Finley sniggers, sitting back in her chair and staring at me with her eyebrows raised. “Get a room.”
* * *
Since Trent broughtus food again, I volunteer to do the dishes. I’m grateful to slip into the kitchen, getting a tiny break from Finley’s nervous chatter and Trent’s comical attempts to keep up with her jumps in logic and subject.
“Hey,” he calls from the connecting doorway as I shake my hand in the water to encourage the suds. “When you said you were doing dishes, I thought you meant putting them in the dishwasher.”
“No such luck.” I stare at him in amusement as he turns in a semi-circle, looking for something. “You okay there?”
“I feel like I should offer to dry but you don’t have a towel.”
“Second drawer to your left,” I say, encouraging him with a nod. “But you don’t need to. There’s only a few.”
“If I leave you alone, you might decide against me staying the night on the couch again, then where will we be?”
I bite my lip to stop laughing at his forlorn expression.
He stands behind me, reaching around me to take each plate as I finish. The heat of his large body warms my back and I instinctively lean back into him, gently brushing close before I catch myself and jump away.
“Just pretend I’m not here,” he whispers in a teasing note.
“That’s a bit hard when you take up half the room.”
He touches my shoulder with his knuckle, a perfectly innocent gesture, my blouse and cardigan providing two barriers to keep our skin from connecting. But a shiver runs out from the spot, tingles spreading in widening circles across my skin until I shrug the sensation away, finishing the cutlery before letting the water drain from the sink.
Trent’s breath lightly caresses the back of my neck, the hairs standing on end, desperate to get closer.
“Did you call the police?” he asks, and I turn, glad of the chance to break away from the magnetic pull of his body. I’d told him I’d do that, but I don’t really want to. The card the constable at the station gave me is in my pocket and I pull it out, feeling weariness sink into my bones.
“Is that the officer that took your complaint?”
I nod and he takes it from my fingers. “Do you want me to call? If she wants answers about the man I saw, I’m better placed to give them.”
He makes it so easy to say yes, to agree, to let him take control with his calm strength and his unflappable nature.
An officer attends but since Trent gave most of the details over the phone, the man doesn’t stay long. After taking a cursory glance around the back yard, retracing the path Trent described, he leaves to attend another call, spending a grand total of twenty minutes.
Finley shoots me all sorts of suggestive glances as I get Trent set up on the couch. In a late bid at gratitude, I offered him Lily’s room, but he was appalled by the idea. Especially when it only took a glance to see her stuff is still in there, her possessions not yet catching up to her physical relocation.
As I settle into bed, a butter knife on the cabinet to give me an illusion of protection, I think of us getting another new flatmate. I barely got the chance to adjust to Lily’s arrival and now there’ll be another new girl. At least, I hope there’ll be another new girl. The turnover so far has been so high, the department might, in its wisdom, give up the scheme as a joke.
I snag my vibrator from the drawer, needing the relaxation before I can even think of falling asleep.
Instead of turning it on, I become intensely aware of the attractive boy on the other side of the wall. My memory draws his features with careful detail, lingering on the intensity of his gaze, drinking in everything he sees, the curve of his mouth when he smiles.
The slope of his chest, the hard muscles rippling across his torso, the deep lines of the v trailing into the waistband of his jeans, a sensuous path my hands are desperate to follow to its end.
I roll onto my side, a pulse beating between my legs. The toy goes back in its drawer; I couldn’t with him in the next room. To think he might be listening, charting the aural progression of my orgasm from start to finish is both tantalising and enough to make my cheeks heat to burning.
He doesn’t want you that way.
Maybe not, but I have a harder time convincing myself of that than I would yesterday. Not after his tease with the mouthful of cake.
I imagine his tongue spending even half that attention on the same spot currently throbbing between my legs and my back arches, my thighs clenching together. With the shock of his sudden appearance fading farther and farther into the background, I can assess the situation more clearly. Think of him ready to fight, to attack an intruder with no concern for his own welfare.
The hint of danger, the same thing that made my stomach crawl as I waited in the police station earlier today, feels a thousand times different here in my bed, with my thoughts full to bursting with Trent.
I flop onto my back, fists grabbing handfuls of my hair and pulling, keeping me in the moment. My eyes close but my brain continues to work overtime; alternating between the pull of memories I don’t want to relive and the far nicer treat of the boy lying on the couch next door.
