Upstairs, I can hear Isabella moving around.
Then I can't hear her anymore.
The cabin goes quiet in a way that is somehow louder than the sounds were, a specific charged silence that I don't know what to do with, and I sit there with my coffee and stare at my phone and tell myself not to think about what that silence might mean.
I think about it anyway.
My cock is hard and has been since I woke up this morning and this is not helping.
I push back from the table.
I need to move. I need to do something with my body that isn't sitting in this kitchen thinking about her upstairs in the silence, in the warmth of the room above me, probably lying on my bed with her hair spread out and her skin?—
I stop that thought and kill it.
I go outside onto the back deck and do push-ups until my arms give out, then sit-ups until my core burns, then I just sit on the deck with my back against the wall and the cold air on my face and breathe until my pulse comes back to something manageable.
It takes longer than it should.
I go back inside and upstairs to the bathroom, turning the shower on cold, standing under it with my hands braced on the wall and my jaw locked and my body refusing to cooperate.
It doesn't help.
I've been hard since last night. Since the kitchen and her hands in my shirt and the sound she made when my teeth grazed her neck, and three sets of push-ups and a cold shower are apparently no match for four years of wanting someone you can't have.
I wrap my hand around myself and think of her.
I can't stop myself. I've stopped stopping myself.
I think about the towel in the hallway, the way the moonlight caught the curve of her collarbone, the way she looked at me with those hazel eyes like she already knew what I was thinking and wasn't afraid of it. I think about her hands fisting my shirt in the kitchen, about the small broken gasp she made against my shoulder, about the way she leaned into my palm when I touched her face.
About the dream version of things, the version that doesn't stop. Her on my bed in the dark, her hair spread out, saying my name in the way she never actually says it, open and wanting, no walls, no history, just her.
My jaw tightens and my hand moves faster and the water is cold and none of it matters because she's right there, twenty feet away, existing in my space, wearing my clothes, ruining me completely and thoroughly and without even trying.
I come hard with her name locked behind my teeth, my forehead dropping to the cold tile, my whole body shuddering through it.
Afterward I stand there for a long moment, breathing.
Still wanting her.
That's the part I hadn't accounted for. That it doesn't actually help. That I can take the edge off and she's still there underneath it, still woven into every thought I have, still the thing my whole body orients toward like it's been doing since before I had the sense to fight it.
I turn off the shower.
Dry off. Get dressed.
When I finally go back downstairs, she's there, waiting.
Wrapped in a towel.
Fuck me! I just managed to calm myself.
Just a towel, tucked in at the chest, her hair loose and down, a small bottle of something in her hand and bare feet on the hardwood, and she looks at me from the top of the stairs with an expression I recognize now, the one that means she's already made a decision.
"The Jacuzzi’s heated," she says.
I look at her. At the towel. At her face, where it's significantly safer.
