Until Eddie.
But no matter how I turned it over in my head, I couldn’t figure out how to stop myself from liking him, from being so attuned to him, from being so attracted to him. My only saving grace was that he was straight and hadn’t seemed to notice. But what if that changed?
I finished rinsing off and reached for my towel, no closer to a solution. I toweled off quickly, then wrapped the towel around my waist. I hadn’t heard a peep from Eddie, so he was still asleep. Good. That meant I could sneak into the living room without having to put my sweat-soaked shirt and shorts back on since I’d forgotten to bring clean clothes into the bathroom with me.
My hand was on the doorknob when the bathroom door suddenly opened and Eddie stood in front of me. We both froze. His eyes dropped, traveling lower and lower and lower still as I held my breath. This wasn’t weird unless I made it so. Just two guys sharing a bathroom.
But Eddie’s eyes still weren’t meeting mine. Instead, they were fixed somewhere around my waist, right where a trail of hair disappeared under the towel, which, I will admit, was slung rather low on my hips, showing off the deep V of my hipbones.
Which shouldn’t have made a difference, but somehow, it did. Eddie’s face was rapidly turning a shade of red that clashed spectacularly with his sandy brown hair as he kept staring at my body. Like he’d never seen a half-naked man before. Like he was mesmerized by the sheer sight of me. Like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
Except that wasn’t quite right, was it? Because the look on his face wasn’t shock or embarrassment or even simple surprise. It was something else entirely. Something that looked an awful lot like…
Interest.
Appreciation.
Want.
“I’m sorry,” Eddie stammered, finally dragging his eyes up to meet mine. “I thought you were… I didn’t realize… I’ll just…”
He backed away, then rushed into his bedroom and shut the door with slightly more force than was necessary, leaving me standing in the living room with my worldview quietly rearranging itself.
That hadn’t been the reaction of a straight man accidentally walking in on his roommate. That had been the reaction of someone who liked what he saw and was mortified about being caught looking.
Eddie wasn’t straight.
Fuck. Fuck.Fuck.
5
EDDIE
I woke up the next morning with the kind of bone-deep mortification that usually followed dreams about showing up to state dinners in one’s underwear—my personal variation on the naked-in-school nightmares most teenagers had.
Except this wasn’t a dream, and what I’d done was so much worse than any breach of royal protocol. I groaned as the mental image of him played through my head again, like it had been burned into my mind.
The sight of him had quite literally stolen my breath. Water droplets had clung to his shoulders and chest, highlighting the lean muscle definition that spoke of years of military training. His chest was perfectly defined and smooth, making me want to slide my hands across it to feel it. The only hair he had was a narrow trail from his stomach downward that disappeared tantalizingly beneath the white towel that hung precariously low on his narrow hips.
And those hips…
Bloody hell and back, he had two of those mouthwatering… I didn’t even know what they were officially called, but Floris always referred to them as cum gutters. Which was wrong on so many levels and yet wholly right at the same time. I’d wanted to lick them, kiss them, worship them… and then continue on to the rest of his body.
He had a scar along his left shoulder that I wanted to trace with my fingertips, and another smaller one below his collarbone that made me wonder what stories his body could tell. The way the bathroom light had caught the angles of his face, the strong line of his jaw still slightly damp from his shower, the unconscious confidence with which he carried himself even in nothing but a towel—it was overwhelming in the most delicious way.
I’d seen attractive men before, of course, but never one who seemed designed specifically to make me forget every lesson in propriety I’d ever learned. As a result, I’d been caught staring at my bodyguard’s nearly naked body like some sort of… Well, like someone who found men attractive. Which, to be fair, I did. But Bash wasn’t supposed to know that.
No one was supposed to know that.
I lay in bed listening to his morning routine through the walls—the familiar sounds of him coming back from his workout, then his shower, shave, and efficient preparation for the day—and tried to formulate a plan.
Perhaps if I timed my emergence from my bedroom carefully, we could avoid any awkward morning-after conversations.
Perhaps I could pretend it had never happened.
Perhaps Bash would be gentleman enough to never mention it.
And perhaps I was deluding myself.
