20. Penelope
twenty
penelope
“I’m so sorry, Pen. What can we do?”
“Nothing,” I say, resting my cheek on my knee. I’m curled in my office chair, one foot planted on the seat so I can sit this way. “Typing is going to be hell though. I don’t know how I’m going to make the next deadline.”
Rafe waves his hand in front of the computer screen
“Do not even worry about it. I’ll talk to everyone and get it figured out. We’ve got you, girl.”
After going over a few more things with Rafe, I close out of the video chat and exhale.
This week has been absolute misery. I might be right handed, but apparently, I do need my left hand to do a lot. Like drive. Type. Wash my hair. It’s also the hand I use to…
Whatever. My vibrator could use a break anyway.
Through it all, Anthony has been absolutely perfect, and it is absolutely suffocating. How am I supposed to hate the guy if he’s waiting on me hand and foot, while also not treating me like I’m incapable, and joking around like we’re best buds? He makes us dinner, and makes my lunches for school, lets me pick what we watch on TV, and has an alarm set for my Tylenol. He does it all without overstepping. It’s maddening. My arm hurts, my ass hurts, my back hurts from sleeping on the couch, my head hurts from thinking too much. I need to soak in a bathtub.
Except, I can’t get my cast wet, and I need two hands to do most things bath-wise. Even after I’ve Jerry rigged a few Stop a deep, platform bathtub with spa jets. Too bad I’m currently allergic to water.
“PJ! You home?”
I tilt my gaze back to the ceiling and silently groan at his use of my stupid nickname.
The one he gave me when we were kids. The one I inadvertently used as my author pen name.
“Yeah. In the bathroom.”
By the time I’m done hollering across the house, his thudding steps sound down the hall. He raps twice on the half-closed door with his knuckle.
“Are you decent?”
“If by ‘decent’ you mean ‘decently miserable’ then yes, by all means, come join the party.”
I hear his stifled chuckle before the door pushes open. His eyes are clenched shut, like he doesn’t believe that I’m fully clothed. How funny that he thinks I could manage inviting him into a room when I’m that vulnerable.
“You can open your eyes, Ant.”
“You sure?”
“Absolutely. I didn’t even manage to get the bubble bath done right, let alone strip myself down yet.”
I watch his thick swallow precede the clearing of his throat and shiver. When he speaks, his words come out like a cement smoothie.
“What, uh… What’re you up to?”
I lift a brow and huff a laugh, let What does it look like I’m doing? speak through my expression, before tilting my head back and forth on my neck.
“I was going to take a bubble bath. I’m getting tired of having to bend over the sink while Claire washes my hair, and figured I could attempt a moment of self-sufficient peace and quiet, but…”
I gesture with my robo-arm toward the bottom of the tub, where half the bag of bubble bath is making blob shapes on the tile.
“Ah. I see.”
“I just hate being so needy . It’s one hand, but you might as well have chopped off the whole arm. I can’t do half the things I normally do by myself, and it’s just so frustrating.”
I did not mean for this to turn into a pity party, but here we are. Woe is me. I slipped on a spilled Stanley cup and can’t wash my own hair.
Ant puts both hands on his hips, then unbuttons the cuffs of his sleeves before rolling them up.
“Alright. Hop in.”
“Ex cuse you?!” I gape, crossing my arms.
His expression turns incredulous, but he doesn’t stop what he’s doing.
“You want to take a bubble bath. I can get it started for you. Wash your hair. Whatever.”
He shrugs like it’s no big deal. My insides melt, because the last time we were together, we hadn’t even gotten naked, and he’d damn near ruined me.
“I… You?—”
“Am here to help you. Because you fractured your wrist. It’s okay to ask others for help when you need it, Pen. Asking for help isn’t weakness.”
My bones shudder. I shake my head, but he tilts his in this sly motion that I know is meant for persuasion and persuasion alone. Without lifting his gaze from mine, he turns the dial on the tub to hot.
His eyes pinch closed dramatically, and he damn near moans as he tests out the temperature.
“Oooo, it’s like a spa. Can you smell the pink Himalayan? Fuck, that’s the good stuff.”
“Stop making my bubble bath sound like a porno,” I chuckle, feigned annoyance not really convincing either of us.
He smiles, that easy, all-teeth, genuine look that can light up a room.
Or a beach at midnight .
“Then get in the tub. I’m not gonna ask you again.”
I sigh over-dramatically, full head tilt, full groan, and kick him out so I can change, only yelling to him when I’m fully submerged in bubbles, hair wet and slicked back, casted arm dangling out the side of the tub. The moment he walks back in, I know for certain that my pink skin has nothing to do with the blazing water temperatures.
Ant’s smile is gone, replaced by a stoic seriousness that can only be placed there by the clench of his jaw. I sink a little lower into the tub.
He clears his throat, and pushes up invisible sleeves that he already rolled up before kneeling next to the tub. When he reaches over my head for my shampoo on the tub’s edge, I steal a whiff of him—the same subdued cedar and jasmine that had enveloped me on every boat ride, every night in watching movies, and that one night I’d spent snuggled up close to him. Immediately, memories torrent down on me like torpedoes, firing off on all cylinders. The speed at which they assault me makes me dizzy. I pinch my eyes closed both to ground myself and to push them away and to maybe reel them back in for one more second.
