Chapter Forty-Four #2
"Actually, there were no rooms," he told me, making me straighten slightly, understanding dawning.
He had nowhere to stay.
He looked too tired to drive.
There was only one bed in my room.
A queen.
Queens were certainly big enough for two people, but it was close, intimate.
The idea of being close, intimate with Barrett set my pulse into overdrive, making me aware of it tapping away at the side of my throat, my wrists.
"Oh," I said lamely, turning to look at him, trying to gauge his reaction. But it was one of those times where I found him oddly blank, expressionless, maybe a little emotionless. "Well... I mean... you can stay here. So long as you don't have like creepy ass sleep habits."
"What constitutes a 'creepy-ass sleep habit?'" he demanded to know, brows drawing together.
"Oh, you know. Crying yourself to sleep. Screaming into your pillow. Drawing a pentagram on the floor and promising your soul to Satan... the usual."
"I worry about the kind of people you've been sharing your bed with.
" It was throwaway comment, but somehow also a little personal.
We didn't talk about those types of things too often, instead choosing topics like things happening in the world, our opinions on them.
That sort of thing. Not discussing former sexual partners.
"I knew someone who used to relive his high school football games in his sleep," I informed him, my lips twitching. "He cheered himself on and referred to himself in the third person."
"What did he do when he lost?"
"There was whimpering," I told him, smiling when his lips curled up.
He wasn't someone prone to amusement, so it felt like I had accomplished something by putting that expression on his face.
"Alright, well, I got chips and cookies and white cheddar popcorn which, well, is always a good idea.
Oh, and I picked you up some of that lemon-lime soda you like so much. "
"Along with your Vitamin Water?" he asked, taking the six-pack of soda, putting it on the nightstand closest to the door, clearly claiming his side of the bed. I, well, I could be a bit of a starfish sleeper, but he could just learn that the hard way.
I hadn't thought anything was unusual when there was suddenly Vitamin Water in his fridge, thinking, hey, lots of people drink it, maybe he did too. It never crossed my mind that the flavors were the only two I liked—XXX and Power C. Coincidences happened.
But now that he mentioned it in that knowing voice, I had never seen any of them go missing when I wasn't there to drink them. I never saw them on his desk or in his bin.
He bought them for me.
Because, most likely, he'd seen them in my bin when he had been at my apartment.
That was very observant.
And... sweet?
I thought it was sweet.
Maybe someone else might have found it creepy. And it would have been if I didn't know he had been hired to rifle through my things and pick up tidbits about me.
So I was going with sweet.
"Oh, and your toothpaste," I told him, needing a change of conversation, feeling a weird warm tightening across my chest. I tossed the box toward him, watching as his face fell, as he reached for it like a snake that might bite him.
"This is winter mint."
"I know."
"I said sweet mint."
"Yeah, I know. I looked. I actually even asked the guy in that department. He said their store doesn't carry that flavor. I just got you what they did have. Something is better than nothing when it comes to toothpaste, in my humble opinion."
"It has to be sweet mint," he told me, voice gaining a weird edge. Almost upset? Maybe a twinge of desperation?
But... no.
That couldn't be right.
It was just toothpaste.
No one got upset over toothpaste. It was literally only in your mouth for two minutes, twice a day. Not a big deal.
But as my gaze settled more directly on his face, there was no mistaking it.
He was having some internal panic, some kind of freak out.
Over toothpaste.
He dropped the box, his one hand raising to start scratching at his inner arm.
Something about the whole situation had my stomach knotting, making me feel wholly out of my depth, not quite understanding what was going on, but knowing it was significant in some way, that I couldn't just shrug a shoulder, say something snappy about it.
"Ah, I'll be right back," I decided, grabbing my phone and keycard, heading into the hall.
Where I spent ten minutes calling around to see who was open and might have his sweet mint in stock. "Hey, Barrett?" I called into the room, watching as he jolted, but didn't turn. "I'll be right back, okay?"
