When I looked up, Marco was watching me with an expression I couldn’t read. His jaw was tight, his eyes dark.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah. This is just—” He gestured vaguely. “Weird.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “It is.”
But weird didn’t quite cover it. Weird was too simple a word for whatever this was.
I stood up and eyed the shower. I’d already put the chair inside, positioned under the spray. All I had to do was help him in, let him shower, help him out.
Simple. Clinical. Like any other injury assistance.
I grabbed the shampoo from the shelf and turned the bottle upside down, working the last of it toward the cap. Maybe a half an inch left.
“You got another bottle under here?” I reached toward the cabinet beneath the sink.
“We’re fine.” Marco’s voice came out sharp, almost strangled.
I looked up. His hand was braced against the edge of the toilet, knuckles white, and he was staring at the cabinet like it had personally offended him.
“Étienne. The shampoo is fine.”
“I was just going to grab a new?—”
“It’s fine.”
I straightened slowly, the cabinet door untouched. He wasn’t looking at me anymore, just staring somewhere past my shoulder, jaw set.
Weird. But okay.
I set the bottle back on the shelf. “Sure.”
I turned on the water, testing the temperature with my hand until it ran warm but not too hot. Steam began filling the bathroom, curling around us, fogging the mirror. I kept my focus on adjusting the showerhead angle, on making sure the spray would hit him properly when he sat in the chair. Anything to avoid looking at Marco sitting naked behind me.
“Okay,” I said when the water was right. “Let’s get you in.”
I turned back to him, wrapping my arm carefully around his waist while he gripped my shoulder for balance. His skin was warm, almost feverish against mine, and the steam made everything feel more intimate than it should. This wasn’t the locker room with twenty other guys around. This was just us, alone, in the humid privacy of his bathroom.
We shuffled forward together. I helped him lift his injured foot over the lip of the shower, guided him slowly to the chair, made sure he was stable before starting to pull away.
“You good?” I asked, my voice coming out rougher than intended.
“Yeah. I’ve got it.”
I should have left then. Should have stepped back immediately, closed the shower door, given him privacy. But I glanced down—just for a second, just to make sure he really was stable—and that’s when I saw it.
He was hard.
Completely, undeniably aroused, and there was no way to pretend I hadn’t noticed.
Heat flooded my face so fast I felt dizzy. My gaze snapped away, but the image was burned into my brain. Marco, naked, aroused, in his shower. The intimacy of it, the wrongness of seeing it, the fact that my body was responding?—
“I’ll be right outside,” I blurted, already backing toward the bathroom door. “Just call if you need—if you?—”
I didn’t finish the sentence. Just got out of there as fast as I could without running, pulling the door closed behind me with shaking hands.
In the hallway outside his bedroom, I leaned against the wall and tried to get my breathing under control. Tried not to think about what I’d just seen. Tried not to think about the heat that had shot through me when I’d noticed, or the fact that my own body was betraying me now, responding to something I absolutely should not be responding to.
