I grumble my reply. “Go ahead.”
She disappears with an armful of clothing and a bag of what looks like an entire shelf of beauty products. The door closes. The faucet runs. I hear her humming to herself, off-key andcheerful, the muffled sounds of bottles being opened and closed, a drawer sliding on its track. Our toothbrushes are standing side by side in the cup on the counter in there. Our towels on adjacent hooks. The entire bathroom arranged like it belongs to two people who chose to share it, which we did not.
I sit on the edge of the bed and groan. The resort activity guide sits on the nightstand and I pick it up, but I can’t even pretend to read it. Instead I’m listening to the other side of the bathroom door, the sounds of a woman going through her nighttime routine. The normalcy of it is disorienting.
I can’t remember the last time someone else’s nightly rituals took place within earshot of my bed. Years.
Not since Victoria.
The bathroom door opens and she steps out, and my brain goes offline.
White tank top that clings too tightly to her perky tits and hardly hides the dusky outlines of her nipples. The sleeveless top bares a whole lot of smooth skin that’s picked up a faint glow from whatever time she spent on the resort grounds this afternoon. Boy shorts, baby pink, hit just below her round ass and the enticing V of her crotch. She’s barefoot on the marble. Her dark hair is down and slightly damp at the temples.
None of this was chosen with me in mind. She packed these clothes for solo nights in a suite she expected to occupy alone, and the complete absence of performance is what makes the visual hit so hard. A woman in lingerie is a woman with an audience. A woman in a washed-out tank top is a woman who thinks she’s alone, and the unguarded ease of her body in those clothes sends a pulse of heat through me that settles low and stays.
“All yours,” she says, and if she notices the way I’m gripping the activity guide like it personally wronged me, she doesn’t mention it.
I change in the bathroom. T-shirt and nylon athletic shorts. The shorts are the problem. Normally I sleep in nothing, a fact that didn’t seem relevant until I was standing in a bathroom putting on clothes specifically because a woman I’ve known for twelve hours is waiting on the other side of the door in boy shorts and a tank top that’s doing things to my composure that a twelve-billion-dollar hostile takeover attempt failed to accomplish.
When I step back out, she looks up from the bed and gives my outfit a once-over. “Huh.”
“What.”
“Nothing. You just look like a different person without the button-down and dress slacks.” She pulls the covers over her lap. “More human.”
“I was human before.”
“Debatable.” She arches a brow and smiles. Then she looks at my shorts and frowns. At first I wonder if my semi-erection is obvious, but then she tilts her head at me in question. “Do you always sleep in workout shorts?”
“Always? No. Never. At home I sleep naked.”
The words are out before I fully consider them, and Ella goes very still. Her lips part. A flush creeps up her neck, and she blinks once before looking down at the comforter.
“Well,” she says after a pause that lasts roughly a decade. “Thanks for the... compromise.”
The silence that follows is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.
I clear my throat and focus on the bed situation, which is its own crisis. She’s already settling in. On the left. My side.
“That’s the left side,” I say.
“I know.”
I scowl. “I sleep on the left.”
“That’s so sad for you.” She doesn’t move. “Because I also sleep on the left, and I’m already here.”
Is she serious? I fold my arms. “I’ve slept on the left side of every bed I’ve owned since I was twenty-three.”
“Impressive streak. I’ve slept on the left since I was seven and had a nightmare about a monster that could only attack from the right. So I have seniority and a more compelling origin story.”
I suppress my smile. “A monster.”
“Don’t judge my trauma. It was very formative.” She pats the right side of the mattress. “This side is perfectly good. Better bathroom access, closer to the veranda. If you think about it, I’m actually doing you a favor.”
She’s not doing me a favor. She’s dug in like a tenant with a lease, and she’s clearly enjoying this. I can see it in the slight curve of her mouth, the way she’s watching me from behind those arresting blue eyes with the quiet satisfaction of a woman who knows she’s already won.
I walk to the right side, grumbling the whole way. Her smile widens.