There was no response. And I figured his panic attack was still bear-hugging him, so I just turned and ran out, got the toothpaste, turned the car back toward the hotel, I started piecing some things together.
He was a bit brash, rude.
Freakishly smart.
He had great recollection.
Acute attention to detail.
Shit with social cues.
Lost in his own head.
Obsessive about his work.
And now the toothpaste thing.
It felt wrong to speculate, to assume things about someone, but I was starting to get the feeling that maybe Barrett was perhaps a little on the spectrum.
I couldn't think of a single other explanation for all the other things mixed together. Especially when you paired it with a few of his stories about his brother and his former coworkers.
It made sense.
I didn't know enough about any of it to say for sure, but I made a mental note to look into it.
When I was alone again. When he wouldn't see, maybe get offended.
Especially if maybe he didn't even know it about himself?
I heard that a lot of high-functioning on-spectrum people often didn't even get diagnosed until late in life because people just thought very smart individuals were a little strange, a little standoffish, lost in their heads.
That could totally be the case with Barrett.
I didn't know much about his family, his upbringing, enough to know if his parents were the type to pick up on that sort of thing, or maybe brush it off as adolescent angst or something of that sort.
"Alright," I said, brushing into the room, trying to keep my tone breezy, light, as if it were no big deal that I just had to track down toothpaste at three in the morning.
"I found the sweet mint. Give me the other stuff.
I like that, and I'm running low," I told him, lying through my teeth, but it was worth the way his shoulders slackened, the way he seemed to finally be able to pull air into his hungry lungs again.
"Oh, good," he said, voice small. "Do you want the bathroom first or..."
"Go ahead," I offered, seeing the way the under-eye circles of his were starting to extend down toward his cheekbones. He needed the sleep more than I did.
Half an hour later, I was making my way out into the room after a quick shower, fully expecting him to be asleep, but found him half sitting up in bed, hands on the blankets at his sides, gaze whipping over to me.
And I swear, he took the deepest breath ever.
I'd never given much thought to my body products, other than having this non-negotiable idea that they all had to match smell-wise - which complicated things more than you might imagine.
People practically bathed in perfume and cologne.
But they weren't about to share a bed with someone who maybe had issues with smells and sounds and all that.
"Do, I, ah, have too much lotion on?" I asked, trying to be as casual as I could about it.
"No. I, um, I like your lotion," he informed me, shrugging a shoulder as my belly did a teensy flip-flop.
You knew you were hard up for male attention when someone telling you that you smelled nice gave you the belly backflips.
"Good," I declared, reaching for chips despite the fact that I had already brushed my teeth.
My dentist could yell at me about it in two months.
Right now, I needed chips. "So what are your feelings on TV and sleep?
" I asked, flipping up the blankets, sliding in, acutely aware of the mere inches between our bodies.
"Normally, I like quiet. But..." he said, trailing off with his hand raised like he was telling me to wait for it.
Then I heard it - things I never would have really noticed before unless my attention was brought to them.
Doors closing.
Elevator chimes.
The loud TV across the hall. The laughing in the room behind us. And, if I wasn't entirely mistaken, the thumping of some people getting busy in the room behind our TV.
"Okay, TV it is," I agreed a bit frantically, reaching for the remote, wanting to get the TV on before the thumping started being accompanied by groans and moans.
Because, quite frankly, my body decided that being in bed with a man after so long without one was problematic, making my pulse quicken, my sex clench.
I had to press my thighs together to ease the ache there as I flicked through the channels.
"Any preference?"
"Something light."
"TV Land it is," I agreed, finding the channel, then putting the remote away. "Is my eating going to bother you?"
"We're about to find out."
"Do you snore?"
"Not that I know of."
"Well, we'll find out, I guess. Goodnight, Barrett," I told him, awkwardly watching the screen, as if saying goodnight was somehow the sexiest of comments to make.
