23. Chapter 23
Chapter twenty-three
Dane
A bout five in the morning, Dane heard rustling and water running. It wasn’t particularly loud, but he wasn’t expecting to hear anything, so it dragged him out of sleep. He looked around at his hotel room.
No.
He looked around at a hotel room that looked an awful lot like his, but was decidedly different. He never closed the curtains in a hotel, and these were both drawn and clipped together with one of the hangers from the closet. Where he left his luggage by the dresser, there was none to be seen. Sure, the room was dark, but there was light coming from under the bathroom door.
Which, as he started to wake up, was also a pretty good indicator that something was up. He wasn’t sharing a room with anyone, after all.
The pieces busted through his still sleepy fog and he fumbled for his phone. Sure enough, they’d buzzed through not four, but eight episodes of Ancient Protectorate. After four episodes, the streaming service automatically shut off in case you fell asleep.
Which it seemed they had.
Dane wasn’t entirely certain what to call the emotion currently buzzing through him. It wasn’t panic, but it wasn’t exactly a warm fuzzy feeling, either. He loved the thought of them crashing in bed together while watching anime. Very much, that was the kind of activity he could get on board with. He appreciated that, as best he could tell, Aras had already woken up and was in the shower, and hadn’t felt the need to send him off to his own hotel room. But he also knew this was probably pushing things. Even if he didn’t fully understand or agree with Aras’s reservations, they were his reservations. He could have them. Sharing a bed, platonically or otherwise, might very well grate against the edges of those boundaries.
The water shut off and Dane didn’t have any time left to consider options. He wasn’t going to lay there and pretend to still be asleep, so he reached over to the nightstand and turned on the small sconce attached to the wall.
A few seconds later, the light turned off from the bathroom and the door swung open. Dane, again, wasn’t going to pretend he was blind, but he steeled himself to act like it was nothing, no matter what state of undress Aras walked out in. Like, he had to have known it was a possibility that Dane could wake up, so he wouldn’t walk out totally butt-ass naked…right?
Dane was half-relieved, half-disappointed to be proved right as Aras walked out, a towel wrapped around his waist, his hair sopping wet, and his chest and torso exposed. He had thick, dark hair under his arms, shown off as he raised a smaller towel to try and dry some more water off his hair. Definitely some good definition in his pecs. And the abs Dane had spotted the night before were on full display. Not over-defined, but absolutely present. His eyes met up with the dark trail of hair that started a few inches above his navel. It flared broader as it reached the upper edge of the towel and disappeared.
After a couple moments, Aras apparently noticed him and stopped. He hiked his towel up a little higher, even though it didn’t appear to be at any risk of falling, and lowered the towel from his hair. “I hope you don’t mind. I didn’t want to make you get up for no reason.”
“I’m not mad if you’re not.” Dane smiled and looked him up and down, exaggerating the shifting of his head. “And I’m not mad about any of this, either.”
“Lewd, at this hour of the morning?”
He turned around, but as far as Dane could tell, Aras was fine.
Which left Dane a little room to tease and poke. And he every intention of using that room. Especially as Aras went into the closet and bent over to get some clothes out of his suitcase. Seeing the towel hug slightly to his ass apparently gave him the courage he needed. “If I was being lewd, I’d have tried to join you in the shower. Obviously.”
“Well why didn’t you?”
Dane hadn’t been expecting a response , and certainly not that one. Aras had been falling all over himself the night before, all too nervous. Not anything like this. So it took Dane a few moments to get his brain back together and working so he could reply. “Are you just horny in the morning, or have you taken some miracle drug?”
“Horny gets handled in the shower.” He turned back around with a full outfit bundle under one arm, and a grin on his face. “And no drugs. But if this is a limited time situation between the two of us, then I’m not going to waste it pussyfooting around.”
“Wow. Another old person word.”
Aras took a couple steps closer, right until he was just on the edge of Dane’s bubble. Close enough that his presence couldn’t be ignored, even if Dane had wanted to, and also close enough to see individual hairs in his treasure trail. When he spoke, his voice was low and hoarse in all the best ways, and it skipped across the air like a record scratch. “Nice deflection, but I did in fact notice you staring when I got out of the shower. So next time, don’t you pussyfoot around either.” He reached down and tapped under Dane’s chin, tilting his head up slightly. “I shower every morning. If we’re coupling up, then let’s couple up.”
Then he left and went back into the bathroom, and Dane just had to sit there, hardening up and fumbling for his phone to check the time. He needed to handle his own shower—extra long to account for that encounter—and get into new clothes that he hadn’t slept in recently.
Just as soon as his knees turned back into solids and he had enough blood in his brain to remember how doorknobs worked.