“What is it?” I keep my towel in place with my free arm.
Why won’t he just let me go?
But suddenly, I know why. He’s running up against the same worry he had about sleeping earlier.
“Oh, you can’t be serious!” I gasp. “You think I’m going to try to run away while you’re in here?” My stomach flips, and my voice goes hoarse and high. “You can’t be thinking of handcuffing me to you while you’re showering!”
His eyes flit from his hand on my arm to the beads of water running down my neck. Then, he lets me go. But he doesn’t let me leave the room.
“I need you in here with me,” he says. “I need eyes on you.”
“Eyes on me…while you…” I flap my hand towards the shower.
He gives a nod, then pulls his shirt off over his head. I see only the briefest ripples of hard, tattooed muscles and a line of dark body hair disappearing into the waistband of his jeans before I bolt.
His arms seize on me from behind at once, drawing me forcefully back up against his bare chest.
“Don’t even try it,” he breathes against my soaked hair. “You leave this room while I’m showering, and I will come, wet and naked, to find you.” My heart contracts. Absurdly, my thighs clench. “I will cuff you to me,” he goes on without emotion. “And I will drag you back in there with me. Understand?”
Do I understand? Oh, I understand, all right. He doesn’t trust me. And if I don’t do what he says, I’ll be bound to him beneath the hot spray of that water. Tied to the dark and beautiful violence of his body, without the barrier of clothes between us.
My thighs give another treacherous clench.
“I understand,” I hiss, trying and failing to pull out of his hold. “Let go of me!”
His hands fall away, and I clutch desperately at my damp towel as if it can somehow protect me. When Curse sheds his pants and underwear, I wrench my gaze away, turning my whole body towards the door. He said he needed me here in the room with him. He didn’t say we had to make eye contact through the steam.
My breath hitches, my muscles jumping in nervous anticipation when the water starts. A part of me almost expects him to change his mind and go get the cuffs after all. To assure myself that isn’t what’s happening, I risk a glance at him in the mirror. I’m not brave enough to look at him straight-on.
But even just the fogged version of him in the mirror makes my knees turn watery and weak. He moves with deadly power, an electric sort of grace. His body is so huge that he should seem bulky and brutish, but he isn’t. There’s a dangerous elegance in the inked lines of his frame. The heavy strands of his soaking hair. The long fingers as they glide and scrub. With the angle of the mirror where it meets the countertop, I can’t see below his waist right now.
If I could, would I still be looking?
His eyes meet mine in the mirror.
I flinch and avert my gaze, my body rigid, my attention elsewhere for the rest of the time in the bathroom. I shouldn’t be surprised that, like just about everything else he does, he showers with a ruthless efficiency. I don’t think the water’s running for five full minutes before he turns it off again. With my back to him like this, every other sense is pitched towards him. My ears strain to catch the sound of him stepping out of the shower. I don’t wait for permission to flee.
And that’s what I’m doing, really. Fleeing. Running from his nakedness, from the silence of his dark power, from the foreign feelings welling up inside me in response. When I reach the bedroom area, I’m shaking badly as I try to piece together why I spent so long watching his reflection in the mirror. Male nakedness has always been abhorrent to me.
I try to get my breathing under control, pacing the room and coming to a stop before the window. Outside, the storm has abated. Everything is covered with white velvet. It looks like earlier snow from the season hasn’t even had the chance to fully melt yet, so this new snow only adds to the big banks and mounds.
One mound is suspiciously absent.
“The car is gone.”
“Yup,” Curse says, startling me. He’s in the room with me, wearing his pants but nothing else. “I let some contacts know it was available not long after we first got here. When you were in the bathroom.”
I guess it’s good that vehicle – and whatever evidence it contained – is already on its way out of the country. But now I feel oddly trapped. We’re in this tiny motel, practically snowed-in, with no way out.
“Someone will bring by a new vehicle for me soon,” Curse says, as if all the fears and worries inside my brain have been splattered along the wall for him to pick apart and examine. “Once the roads have been cleared.”
“And then what?”
Curse’s hair is curling slightly as it dries. The wet locks are tousled, falling over his brow. Once again, I want to touch him. Once again, I hate myself for it.
“Then we move on. To Montreal.”
“Montreal,” I echo, letting the word sift over my tongue. I haven’t been there since I was sixteen. “Is that where Elio is?”
