Snapshots | ✓

Thirty Eight: Micah

Sunday, February 7th, 2016

Hayes tapped his knee repeatedly. "Micah."

"What?"

"Micah," she repeated, grabbing his knee and shaking it.

"What?" He looked up from his phone just in time to see Matt Damon's face in sniper's crosshairs and for someone to exclaim 'My God, that's Jason Bourne' in an office with lots of screens. The rest of the trailer passed in silence, Hayes continuing to shake his knee with unparallelled glee lighting up her face.

"I have to call my dad," she said, grabbing her phone. Before she could dial, her phone started ringing with her father's face popping up on the screen. She answered and started shouting excited sentence fragments in English, French, and Spanish, sometimes stringing words from two or more languages into collections that almost resembled complete phrases.

He watched her with a small smile until the game came back on, at which point he returned most of his focus to the football game. He caught his name and a reference to the SuperBowl and then the conversation switched entirely to Spanish, Hayes glancing at him a few times with a faint blush in her cheeks. The conversation turned sharper and she left the room, and despite the language barrier it was clear she was arguing with her father.

A few minutes later she came back without her phone. Her expression had darkened considerably, the little line between her eyebrows appearing as it did when she was upset. She threw herself down on the couch and pulled his arm around her shoulders without saying anything. They sat in silence until the next commercial break, but when he inhaled to ask if she was okay she shook her head. "Don't ask."

He looked at her for a long moment but obeyed. He may have tightened his grip on her the tiniest amount, though.