Has he lost his mind? I don’t hear him anymore, which means he must be naked as the day he was born coming towards my shower. I consider squirting the shampoo in his eyes, but when Zeb slowly peels the shower curtain back, the only expression on his face is pure concern.
“My clothes are covered in blood,” he says. “Sorry for the indecency.”
I don’t know what part of him to look at first, to my embarrassment. He has a lot more blood covering his face, and lots of dirt. He smells very strongly of sweat, and he definitely has a sunburn. There’s also the fact that he’s naked. And when my eyes inadvertently drop between his legs for just a second, I notice something… horrifying.
He’s huge. Enormous. It’s the biggest one that I’ve ever seen, honestly. My eyes snap nervously back up to Zeb’s. If he noticed me looking at his cock, he doesn’t mention it out loud. I want to ask him if hehasto get in here with that big thing swinging around between his legs, but Zeb doesn’t give me the opportunity to do anything like that. We barely have any room in this shower. He towers over me and if I hadn’t just experienced what I did outside, maybe I would have enjoyed his closeness, but I take a sharp breath in, totally claustrophobic.
“Did you get clean?” Zeb asks, examining me closely. I’m wet, but there’s no soap on my body. My hair sticks to my neck and the bathroom has a nice, steamy atmosphere. It’s cozy here in the bathroom, unlike the hot, vicious desert.
“I haven’t been in here that long,” my voice responds hazily.
“I’ve been gone for an hour.”
I was right… I did disassociate in the shower, losing all my sense of time. Zeb takes water from the showerhead over his body, but then he takes the white motel room washcloth and lathers it in soap.
“I’ll clean you up,” he says. “If you don’t want me touching any part of your body, just hit me.”
“Will that make you stop?” I ask him, suspicious that Zeb has any intention of stopping once he gets his mind on touching me. He’s already so close and so naked that it makes me nervous. I’m too scared to look down at his dick searching for further evidence of his arousal.
“Yes,” he says. “I know I put you through a lot.”
There’s surprising softness in Zeb’s voice that I didn’t expect. Softness that doesn’t completely reflect the steel-eyed man who commanded me to shoot men bleeding out on the ground in front of me. He detects my shakiness, and I hate that I’m so vulnerable with him, even if I can’t control it. My lower lip trembles completely and I drop my gaze to Zeb’s hands, watching him massage the soap on the bleached washcloth into a thick lather.
“I worried that I pushed you too far.”
“Did you leave those bodies–”
“No,” he interrupts. “I told you, Janelle. You don’t need to worry about that.”
“I’m not a criminal.”
He laughs. “I know that. I could tell from looking at you. Arm.”
Zeb gestures for me to hand out my arm for him to clean. I’m covered in… I don’t even want to know, but I suspect it’s a mixture of dirt, sweat, blood, and another gooey substance that will make me vomit if I think about it too hard. He takes the bottom of my palm and grips me gently, so I could snatch my arm away if I really want to. I don’t want to, of course. I let Zeb get my arm clean, and then he takes my other arm and cleans me off.
Slowly, he helps get water under the thickest parts of my hair so that it soaks through properly. I’ve never allowed a man totouch my hair and the second Zeb’s fingers make contact with my scalp, shivers travel all the way down my spine. He doesn’t take his eyes off me while he cleans me and while I know logically that he must be seeingeveryraw, unclothed inch of me, I don’t feel like he’s staring or looking at me out of unbridled lust.
Zeb’s fingers spread the strands of my hair apart and he combs out my hair without grabbing at the tangles. He has to get close to me to get the muck and sweat out of my hair, and I grow profoundly aware of his warmth, just how much bigger Zeb’s body is in comparison to mine, and howlargecertain parts of me are now that we’re essentially forced to be pressed up together like this.
He pulls away from me once he’s done with my hair. He looks around for a bottle of shampoo and I don’t even bother to tell him to be sparing with it. Normally, I would fuss way more about the outcome of a hair wash, but I just want everything that happened outside to go spiraling down the motel shower drain.
Zeb lathers up my hair and washes the shampoo out without getting any in my eyes. Considering our position in the shower, he’s better at the job than most hair stylists I’ve been to. Once he has my hair clean, Zeb fills it up with conditioner and twists my hair into a low bun. He kisses my forehead and mutters, “Let me clean the rest of you.”
When he’s so close to being done with his quiet, painstaking work, I half expect Zeb to lecture me or blame me for running off. He let me wash my intimate areas without his assistance, which again surprised me. There are signs that he’s not completely immune to seeing my body naked. But he’s either trying to suppress those feelings or distracted by something more intense. My guess is, he’s distracted by anger with me. He’s fallen so quiet and looks so stern that I really expect him to chastise me.
“I think I’ve made the mistake of growing attached to you,” he says.
Mistake.I don’t know why that word sticks out over everything else he said. It doesn’t really matter if he’s attached if he thinks it’s a bad thing.
“Why is it a mistake?”
“Because this is my life and it won’t get any easier in the next few months.”
“I’m fine, Zeb.”
“You’re fine right now. But what if I hadn’t come outside? What if we weren’t on the one stretch of highway that I’m guaranteed to get help quickly? I didn’t realize how much it would fuck me up to lose you.”
Is that why he went so far? There’s something deeply and strangely sensitive in Zeb right now and his hand trembles as he holds the washcloth, which he grips tightly in an effort to steady his hand and further conceal his intense emotions from me. I’m attracted to him – it’s not that I’mnotattracted to him, but I don’t want Zeb to use me and then dump me on the side of the road.
