Chapter 11
Chapter eleven
Clay
Louisa’s fingers brush my back, and I barely suppress a tremble.
I’m holding an empty highball glass, and I don’t know why.
My thoughts are hazy, but my memory is sharp enough to erase the crowded bar and bring me right back to the camper.
To Louisa’s pussy rocking on my tongue while I ground my cock into her mattress.
My face goes hot. I came in my pants—that doesn’t happen to me. It just doesn’t.
I lost control.
I haven’t managed to wrestle it back.
Getting her off was supposed to indulge my curiosity and bring an end to whatever inconvenient feelings I might be having for her. It wasn’t supposed to whet my appetite for more.
With an irritated sigh, I glance around the bar, find the face of the person I’m making a drink for, and force myself to remember. Right, a Jameson and Ginger. I need ice. I turn and walk straight into Louisa.
My hands go to her hips, her brown eyes wide as we sway, lost in a dance more instinctual than anything. Everything in my head goes to static, like an old radio flipped between stations.
“You’re being weird again,” she mutters, and it breaks the spell. We aren’t swaying. She’s trying to get around me. I let her go. She glances down before stepping around me. “Just clean that up.”
The highball glass I’d been holding lies shattered on the floor.
Briar breezes by.
“Am I being weird?” I ask her.
“You are the weirdest thing in the room, and that room includes a meat raffle,” Briar says, unloading her dirty glasses into a rack next to the washer.
That’s a hell of a long fall.
I need peace, clarity, or whatever it takes to stop my life from spiraling out of control.
So the morning after the meat raffle, I take a gamble, walking down the old dirt road toward the sauna, hoping Louisa won’t be there.
I can’t be in a room with her naked body and continue to deny that I want her again.
She might not be actively trying to annoy me into leaving, but I’m still an obstacle to her. She’s still one to me. We can’t trust each other, and wanting her—worse, feeling something for her—is a weakness.
One I will overcome.
It’s a cool morning, overcast and drizzly. Everything smells different, looks different, in the rain. Greener. Lusher.
Gloomier.
There’s no smoke coming out of the chimney, so Louisa isn’t here, which is good.
Definitely good. I’m not disappointed. Not even a little bit.
There’s no lock on the door, so I let myself in. Gray light streams in through a window over—
a goddamn shower!
I knew she was torturing me, demanding full access to the shower in the apartment twice a day, and she had another option the whole time? I’d respect her commitment to annoying me if I wasn’t the target.
Just to be certain that no surprises await me—large spiders, rabid opossums—I open the thick wooden door.
The room smells, unsurprisingly, like cedar, but there’s a light lavender fragrance to the cool air.
A wooden railing blocks off the barrel-shaped woodstove, and on top of the woodstove, a metal basket holds a number of rocks.
The walls are lined by a low bench, with a narrower one higher up along two of the walls.
When I flick the light switch in the first room, the light inside the sauna turns on. It must still be connected to the grid.
I turn the light off, close the door, and glance around the dressing room.
One lone wooden bench. The shower. A couple of fluffy towels hanging off hooks on the wall.
An empty wooden bucket with a ladle. There’s plenty of wood in a rack against the wall, and newspaper and matches, so I start a fire in the woodstove.
I fill the wooden bucket with water from the shower, then sit down to wait.
I’ve been too distracted. I’m significantly behind where I’d hoped to be in converting that money into something legal. Maybe I should risk contacting the college friend I was supposed to meet after the show in Vegas. We could meet up in Minneapolis or Chicago to swap the dirty cash.
Maybe I should leave.
Except I know I won’t. Not yet.
I scrub a hand over my face and stand up.
There’s a thermometer next to the door, and the sauna is warm enough that I might as well sit in there.
I strip, dropping my clothes onto the floor.
That I have to remind myself to pick them up and fold them neatly before setting them on the bench only shows how disordered my mind has become.
Dry heat greets me as I step inside the sauna.
I pour a couple of ladles of water onto the rocks on the stove, and the billowing steam smells like lavender.
Louisa must add a few drops of lavender oil to the water each time she uses the sauna.
Maybe if I buried my face in her hair, I’d smell it on her.
