12. On a Night like Tonight #3
The muscles across his shoulders and arms ripple with each motion, and his sun-kissed skin glows in the torchlight from beyond the windows.
But as he pivots to me, my gaze finds the scar across his chest, jagged and rising from his skin like corded rope.
The blood across his face, neck, and chest has since dried, and it cracks and flakes as he moves.
And maybe I should fear him still, but I don’t. Wildly, I don’t.
Before I can think any better of it, I move to him.
I take a piece of cloth and soak it in the water, a mirror of Adelphine’s actions only minutes earlier.
He freezes beside me, his dark eyes tracking my movements, and I can’t help but think of the rock, the brush of my pinky on his hand, the way he looked at me.
The way I must have looked at him.
I clear my throat and lean forward. He flinches in anticipation, and I pause, the water dripping down my hand and pooling at my feet. When he doesn’t move away, I slowly begin wiping up the blood.
This could be going any number of ways. It could be like when I was sick and he cared for me. But oh god, does it go so wrong.
The blood smears across his skin, turning from a paint splatter to a slaughter, and it is not good.
If he was flirting before, I am doing the opposite.
“Ohmygod,” I whisper as it worsens.
“What’s that look on your face?” he asks as I rub at his cheek. His skin is raw as I try to scrub away the blood, but it clings to his facial hair and smudges across his skin. How is there so much blood?
“It’s nothing.”
It’s not nothing. He looks a bit like a Van Gogh painting, swirls of red painted across his skin, and my god, I am trying, but blood is far more difficult to wipe away than I thought, particularly on a scruffy man who hasn’t bathed in who knows how long.
I glance down at the bowl. Maybe there’s something wrong with the water.
Or perhaps there’s something wrong with me.
“You’re supposed to dab,” he says as he grips my hands in his. It is a mirror of my first night on his ship, of him bent beside me as I made a mess of his floorboards with spilled ink. “You never learn,” he says softly.
I deflate, but my pulse speeds up under the touch of his hand over mine, and he moves it in a dabbing motion.
I let him, his grip light on mine, guiding me across his body, over his face, down his neck and to his chest. If anything, this is hotter, more scandalous than when I was handling it myself, and he watches our joined hands glide across his body, his fingers carefully curled around mine, his skin scorching.
After a few minutes, the blood is nearly gone, but I don’t want to stop, our hands still over his heart, his pulse thundering under my palm.
I glance up at him, but he doesn’t meet my gaze, eyes still cast down to our bloodied fingers.
Neither of us moves, lingering in this moment for as long as we can manage, our labored breathing the only sound in the room.
“You’re not very good at this,” he says, voice crashing through the silence as he gently lets go. He lifts the bowl from the table, crosses to the balcony, and dumps the bloodied water over the railing.
“I don’t often deal with blood,” I admit with a pointed look.
He raises a brow at me as he splashes fresh water from the pitcher into his hands and then over his face and chest, clearing away the last of the evidence.
Water drips from his hair and stubble and down his chest as he turns to me, and holy fuck I can’t handle this.
My lips part as I take him in, and I try to school my expression, to look anywhere else. But it’s impossible.
I’m blushing, but if he notices, he says nothing.
Fuck, why is he so hot? His chest is lightly dappled with curly black hair, bits of gray and white peppered in like his stubble. My gaze dips lower to where his pants are tied at the hip, a pink scar slashed across his flank and continuing below the waistband.
What in the ever-loving fuck is wrong with me? He’s my captain. He’s my ticket home. The ticket to the story sitting in my back pocket. If I fuck this up, I’ll be screwed in more ways than one.
Captain Night waits a beat before speaking. “What did you think life aboard my ship would be like when you joined my crew?”
I settle in one of the chairs and lean forward, running my finger over a nick in the wood. “I guess I thought it would be fun. My life before wasn’t very fulfilling. Every corner I turned, I felt like I knew what to expect.”
He stares at me as if he knows there’s more to it than that.
I clear my throat and go on, “And I think I was afraid of letting anyone in. I … Well, something happened in the past, and I struggled to trust people after. I got comfortable in my little corner, I suppose.”
He drops down into the seat beside me, throwing his legs out under the table, hands steepled on his chest as his boot finds mine.
Again with this game of footsie. I can’t handle this.
It is too much, yet not enough by far. God, I can feel my pulse in my fingertips as I wrap my fingers around the edge of the table for support.
He is intense and serious, but I have never wanted to kiss someone more. At least I can admit that much.
“So,” he says, “you wanted an adventure? You left a stable, lonely life to try your hand at pirating?”
Not really. I didn’t make the decision to leave; fate or whatever it was that brought me here did. But I did, in one way or another, hope to leave, and that must have been enough to send me into the past.
Somehow.
Is that how time travel works?
“Yes, I suppose I did?” I shrug. “It feels like the decision was kind of made for me.”
If you only knew the truth.
He laughs, and the sound resonates somewhere within me. “You don’t seem so sure.”
I wince and let go of the table, scooching back in my seat. “It’s hard to know if it’s something you truly want until it’s almost too late.”
He opens his mouth as though to answer, but nothing comes out. Instead, he wets his lips. His knee leans against mine under the table, solid and sure, and I don’t move. No matter what he says or does, I am pulled to him like a magnet.
And for the first time in a long time, I am not pulling away.