“I’ve been meaning to. I will. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight and thank you for trusting Home Defense.”
Tenley waits a second, as I lie my head back on the carpet and sigh. “Is she gone?”
“Yes. Crisis averted,” I murmur. “Only thing on fire right now is my ego. It’s going down in flames.”
“Your password is Stanley? As in Stanley Cup?” She rolls her eyes. “So boring and predictable.”
“Nobody asked you.”
“Why was your steam shower on at this hour?” she asks. “You showered when you got home from practice.”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“Doesn’t showering wake you up? It’s why people do it in the morning.”
“Can you just go back to bed so I can get up?”
She doesn’t move or speak so I lift my head off the floor to figure out why. She’s standing next to the foot of my bed. Her blue eyes are sparkling. Her mouth a little open, like she’s in shock, but it’s also turned up in the corners like she’s fighting a smile. “Why do I have to go away for you to get up?”
“Duh. Because I’m naked,” I snap and tilt my chin in her direction. “And quite frankly you almost are too. I’m up here sleeping in a fucking snow suit and you’re in that?”
"Is it an invisible snowsuit, like the Emperor's clothes? Because I don't see any snowsuit."
She's enjoying this. A lot. I can tell by the giddy lilt in her annoying voice. I curse into the floorboards. "Tenley. Leave. I need to get up."
“I dare you to just do it,” Tenley says, the lilt in her voice turning to taunting. “You shower naked in front of, like, thirty people just about every day. I dare you to get up off the damn floor in front of me.”
“You want to see me naked?”
She laughs. “Hell no. It’s a dare. The pleasure for me comes from watching you lose the bet, Skippy.”
This is so fucking ridiculous. But now I'm cold and tired, and totally over the entire night. I just want to go to sleep and pretend this never happened. And I know my insomnia won't go the hell away if I let her walk out of here thinking she's won something. Nash Westwood doesn't lose. So I take a deep breath, hold it, and as gracefully as possible on the still slick tile, I get up off the floor.
It takes about two and a half seconds and then I’m standing there, as naked as the day I was born, a foot and a half from Tenley. Her eyes drop lower, and lower, and lower, very slowly, and I don’t move. The towel is still clutched in my left hand but I don’t try to cover myself with it. She wants to look. And I kind of like it. It’s the first time I am absolutely certain Tenley won’t be able to come up with a snarky remark. I’m a professional athlete at the top of my sport and every inch of my body reflects that.
And as for my cock, well it’s somehow managed to stay half hard, and even soft it’s definitely not something she’ll tease me about. Her eyes are on it now, and I can tell she likes what she sees. But I start wrapping the towel around me when her cheeks flush and she bites her bottom lip. Because it’s threatening to make my cock go from semi to fully hard.
She blinks and her eyes shoot to mine. Swallowing, she says, “Didn’t think you had it in you. Impressed.”
“I think I impressed you in more ways than one tonight.”
“Cocky. Gross.” She rolls her eyes before they flitter down to the bulge now under the gray terrycloth. “I think it’s safe to say you’re not repulsed by what you see either.”
My eyes sweep her body again even though I tell them not to. They listen as well as my dick. “You’re a smokeshow Tenley and you know it. You don’t have to hear it from me.”
Our eyes lock. It feels like an eternity that we stare at each other, and something thicker than steam is clogging up the air now. But then she takes a step back and points to the shower. “Speaking of smoke. What the hell were you doing?”
“I told you. Showering.”
“Why?”
“Because I needed to.”
She frowns and folds her arms, which does nothing but push up those tits of hers. Yeah, I can totally see her nipples through her tank. She tilts her head as if mulling something over. “You know Tate used to take multiple showers a day when we were teenagers. Because Conner once came over unannounced and barged into his room and caught him… So he started doing it in the shower until Mom complained he was using too much water and… Yeah. Were you jacking off?”
“What the hell!”
