Chapter 16 #2
This was the exact smell that lingered on his varsity jacket when he put it around me the other night. It was the smell that hit me every time he leaned in close to whisper a fake sweet-nothing into my ear whenever Kelcey was watching. It was rich, deep, and overwhelmingly male.
Smoothing the lather over my skin felt shockingly intimate. I was literally washing myself in his scent, standing in his shower, surrounded by his personal space. The realization sent a sudden, hot shiver through my stomach that had nothing to do with the cold water.
Get a grip, Ainsley, I told myself sternly, scrubbing vigorously at my arms. It’s just body wash.
I shook my head, turning off the water to drown out the thoughts.
I grabbed a large, plush white towel from the cabinet under the sink and wrapped it tightly around my chest, tucking the end securely in the middle so it would stay up.
I dried my face, running a quick hand through my damp hair, and turned to grab the clothes Rhys had lent me off the counter.
I pulled on the clean underwear from my bag I had carried in under Rhys’s clothes, then Rhys’s shorts.
I had to roll them up a few times so they didn’t look like I was drowning in them.
I reached for the T-shirt. My hand swept over empty marble.
I froze. I looked down at the floor. Nothing.
I looked around the sink. Nothing. Oh, gosh.
I spun around, trying to figure out where it could have gone, and then I remembered those mischievous green eyes and the distracting smirk and the near-drop of clothes. Except it apparently wasn’t a near drop. I dropped the shirt in the middle of Rhys’s room.
I stared at the locked door in unadulterated horror. I couldn’t go out there without a shirt on.
“Ainsley?” Rhys’s voice barked from the bedroom, followed by two firm knocks on the door. “You dead in there? We need to go in five.”
My throat went dry. “Uh. No! Not dead!”
“Great. Hurry up.”
“Rhys?” I called out, my voice squeaking slightly. I cleared my throat, trying to sound like a normal, functioning human being. “Rhys, hey. Um. I have a slight problem.”
Silence on the other side of the door. Then, a low sigh. “What did you break?”
“I didn’t break anything!” I insisted, clutching the towel tighter against my chest as if he could see through the wood. “I just... I dropped the shirt you gave me on the floor of your room.”
A long beat of silence stretched between us. I could practically hear the smirk forming on his face.
“So what you’re saying,” he said, his voice dropping an octave, sounding amused, “is that you’re stuck in there.”
“I am asking you to hand me the shirt,” I demanded, heat flaring up my neck and flooding my cheeks. “Just pick it up, open the door an inch, and pass it to me.”
“Or,” Rhys mused, “you could just walk out and grab it.”
“I don’t have a shirt, Rhys.”
“So wrap up in a towel.”
That was a decent idea, I supposed. But I wasn’t going to admit that to him. My fingers brushed over the towel, but then reality hit me and I dropped the plush fabric. “I’m not walking out there in front of you in a towel.”
“I’ve seen girls in bikinis, Ainsley. I think my heart can handle a towel.”
“Rhys, I swear—”
The door handle turned. I gasped, pressing my back against the sink, but the lock held.
“Relax,” he laughed softly, though there was a rough edge to his voice that hadn’t been there a second ago. “I’m turning around. Open the door and take it.”
I waited three excruciating seconds. “Are you actually turned around?”
“Yes, Ainsley. My back is to the door. Hand on my heart.”
I took a deep breath, unlocked the door, and pulled it open a few inches.
He was telling the truth. Rhys was standing two feet away, his back to me, holding the gray shirt out over his shoulder.
He was wearing a fresh dark tee and athletic shorts himself, his hair damp from a quick rinse in another bathroom.
The muscles in his broad back flexed slightly under his shirt as he held the clothes out.
“Quickly,” he murmured, his voice surprisingly gruff. “We’re going to be late.”
I reached my arm out, my fingers brushing his as I grabbed the fabric. His skin was warm. Too warm.
“Got it,” I whispered.
I started to pull back, but as I did, I lost my grip on one and the shirt fell to the floor. Again. I mumbled a curse. Rhys must have heard the soft rustle of it hitting the tile, because before I could utter a single word of warning, he instinctively spun around. “Did you drop—”
He stopped dead. The world shattered into a thousand suspended seconds.
Rhys’s eyes widened. His gaze dropped from my face, taking in the view of me in one agonizing sweep—my bare shoulders, the towel I was now keeping a very tight grip on, the water droplets running down my skin.
His jaw clenched so tight I heard his teeth click, a muscle ticking wildly in his cheek.
For three long, agonizing heartbeats, neither of us moved.
I wasn’t even sure either of us were breathing.
The air in the hall suddenly felt thicker than the air in the dance studio, heavy with a suffocating tension that made my skin prickle from head to toe.
He wasn’t looking at me like I was his rival’s little sister. He wasn’t looking at me like a prop in a fake dating scheme. He was looking at me like he wanted me.
He swallowed hard, his throat bobbing, and shoved a hand through his damp hair, forcefully ripping his eyes away from my body to stare fixedly at the wall above my head.
“Seriously, Ainsley,” he choked out, his voice thick and entirely stripped of its usual smooth confidence. He picked up the shirt from the floor without looking down and shoved them back into my hands, his fingers trembling slightly against mine. “Put... put the shirt on. I’ll be downstairs.”
He turned on his heel and almost fled out of his own room, pulling the door shut behind him with a sharp click that reverberated through my bones. I stood in the silence of the bathroom, my hand pressed against my chest, feeling my pulse racing at a terrifying speed.
My skin felt like it was on fire. The scent of his body wash was still clinging to me, but now it was mixed with the dizzying memory of the way he’d just looked at me. It wasn’t fake. Nothing about those three seconds had been fake.
It took me three tries to get it over my head correctly. It was hilariously large, the soft gray fabric swallowing me whole, falling well past my hips, smelling cleanly of detergent and faintly of him.
I dragged my wet hair into a ponytail, pulled myself together as best I could, and walked downstairs. Rhys was standing in the kitchen, leaning against the marble island, staring intently at his phone. He looked entirely composed, but when he heard my footsteps, his head snapped up instantly.
His eyes tracked me as I walked down the last few steps, dropping briefly to the absurdly oversized clothes engulfing my frame, before snapping back to my face.
The tense, dark look was gone, replaced by a carefully constructed mask of indifference—though the slight flush at the top of his neck betrayed him.
“You look like you’re wearing a parachute,” he said, offering a weak, tentative smirk.
“That’s in fashion,” I retorted, clutching my bag tightly to cover the nervousness threatening to break through my voice. “Let’s just go.”
The drive to the gym was entirely silent, but it wasn’t the comfortable silence of earlier.
It was thick, heavy, and packed with everything we weren’t saying.
Every time Rhys shifted gears, my eyes flew to his hands.
Every time he glanced in the rearview mirror, I caught the sharp side-profile of his face and felt a ridiculous, fluttering panic in my stomach.
And the whole agonizingly long drive to the gym, my mind kept flitting back to that look on his face outside the bathroom, the buzzing that never seemed to leave my body, and why this afternoon was going to be melded in my mind forever.