He didn’t even have a penis.
“Well, I need to be here if I’m going to do this.”
“You make it sound so ominous. And kind of like a dangerous job.”
“It is dangerous. I might fall and bludgeon myself to death on your shoulder.”
“I’d turn just in time and catch you on my pillowy bosom.”
“I don’t think ‘pillowy’ is the word I would have used,” she said, but even as she did her mind was comparing his chest to something she could rest her head on. She could see it out of the corner of her eye, all broad and plump. It looked just as inviting as it had inSwan Song, only here in reality he had chest hair.
He had all of this lovely, rough chest hair that she couldn’t remember ever seeing in any of his movies. And she would have noticed too, because it wasn’t just rough. It was pretty thick and very dark, and it reached all the way down to his insanely hard stomach and the jut of muscle arrowing down from his hips and, and, and—
“Want me to pose for you?”
“What? No, no, God, no—sorry. Sorry, I just—”
“I’m teasing.”
“It wasn’t... I didn’t—”
“Alice, Alice, I’m teasing you. I asked you to come in here, remember? I wanted you to wash my back. It’s fine for you to look at whatever you want to look at. In fact, it’s more than fine. It’s kinda giving me goose bumps.”
He showed her his bristly arm to prove it, though that didn’t really explain anything to her. What exactly was it about her gormless expression that was giving him goose bumps? She felt like an explorer who’d just discovered man, and he seemed to agree. She asked him why before she could stop herself, and his answer made her entire body burn with embarrassment.
“I don’t know, I don’t know. You’re just so...intense about it. So curious—like you’ve never seen a guy’s body before.”
There was probably a non-humiliating way she could have told him here that she hadn’t, but if there was she couldn’t think of one. Twenty-year-old women were supposed to have seen naked male bodies—and she knew “movies” and “one time when I accidentally walked in on my dad as he got out of the shower” did not count.
In fact they probably counted against her.
Adults did not tell stupid naked-dad stories.
“You say that as though your body is typical,” she said, and almost nodded in satisfaction. There—that got her off the hook. Of course it also got her into a very thorny area in which she had to explainwhyhis body wasn’t typical, but she would deal with that hurdle when she came to it.
As in right now.
“You think it’s not?”
“I think you’re very...big.”
“And that’s a bad thing.”
“I didn’t say bad.”
“So it’s good then, huh?”
He knew exactly what he was doing, the bastard. She could actually see him trying to suppress his teasing grin, as she worked on a way to say no without seeming like a total liar. And just when she was sure she’d come up with the perfect answer, he caught her gaze with those sparking eyes and she was lost again.
“I wouldn’t say it was awful.”
“Well that’s kind of you.”
“It has some positives.”
“Such as?”
She didn’t answer him with words. It seemed best not to answer him with any words. She couldn’t trust them to behave once they were close to her vocal cords, so instead just went with shoving the bunched-up washcloth against his left shoulder blade. He’d get the gist then and even if he didn’t—this was what she was supposed to be doing. She was supposed to be washing his general back area.
