He caught it. One hand. Without looking.
I stared at the ceiling and said nothing because there were no words adequate to the situation.
Before I could locate any, another cramp began to build. Slow this time. Deliberate. The kind that gathered itself before it arrived, that made you aware of every second of its approach. My breath caught at the back of my throat.
“Here.” His voice was calm.“Throw it again. I won’t catch it.”
I opened one eye.
He was holding the pillow out to me. Steady. Patient. Not a trace of the smugness I wanted to punish him for.
“Get me a brick,” I said.
He sat carefully on the edge of the bed—the mattress dipping slightly with his weight, that small shift in the air between us that my body registered before my brain did.
“If you knock me out cold,” he said reasonably,“how exactly do I help you?”
I was about to answer.
Then he shifted slightly closer and the words dissolved entirely.
He smelled so good.
You knew this was going to happen. You could have warned me how bad it was going to be, I said to Bad Girl.
How was I supposed to know? It’s never happened before. It isn’t fun for me either. A pause. He does smell so good though. We could do worse.
She wasn’t wrong.
I edged a little closer to him and grabbed his elbow, pressing my nose to his shirt without any pretence of dignity. I was so hot. Getting hotter by the minute, the warmth of him making it worse and better at the same time in a way I didn’t have the capacity to examine right now.
“Here.” He reached down to the floor beside him.“I brought you something.”
He placed a bundle of clothes next to me on the bed.
I lifted a pale blue shirt and covered my face with it.
His cologne. A woody undertone. And beneath both of them the warmth of his skin—layered into something that had no name except his. Like that was all I needed to breathe. Like the air in the room had been wrong until this moment and this was the correction.
The cramp eased.
I rubbed the soft cotton against my cheek.
Inhaled.
And again.
So good.
There was more. Another bundle. Then another.
I smiled and hugged the pile and got to work arranging his scent all around me.
??????
It was bad.
Like really bad.
