expected as she quickly realized that the signs for A, M, and E were all quite similar. She tried out Amelia a couple of times and then Amelia Allen, which was hardly any more difficult since N was the only new letter not to appear in her first name. It was during her first go at Amelia Rose Allen that she realized that she'd actually been signing her E's like S's.

She'd become so concentrated on perfecting her name that she didn't notice Henry come down the stairs until he was lightly tapping on the open door to announce himself. Her gaze shot up from the pages, then flickered back to glance at them momentarily.

H-I, she attempted to sign.

The corners of his mouth edged up into a small, almost conspiratorial smile. He returned her gesture with one that looked similar to a salute, only his palm was facing outwards toward her.