"Goodnight," he told me in a choked voice a minute later. I thought he had fallen asleep until a few moments later, his voice sliced through the relative silence of the room. "Hey, Clarke?"
"Yeah?" I asked through a half-mouthful of chips.
"I'm glad you're not dead."
Shakespearian sonnets they were not, but I somehow felt that those words were important, meant something to him.
And the thought that kept me doe-eyed awake until daybreak was a new one, an interesting one.
Maybe the belly backflips and skittering pulse rate were not entirely one-sided.
—
Consciousness came to me with a suspicious sharp pain in my lower hip and waist, a pounding in my shoulder.
I had, thus far, avoided the seemingly inevitable side effects of age. Like sneezing wrong once and walking funny for the rest of your life. Like waking up with a backache that made it impossible to sit right for the whole day.
My first thoughts weren't that maybe something was unusual about this particular morning, but rather that This was it.
I was officially old. I needed to invest in orthopedic shoes, get a subscription of Ibuprofen, and start being allergic to new forms of technology.
Maybe throw in a little dose of bitching about the youths.
A heaping dollop of I can't make it through the opening credits before I fall asleep during movies.
All that fun, old people stuff.
That is until I realized that I was moving. Or, more specifically, the parts of me that were uncomfortable were moving. Without me having anything to do with it.
It was then I sprung fully awake and became aware of what had really happened.
I had star-fished all over poor Barrett.
My hip was cocked up on his. My shoulder was jabbed unceremoniously against his ribcage.
As uncomfortable as I was, I knew he couldn't have been faring much better.
Wanting to check if my gracefulness was thus far undetected, I slowly turned my neck, only wincing a little at the stiffness there, expecting peacefully closed eyes.
But finding wide open ones.
I learned something new about him right then.
His usually guarded, speculative eyes were soft first thing in the morning, a little greener than brown. The circles were gone. His hair was bed-messy. One of his arms was thrown upward, tucked behind his head.
"Good morning."
So, I mentioned the impulse control thing before. It extended to all aspects of my life.
Including the intimate parts.
And, well, his hair wasn't the only thing that was bed-sexy in the morning. His voice was too. It poured through my system like molten lava, waking up parts of me that had been forced into hibernation for a long while.
Thinking, yeah, thinking wasn't involved in the least.
One minute, I was awkwardly sprawled backward across him. The next, I had turned, sprawling over him chest-to-chest in a very deliberate way as my lips sealed over his.
Beneath me, his body stiffened, making my rational mind grasp for some control over my hungry body, wondering if maybe physical touch was just... not a thing he enjoyed.
Even as the thought planted, attempted to take root, as my hands pressed down onto the mattress to start pushing my body up and away, a low, wolf-like growl moved through him, vibrating up into my body as his hands lifted, closing around me.
Tight. So crushing that I felt my air start to get constricted.
But I couldn't seem to make myself care as his lips came alive under mine, pressing harder, d more, demanding more, taking over.
One arm stayed anchored across my lower back.
The other raised, framing the side of my face for a second before sifting back into my hair, curling, tugging just to the point of deliciousness, making a low moan move through me as his body curled, turned, pushed me onto my back with his body before all its hard lines pressing into me.
Free to move, my hands rose, one sinking into his hair, the other slipping down his back, tracing over the space where his shirt had ridden up, exposing a sliver of warm skin.
My thighs fell open, inviting, urged him between.
He did, just a second before pressing up, pulling his lips from mine, waiting until my eyes fluttered open, barely able to concentrate over the chaos swarming my system.
Because, like everything Barrett did, he kissed thoroughly, with conviction, with a purpose.
And, well, I wanted to know what else he could do thoroughly, with conviction, and with a purpose.
Preferably once we shrugged out of a few pesky layers.
But then he ripped it all away.
With just one simple question.
Ten little words.
"Why did you get kicked out of the police academy?"