Asshole.
He brought me to the edge with those hands, that mouth, that devastating, deliberate patience—and then he stopped. Pulled back. Walked away like I was a chore he'd completed.
The tremor starts in my legs first. A fine, violent shudder that works its way up my thighs, through my hips, into my chest. I roll onto my side and curl tight, knees to my chest, fist pressed hard against my belly. The ache between my legs is a deep, resonant throb. I squeeze my eyes shut.
It meant nothing.
I say it to the inside of my skull. Say it until the syllables lose shape.
It was reflex. He's a man who knows exactly how to use his body, his hands, his mouth—and I'm a woman who hasn't been touched in longer than I want to admit. That's the entire equation. There's no other variable.
But my body isn't interested in equations. It remembers the rough drag of his jaw against my inner thigh. The way his fingers pressed into my hips as if he was mapping me, conquering lands he intended to revisit.
It remembers the sound I made.
God. The sounds I made.
Anger cuts through the haze. Not just at him—at myself. At the way I arched into his touch. The way my hands found his hair and held on. I handed him a weapon and watched him pocket it, and he didn't even have the decency to use it. He just kept it.
I sit up. The motion is abrupt, stiff. The silk falls away and the air of the room hits my skin and I'm moving before I decide tomove—across the floor, into the bathroom, cold marble under my bare feet.
The woman in the mirror looks wrecked.
Lips swollen. Eyes too dark, too wide. A faint sheen across her skin like she's been running. I stare at her for three seconds, then turn the shower handle all the way to cold and step inside.
The shock slaps me with hundreds of frozen needles. Cold water pounds every inch of exposed skin—shoulders, chest, stomach—and I inhale sharply, the sound ragged in the tiled space. I stand under the spray and breathe through my teeth and wait for the relief that's supposed to come. The reset. The clean, numbing distance.
Only, it doesn't.
The frigid water runs over my body and instead of erasing the memory of his hands, it seals it. Every place the water hits is a place he touched. The spray against my inner arms. The rivulets running down the back of my thighs. My skin stays tight, aware, hyper-sensitized. I press my forehead against the tile and wait. It doesn’t help.
I scrub at my arms, my neck, the curve of my shoulders. Trying to wash away his scent. The smell of musk and something warm and dark that got into my lungs and lodged there like smoke. It clings. Even under the cold spray, even with luxury boutique soap, I catch traces of it and my stomach tightens in response before I can stop it.
The ache doesn't wash away. It dims, slightly. Enough to function.
Two weeks.I repeat it under the spray. Two weeks and you walk away.
I dry off with a rough towel, drag on my own clothes—cotton shorts, a worn tank top, the soft gray hoodie I grabbed at the last minute when I packed. My clothes. The ones that belong to my life, not this one. I pull the hoodie over my head and breathein the familiar smell of my own laundry detergent and my chest unknots, fractionally.
Then I walk out of the bathroom and stop.
He's back.
The air changes before I fully process the visual. He stands near the window, of course, always framed by windows, always backlit, always positioned like he owns whatever room he occupies. He's changed. Dark gray sweatpants riding low on his hips. Black t-shirt, sleeves cut close to biceps that have no business looking like that at whatever hour of the morning this is. He holds two glasses of water with the casual authority of a man who has never once questioned whether his presence is welcome.
My pulse spikes. Hard and immediate, a single violent kick behind my sternum that I feel all the way to my fingertips.
Calm down. I order my body, fruitlessly.
He turns his head and finds me in the doorway, and the eye contact alone accelerates my breathing—tightens it, shallows it, makes me draw one careful breath through my nose to steady myself. I catch his scent from here. That same warm, dark note that the shower failed to scrub from my memory. My stomach knots.
I hate him.
"Drink," he says. Not a command. A fact, delivered quietly, as if my hydration is simply one of many things he's already decided to manage.
I don't move.
He walks toward me, unhurried, each step measured and deliberate. Stops two feet away and extends a glass. The cool condensation catches the light. His knuckles graze my fingers as he presses it into my palm—barely anything, skin to skin for less than a second—and the contact fires straight down my spine, arrives at the base of my stomach as a low, unwelcome pulse.
