Chapter 8
Charlie
My fists bang against Mateo’s hotel door, my bags thrown at my feet. We are going to be late if he spends any more time on his hair and doesn’t move his ass toward the exit.
“We need to go,” I yell through the wooden barrier. “Mateo!”
My patience is not thin, it’s gone, eaten away by a poor night’s sleep, all because of Mateo and the uncomfortable sensation he left lodged in my throat when he called my scars beautiful.
No one should be awake at five thirty in the morning with no access to caffeine, and Mr. My-Hair-Needs-To-Be-Perfect is making it worse by adding to my baseline level of anxiety.
It’s already elevated compared to the average person, but it’s at an all-time high right now.
Everything is changing, including my relationship with Mateo, and I’m off-kilter and unsteady.
I had to escape to the lobby yesterday to settle my racing heart, to digest the gentleness of his touch and the sincerity in his declaration.
Jett distracted me with his antics and long-winded stories for most of the evening, but when Mateo pulled me onto the dance floor, my heart raced again, thumping in my chest in time with the music.
Spun round and round, I replayed his words in my mind: beautiful, brave, resilient, incredible. I almost wanted to believe him.
“Are you trying to wake the entire hotel?”
Spinning, I find Mateo leaning against the wall with coffee in both hands. “Do the little stomp again. It’s adorable.”
A cocky grin teases his lips, and my knees almost buckle from the strength of it.
Murder is illegal.
I do not look good in orange.
There are no iced lattes in prison.
The third reason reverberates deep within my soul, and I snatch my duffel bag, bypassing Mateo to the elevator.
“Look everyone, Charlie is stomping.”
That’s it. I cannot deal with Mateo’s snarky bullshit before the sun rises, especially when his smile sends me into a tizzy and his words bobble around my mind.
I turn around, ready to…I don’t know, yell at him, I guess, when Mateo shoves the to-go cup into my hand, peels the duffel bag from my grip, and saunters into the open elevator in three swift moves.
I stand, dumbfounded, with an iced latte in my grip.
Mateo watches triumphantly in the elevator. “C’mon, bruja . We’re going to be late.”
“No, no, no, no, no ,” I chant, hoping the more I say it, the less real this nightmare becomes. “No.”
When Sofía handed us our room keys, Mateo disappeared, but I stayed behind to talk to her. I needed space from Mateo and the wild emotions racing around my mind, and I needed to establish a BSF: Best Sea Friend.
Sofía reminds me of Amy: soft, kind, outgoing, confident in herself.
She was easy to talk to last night at the bar, offering small details about everyone at the table. In return, I told her about our advisors and our unorthodox dynamic.
Solidifying her as my BSF went splendidly. Sometimes you just know when you click with someone, the same way you know you hate something with your whole soul.
I redirect my attention to the very thing I currently hate with every fiber of my being: Mateo lounging on my bed. The only bed. In the center of the cabin. The one meant for me and my body. Alone.
He is sprawled out over the maroon sheets, his arms thrown behind his head. “Maybe try saying it in Spanish.” Mateo raises a brow. “ No. ”
I blink.
Asshole .
“What are you doing?”
“Relaxing in my room. What are you doing? Here to finally admit you’re madly in love with me?”
I choke on any coherent response, and my face flames a thousand degrees when he raises a brow. He’s stunned me into silence, and he knows it.
My duffel bag slumps to the ground.
This is my worst nightmare realized. We cannot share this tiny room, and we definitely cannot share the bed. There’s only a sliver of space on each side of the queen-sized mattress, and a small nightstand hangs off the wall on the right side beneath an ornate gold sconce.
A faux-marble desk and an upholstered chair sit against the left wall, paired with a large mirror mounted against swirling tan wallpaper. There’s a closet across from the bathroom and a cubby with two shelves. It’s smaller than Cheryl’s office.
I need more space from Mateo, not less, to squash the odd feelings in my chest.
Whipping the door open, I storm from the room. Mateo’s laughter chases me down the hallway as I search for Sofía to fix this minor mishap and assign me my own quarters, free of tall, charming, attractive men whom I want to throttle with the full force of my body.
Terror is the wind beneath my wings as I try to navigate the vessel, my dread-filled body blindly guiding me down empty hallways and into storage rooms. Fall in love with him? Please. He’ll be lucky if he makes it through the trip without me flinging him overboard.
Sofía is in the galley, speaking with the chef, when I find her.
“Can I speak with you for a moment?” I try to prevent the panic from creeping into the question, but it’s bubbling closer to the surface by the second.
“What’s up?”
“There’s been a mistake with Mateo’s room and mine.”
Her brow furrows as she flips through her paperwork. “Room 209?” At my nod, she says, “No mistake. That’s your room.”
“Yeah…” Annoyance creeps into my tone. “So why is Mateo claiming it as his room also?”
“Because it is?” Sofía’s face morphs from confusion to shock, then disbelief. “Your advisors didn’t tell you that you had to share a room?”