I slump onto the bench nearest the stove and lean against the wall.
It doesn’t take long for sweat to bead on my skin.
Maybe this thing that’s wrong with me bleeds out my pores, too, because it doesn’t take long for my messed-up thoughts to drip away.
It’s not peace. I doubt I could find something like peace. But the quiet is close enough.
Maybe fifteen minutes pass before the door hinges creak. I don’t bother opening my eyes. I hate how glad I am that she’s here. “Care to join me, Ms. Gallo?” I ask dryly.
“It is my sauna,” comes the inevitable husky reply.
“Good thing we’re sharing.” I don’t bother to cover my cock. For one, I’d have to move off this towel to wrap it around my waist. And two, she’s seen it before.
She says nothing. The door closes behind her, and I catch the lingering scent of goddamn cherries in the hot air and hear her settle onto the bench across from me.
It’s a different cherry scent today. More floral, less boozy than the one she seems to wear while working.
Not the smoky one she wore to Benji and Gina’s wedding, either.
She has at least three separate fragrances with a dominant cherry note, and this is the lighter, fresher one.
Not that I’m cataloging her perfumes or trying to figure out what each scent means to her, what moods or feelings each one might evoke.
In the silence between us, I picture her sitting with her legs crossed, her back arched, the towel artfully concealing just enough—a perfect pin-up pose, ready to go on some trucker’s biceps.
With a sigh, I give in and open my eyes.
Louisa is sitting on the high bench, not directly across from me but close enough that I could reach her foot if I leaned forward.
Her towel is spread out on the bench below her, her shapely legs primly crossed, though she’s completely naked.
She’s not posing for me or putting on a show.
She’s leaning against the wall, shoulders relaxed, enjoying the heat.
It’s even more alluring.
Once, I might have been able to look at her breasts and shrug them off as just another nice pair in a world full of nice breasts. Full, round, tipped in dusky pink. Starting to lose the inevitable war with gravity that comes to all natural C-cups.
But I saw them bathed in sunlight in that Shasta camper, with those rosy tips puckered. I watched those globes tremble as she came apart for me, and it was profound—a moment of absolute divine beauty.
I never touched them. Never felt those responsive nipples on my tongue, never blew a cool stream of breath over them to watch them tighten more. How did one time with this woman turn into a sea of regrets that there will never be more times?
She twists her hair up and secures it with the claw clip, her breasts lifting.
Fuck they’re stunning.
“You okay?” she asks. Her skin is already dewy with sweat, her eyelids heavy as she relaxes back against the wall.
It takes a moment to realize her voice was genuine. Not saccharine because she caught me staring. No, not staring. I’m scowling at her tits.
I scrub a hand over my face to hide the struggle of finding a more neutral expression. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
She spreads her arms in a way that’s both a shrug and a gesture to her naked body.
Shit, my cock is half-hard and well on the way to standing at full attention.
I fist the edge of the towel I’m sitting on, but there’s not enough towel to cover myself unless I move.
I rock to the side and tug. I don’t know why I’m feeling so vulnerable, and my irritation grows when I can’t free enough towel to cover myself.
“Don’t,” she says, her voice soft. Then, more casually, “What’s a little nudity between business partners? We’re past being shy.”
Vulnerability be damned. I can’t ignore the gauntlet thrown. I release the towel and lean back. “I have never been called shy. I was trying to be a gentleman.”
“Have you been called a gentleman?” she asks, arching a brow.
Her doubt stings. I rub at my sweat-slick chest. “Does it surprise you someone might?”
“No.”
“Then what?” I snap. She’s destroyed that little sliver of peace I’d found, but it would be easier to resent her if she weren’t naked. Easier to get up and walk out if I could stop trying to memorize her curves.
“I think you prefer others see you as an untouchable asshole.”
What drivel. “Hundreds of people have touched me. Thousands on stage.” The words sour on my tongue. Louisa doesn’t give a shit how many people I’ve slept with, how many people I’ve danced for—why should I want her to care?
“I’m not talking about physical touch,” she says, all languid and dismissive. “Sometimes, you might be a gentleman, so it doesn’t surprise me that someone might call you that now and again. What surprises me is that you might call yourself one.”