Bounced! Chapter 1 #2
He tilted his face up, lips already parting, eyes going soft and sure.
I bent toward him.
Close enough to feel his breath.
Close enough that another half inch would have done it.
He smelled like eucalyptus and someone else’s cologne.
That was all it took.
Someone else’s cologne, a stranger’s brand. The whole thing cracked down the middle, because in the half second before a kiss, when I was close enough to breathe his same air, that’s when I found out whether I was kissing a person or the shape of one.
I already knew the answer, and the answer emptied me out from the inside.
I pulled back.
Not fast, not like he’d done anything wrong, because he hadn’t. He’d been generous and warm and exactly what I’d hoped for.
I pulled back slowly and let my hand trail off his neck like an apology. He opened his eyes and read my face. To his enormous credit, he didn’t look hurt, just curious or maybe a little sad on my behalf, which I couldn’t stand.
“There he goes,” he said softly.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He picked his towel up off the floor without breaking my gaze. “You almost had you a night.”
“Yeah.” My voice went to gravel as my gaze fell to the floor. “I almost did.”
He toasted me with his little paper cup and drank it himself, as I made myself walk away before I could change my mind, which, for one dangerous second, I very nearly did.
I was barely paying attention when a hand landed on my chest.
I froze.
The hand belonged to someone who’d come up on my blind side, which took some serious spy work, because I don’t have much of a blind side.
He was smiling up at me with warmth and even greater intent, fingers already working slowly through my damp gray, following the trail of it down my stomach like he had all night and intended to use every hour.
He looked about my age, maybe forty, with salt at his temples, and forearms that said he did something with them for a living.
The look of him had me hard, my towel tenting again, before I knew it was happening.
“Hey,” he said, as his hand moved over my chest like it was reading braille and enjoying the story.
“Uh, hi,” came out rougher than I meant.
“This whole situation you’ve got going on,” his palm flattened and pressed, testing, the way you lean into a horse you want to mount. “I could stand here doing this a while and be really, really happy.”
“I’ve been told it’s aggressively mammalian.”
He grinned.
“I’d call that a selling point.” His thumb dragged lower, slow and deliberate, tracing the hair past my navel.
My breath caught, and the low pulse of the room seemed to sync itself to my heartbeat.
My body, the traitor, responded the way a body responds.
Everything downstairs filed an enthusiastic report, in triplicate, underlined, notarized.
Everything upstairs read the report, initialed it, and quietly declined to act.
What the fuck?
More accurately, what the actual not-fuck?
I had, at this point, been forced to choose between the guy’s hand and my hip.
I chose his hand, because his hand was warm and certain and asking a question my whole body was howling to answer.
My monkey-brain let go of the towel. The towel, sensing weakness, took full advantage and dropped clean off, pooling around my feet on the cool tile with the finality of a curtain at the end of a show.
For a second, neither of us said anything.
His gaze drifted downward, unhurried, and came back up several degrees warmer.
“Oh,” he said. “Well, hello.”
Down the hall, someone applauded. Two claps.
Somewhere farther off, a voice called, “I give it a ten!”
I bent, retrieved what remained of my dignity in cloth form, and refashioned it around my waist. Salt-and-pepper man watched with the amused patience of someone witnessing a barn raised by a lone farmer.
I straightened. His hand had come off my chest, not offended, almost tender, which was somehow worse.
“You alright?” he asked quietly, “Because from where I’m standing, you’ve got no reason in the world to be walking anywhere.”
“Yeah.” My voice came out low and wrecked, roughed up by the part of me still voting hard to stay. “Yeah, sorry. It’s not you, and it’s not the—“ I gestured at the towel. “The wardrobe malfunction.”
He laughed, covering his mouth to muffle it. “It’s never me,” he said. “I’m a delight.”
“You seem like it. That’s kind of the problem.”
He tilted his head, letting it be true without making me explain. “You just get here?”
“Something like that.”
“You’ll warm up.” He patted my chest once, friendly now, the heat folded and put away without hard feelings. “Or you won’t. Either way, there’s a hot tub through there with warm water, warm company, and no towel to lose. A man could forget his own name in that room.”
That was, unfortunately, exactly the problem.
Forgetting my own name was the one thing I’d come here to do.
It was also the one thing I couldn’t manage, even with my whole body begging me to try.
In a blink, he was gone, vanished through a door left open.
I stood in the steam feeling every inch of the wonderfully aching and aroused situation I’d driven eleven miles to put myself into.
Fine. I thought. One look at the hot tub. One look, and then I’ll go home and admit this whole expedition had been a failure and eat something over the sink like a bachelor in a commercial for frozen dinners.
One look.
I could manage one look.
I rounded the corner into the pool room.
The steam grew thicker, rolling off the water in slow columns, the light coming from somewhere beneath the surface so the whole room shifted and swam.
Bodies moved, half-seen and unhurried. At the far edge, beside the hot tub, a man stood with his back to me, toweling off.
Water dripped from the muscles of his lean, taut back. His hair, still wet and un-toweled, hung limply to his shoulders, pressing against his head and skin. The low light from the nearby pool shone up, illuminating golden skin that made me—
My heart stopped.
I don’t mean that the way people mean it when they’ve stubbed a toe. I mean the whole engine of me seized with one hard clutch behind my ribs, and everything, the heat, the ache, the pulse in my blood, went dead silent.
I knew that back.
I knew the breadth of those shoulders and the way they tapered down.
I knew that hair, dark with dampness, going to gray at the edges and curling a little at the nape.
I knew the whole set of him, his weight shifting on one hip, the unhurried competence of a man drying his own arms like the room was his to take.
When he lifted the towel to his shoulder, I caught ink. Dark, full sleeves ran wrist to elbow to bicep on both arms, flowing as his muscles moved.
Wes?