Oh, I am going to kill Cheryl and Dan. In my mind. I could never tell Cheryl I was upset with her; it would give me an ulcer.
“No,” I bite out, “they did not.”
“I’m so sorry. We told them when they asked for the switch that we didn’t have any single beds with the extra film crew. They told me not to worry about it. ”
She apologizes again, but I wave her off. It’s not her fault my advisor forgot to mention I would have to share a bed with him .
This is going to be a big fucking problem.
My plan was to avoid Mateo as much as possible by hiding in my cabin and only interacting with him when we had to advise.
It’s what I concocted last night when I couldn’t sleep because I was too busy thinking about how he spun me around on the dance floor and how easy it was to escape the swirling thoughts often clouding my mind.
Getting out of my head doesn’t happen often, but twice with Mateo, the voices have grown quiet, and for a few precious minutes, I could live in the moment, untethered from my thoughts.
I hope Mateo has a good back, because he’s about to become quite cozy with the floor. Three weeks at sea with him was going to test my patience, but three weeks commingling in a queen bed on a rocking vessel with no windows will end in bloodshed.
“Well?” he presses, his arms flexing as he sits up when I return to the cabin.
I ignore him and the smug look on his face, and aggressively unpack. My poor duffel takes the brunt of my anger, but it’s either the bag or Mateo’s face. He huffs, the sound uncomfortably intimate, and I stumble, kicking my luggage before disappearing into the bathroom to unpack.
Rogue strands stick out around my face, and my right eye twitches—a telltale sign I’m teetering on the edge of a conniption. I smooth out my hair and wipe the sweat from my brow, then haphazardly store my toiletries, monopolizing the little storage space the bathroom offers.
“Uh…Charlie?” Mateo trails off, the deep timbre of his voice traveling through the cabin and dancing along my spine. “I think your bag is buzzing.”
My toothpaste tumbles from my grip, crashing into the sink as his words register. Oh, fuck.
“Close your ears and plug your eyes,” I scream, diving for my bag.
This cannot be happening.
“Close my…what?”
“Look away , Mateo,” I screech, digging through my clothes so I can end this nightmare. “If you choose one moment in your life to listen to me, please choose right now.”
I could vomit from the embarrassment creeping up my throat as I pull out my blue vibrator and shut it off.
“Is that…” His husky accent puffs against my ear as he pops my personal-space bubble. The crisp, summery scent of his cologne assaults my nostrils in a tantalizing way.
“Get away,” I yell, spinning to block his view, the bright-blue vibrator tight in my grip. My body collides with his chest and the toy whirls, swatting him on the cheek.
Mateo recoils, staring down at my hand with horror.
Oh, Neptune, I just whacked Mateo with my sex toy.
I gasp. Mateo responds with his own. Time creeps to a stop as he examines the sex weapon in my hand.
“Did you just slap me with your alien dick?” he asks, each word slow and full of disbelief.
My jaw slackens.
“This is not an alien dick ,” I say, whacking him in the chest with the vibrator. “It is a normal fake penis. Thank. You. Very. Much.”
Each word is punctuated with a good ole dick slap between his pectoral muscles.
“Stop hitting me with it!” He rips the blue silicone out of my hand and waves it in the air. It jiggles back and forth, and I don’t know what’s worse: that the toy looks small in Mateo’s grip or the way my core bottoms out as he waves it through the air.
“Mateo.” I hold up a hand, creeping toward him like he’s a viper poised to strike. “Hand me the item, and we can forget this ever happened. ”
His smile is mischievous as he takes a step back.
There is no crystal found on earth that could save me from this predicament, and the small round fire opal dangling around my neck mocks me.
You asked for fiery passion, it whispers, well here you go. I’ll serve you up sexual tension on a silver platter.
“Were you going to use this?” he asks, his question low and intimate. The raspiness of his accent cranks the sexual tension dial to ten, and my knees wobble.
What the fuck is happening to me?
We don’t knee wobble for Mateo. I need to deflect, fast, to save myself from this situation.
“Are you shaming me for using a toy, Mateo? How very archaic of you. This is the twenty-first century.” Smug satisfaction floods my veins when he gulps. “Women enjoy sex as much, if not more, than men.”
His cocky grin falters, and I seize my opportunity, stealing the toy and returning it to my duffel bag.
“Now that you’ve groped my pleasure device,” I scold, and his face pales further, “I am going to the lab to see what they have for sample processing.”
He stands mute and baffled in the middle of the cramped cabin.
“ Adios, Mateo ,” I purr, squaring my shoulders and sauntering out the door to exude the idea I was unfazed by that interaction.
The door clicks shut, and I slump against the hallway, a shuddered breath escaping. I use the wall for stability while I take deep breaths to cool down my racing heartbeat.
I’m not going to survive in this small cabin—not with the mental image of Mateo holding my vibrator burned into my retinas.