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Her face lit up. “Yes. AndMoanaandEncanto.”
“I just happen to haveBrave. Any chance you’d watch it with me after dinner?”
“Oh.” She blushed pinker than the sky. “I usually watch it in my pajamas.”
With a stuffie or two, possibly in a blanket fort, he thought.
“I’m happy to volunteer some sweats if you’d like. Or we can run back to the Ranch.” Her face closed and Sutter quickly backtracked. “I just want you to be comfortable.”
She tugged on her Ranch staff shirt. “I’m fine in this.”
“Whatever you like. You won’t mind if I get comfortable? I like to watch movies in my sleeping bag.”
A grin peeped through. “Really?”
Sutter nodded. “The movie caterpillar. Longstanding tradition in the James household.”
“Any chance you have a spare sleeping bag?” she asked.
“Of course. You’ll have to wrestle me for the Spiderman sleeping bag, though.”
She laughed, tipping her head back, and that sense of rightness bloomed in Sutter’s chest again.
After dinner,which Sutter encouraged Saoirse to eat with her fingers, they settled side by side on the entertainment room’s big sectional sofa in their sleeping bags and watched the movie on the big screen TV. Sutter watched Saoirse. Her chin was a little shiny from the butter and barbeque sauce, even though she’d let him wipe her up before she helped him clear the table. He popped a huge bowl of popcorn and she ate it piece by piece, sneaking each kernel out of the bowl with her fingertips, which Sutter found oddly adorable.
He found the way she shivered and moved a little closer to him on the couch when the demon bear appeared even more adorable.
As the movie ended, he asked, “If we were to stay in our sleeping bags, could I convince you to sleep over?”
Relaxed from the food and the movie, she laughed. “If I can be back on the Ranch by eight. I don’t want to be late for my first session.”
“No problem.” Sutter rolled onto his side and stretched out his sleeping bag along the “L” of the sectional sofa. “Tell me something else you love.”
“Movie caterpillars,” she responded and the lightness in her voice made that feeling in Sutter’s chest open butterfly wings and soar. “Tell me something you love.”
“I love a lot of things. I’m that psycho who gets up at six in the morning and goes for a run while the sun’s rising and the birds are starting to sing. I love that time of day. I love feeling like my heart’s going to pound out of my chest as I run. I love my younger sisters, even when they drive me crazy, which is most of the time. I love pushing myself, whether it’s physically or an idea or an impossible goal. I don’t even mind the times I fail because when I succeed, it feels twice as good.”
Saoirse’s brown eyes glistened as she listened to him.
“I always wanted brothers and sisters,” she admitted softly.
“Only child?”
She nodded. “Pregnancy caused my mother to miss a whole competition season. She said she’d never miss another.”
Rather than follow a conversational path that might rob her eyes of that light, he asked, “When you want to push yourself, what do you do?”
“I don’t—I mean, I haven’t pushed myself in a while.”
“Now wait, I know that’s not true. You moved here recently, right? That’s pushing yourself.”
“I guess. I like to push myself with new ideas, sometimes. I’ve been reading about cryptocurrency. It’s a struggle to get my mind around money that’s not linked to a country.”
“That’s like Bitcoin, right?” Sutter knew about cryptocurrency from financial courses during his M.B.A., but he hadn’t studied it in depth.
Saoirse nodded and under Sutter’s gentle questioning, she told him more than he could have learned in an hour’s B-school lecture about cryptocurrency.
Her eyes were alight the whole time, until they got droopy.
