Except he was dressed. And I was naked and dripping wet and—
Oh Jesus, my hand was between my thighs.
We both stared, our mouths open and our lips moving soundlessly. And then Sean’s eyes narrowed. The look he gave me made every inch of my exposed skin blaze, as if I was standing naked in front of a furnace. And as it soaked into me, I reacted: I felt my nipples tighten and a deep, hot ache explode in my groin, turning instantly to slick wetness. I couldn’t move. Two, three seconds ticked past, and with every shuddering breath I took, I could feel him drinking me in, burning my image into his mind forever.
And I liked it. I’d never been looked at that way before: like I was a painting or a statue, like I was something he could look at forever and still never get enough.
Then I suddenly came to my senses and twisted away from him. Covering myself wasn’t so easy: my makeshift towel was on the sink and there was barely room to open the shower door to get it. For a few seconds I had to stand there with my naked ass towards him, onearm hooked around the door, flailing for the drape, while the other clutched at the dial to turn off the water. Only when I finally had the scarlet drape wrapped around me did I turn around. I wanted to see if he’d averted his eyes.
He hadn’t. He was staring at me transfixed. I gulped, aware that the drape was clinging to my body as tightly as any Hollywood red carpet dress.
Sean walked slowly towards me, lifted the panel and slotted it back into place. His eyes never left mine, not until the false wall finally separated us again.
I let out a long, shaky breath and slumped against the wall of the shower stall. I knew I had to dry myself, put my clothes on and get out of there. I knew I had to walk out there as if nothing had happened so we could get back to being business partners. I knew I had to dunk all these feelings back under the black waters of my mind and hold them there.
I knew all that. But for long minutes, I just stood there staring at the panel Sean had put back in place...and wishing it would fall again.
When I finally got myself under control, I threw on my clothes, said goodbye to Sean and almost ran to my car, then sat behind the wheel shaky and weak.That was just the first day in the grow house,I thought.How the hell am I going to manage six months?
16
SEAN
I woke up and frowned.
Most of the time, I don’t remember my dreams and that’s a blessing. There’s bad shit down in the depths of my memory, rooted in too firmly to ever extract. When I’m awake, I can mostly keep it contained, bricking it up behind sheer willpower. A little of it always escapes, a toxic drip, drip, drip of blackness that sours my mind and feeds my anger, trying to lure me into losing control completely. But mostly, by day, I’m its master. At night, things reverse. It lurks in the dark places, waiting for me to drop into sleep so it can grab the other me. The scared kid.
At four AM in the darkness, we’re all scared kids.
I don’t remember what happens, but sometimes I wake up in sweaty, twisted sheets and that wall I built is lying in ruins, my past so close that I can reach out and touch it. And it takes an hour of wailing away on the guitar or smashing someone’s place to pieces before I feel like me again.
This time, though, I wanted to remember. This dream had beengreat.
This time, I’d dreamt of her.
There were after-images of her in my mind, the sort you thinkwill be clearer if you close your eyes and focus on them, but the more you concentrate the more they break up and blow away. I could still feel sunshine on my skin...yeah, there’d been lots of sunshine, streaming through that red hair of hers. And her legs...long, graceful legs, bare under a long skirt. She’d been barefoot. Barefoot in a fucking meadow, that’s where we were. And I’d been...we’d been…
I screwed my eyes shut, but it was gone. I cursed hard enough to strip the paint from the walls.
It wasn’t like I should need dream-Louise. I had plenty of images of real-Louise filed away in my head: her in that green scoop-neck top, for one, all that soft, pale cleavage and her bewildered by all my staring. Her lying in the grass, beautiful even covered in dust, my heart in my throat because I’d come so close to killing her.
But mainly, her in the shower.
I’d seen just a taste of her and it was maddening. Smooth skin, milky-white and gleaming with water. Her breasts, the ones I’d hungered after so badly, were just perfect. The water had slid down over the soft globes like it was caressing them, making them shine and glisten, dripping from her rosebud nipples. I’ve never wanted to fill my hands with a woman’s breasts so much. I could already feel them, wet and heavy and soft under my palms, the nipples rubbing across my fingertips.
Her stomach, soft and smooth and with that cute little navel I wanted to kiss and lick until she squirmed against me. She had that gorgeous womanly shape: tight on the waist, flaring out at the hips. And between her thighs….
I’d been imagining what lay between her thighs ever since I first caught sight of her. Every man wonders, when they see a redhead. When that board had dropped and I’d seen her, my eyes had dropped to her groin in less time than it takes to blink...but my view had been hidden. By her hand.
I still wasn’t sure what to make of that part. There was a chunk of my ego that wanted her to have been playing with herself, thinking about me. But I knew it was more likely she’d just clapped her hand there to hide herself.
It didn’t matter. Getting so close to seeing every part of her, even that most secret one, just made my cock even harder for her. I needed her naked and under me like I needed to breathe...and yet I had to keep fighting that urge.
Thatwas why I tried to hang on to those images of dream-Louise. Because my dreams were the only place I could be with her.
We spent the day setting up the banks of lights. I’d told Louise to spend the extra money to get low-energy LED bulbs: I’d known plenty of growers get caught when the power company got suspicious about the huge amount of power they were drawing. We hung them from the ceiling so they pointed down at the tables. When we switched them on, the tabletops became desert-sun bright.
That evening, the plants arrived. Louise had very carefully reached out over the internet and struck up a friendship with some guys from the Netherlands, talking about gene lines and heritage and cloning and other shit that made them all sound like they were evil scientists in a sci-fi movie. They’d hooked her up with their guy in the US and he’d agreed to sell her a batch of seedlings. He pulled his van into our garage, opened the doors and we were staring our future in the face.