“Tilt your head back,” is what steals me from the downward spiral, but I don’t think Ant’s voice, thick with restraint, is a better trade-off. I comply, if only because my bones seem to think we still speak the same language as him. But I keep my eyes closed, shutting off one of my senses so that I can’t cement this into my memory along with all of the other movies of Anthony Ellis that my brain likes to replay before I go to bed.
I forgot that losing one sense makes all of the others stronger. The moment my eyes flicker shut, I sense everything else.
The click of the shampoo cap, and the squirt of the thick liquid into his palms. The deep exhale of his breath, and the sharp inhale that precedes his fingers on my scalp. If I wasn’t paying such close attention, I might have missed the moan caught in his throat, begging to escape. He covers it with a grunt, the sharp clearing of his throat, and I have to suppress my own caged noises.
His touch could lull me into another dimension. I shouldn’t have expected any less, after he made my body hum beneath the stars, but I had once upon a time convinced myself it was just circumstantial. Somehow, Anthony Ellis washing my hair is even more sensual. All ten digits cradling my head like fine China, each individual fingerprint writing sonnets in the circular motions. I want to tip my head back and hum, but settle for relaxing my shoulders so that my head falls perfectly into the palms of his hands.
He takes his sweet, sweet time, even dipping his thumbs to knead the base of my neck. And you know what? I let him. His penance for breaking my heart can be untying the knots in my muscles. He chuckles, this low, dangerous sound, and I lift my head from his sweet ministrations.
“What?”
“You enjoying yourself?” he asks, his tone wrapped in whiskey and molasses.
“What do you mean?”
He dips his head right beside my ear. “I don’t mean to be crass, Penelope Jayne, but the last time I heard those sweet little moans from you, it was when I had my fingers inside you.”
I groan, loud and over-exaggeratedly. Partly because he ruined my vibe. Mostly to cover the way that one phrase lit up my insides into begging him to do it again.
“You just can’t help yourself, can you?” I ask, tilting my head all the way back and peeling my eyes open.
It was the exact wrong thing to do, because not only am I staring up at Anthony Ellis through his spread legs, but I can see the outline of his stiff, swollen cock still trapped in his work slacks. What’s even worse is what comes out of his mouth next.
“Not when it comes to you.”
The blue in his eyes cuts like ice, and then he stands and disappears. I close my eyes again, doing my best to overanalyze every single moment of the past two minutes until I hear him return. Something scoops into the water beside me, and he asks me to tilt my head back again. Warm water cascades through my hair, and after he rinses the shampoo several times, I smell the telltale scent of my coconut conditioner.
“So uh… Since we’re on the topic…” he starts, weaving his hands through my waist-length hair, massaging in the conditioner like he’s practiced in it. A bowling ball shoots up my chest and captures itself in my throat. “Can we talk about what happened?”
I sigh. Deep down to the marrow of my bones.
I’ve practiced this conversation in my head a million times. Some of those times, I berated him. Some, I begged for understanding. Sometimes he cried and begged for a second chance. None of my little head fantasies involved Anthony Ellis washing my hair in the bathtub simply because he’s apparently that kind of man beneath the one week of flaws I was exposed to.
“Sure. Go ahead.”
He clears his throat, fidgeting with my hair.
“I was actually wondering if you wanted to start. I’ve never heard things from your perspective, and I uh…” He shifts behind me. I would give anything to see the look of anguish on his face right now, to see if it matches the one I just stopped seeing in the mirror. “I need to know how badly I hurt you, Pen. So I can make it right.”
It’s funny. No amount of rehearsing this speech in my head could have ever prepared me for the actual opportunity. Stage fright swallows all of my words whole. I am a blank slate, with my head in his hands and my heart trying to join it.
“You said all the right things, Anthony. All the right things. And my heart believed every one of them to be true. But then your actions didn’t match.
“When you didn’t show up to dinner, didn’t answer any of my texts or calls, I felt like the carpet was pulled out from under me. I felt hurt. Betrayed. My heart was broken, but I think I was mostly embarrassed . That I could tell you all of the ways that I’ve been hurt in the past, that you knew what it took to break me, and I let it happen to me all over again.”
I can feel his deep, heavy breaths, both falling in hot waves against my bare skin, and by the thighs that are caged against the edge of the tub. His hands in my hair froze the moment I started talking, and haven’t yet picked up again. When he finally speaks, his words are wrapped in barbed wire.
“I can’t justify what I did. It was wrong. I know that. I knew it in the moment, and I still went ahead and left you out to dry anyway. I cannot begin to apologize because the word sorry doesn’t seem significant enough for what I did to you.”
His words rattle my bones, but the grip that pulls my hair into a ponytail, the one he subconsciously holds a little too tightly, brings me back to Earth.
“I won’t ask for another chance, not when I don’t deserve it. But Penelope, I need you to know that, despite my lack of follow through, everything I said to you that night was the truth.”
As he speaks the words again, ones I thought only I had cemented into a brick in my memories, I fall right back to that beach, with my head on his chest, and the infinite sky above us.
“This is not what I expected would happen when I came on this trip,” he said, afterward, our legs like pretzels, his grip on my hand a vice.
“Me neither,” I said, quiet as a bashful mouse, to his chest. I kissed him there, and his lips on my temple lingered.
“You have been the best part of this trip, Penny Layne .”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not, when it’s the truth? I didn’t even want to come. Why do you think I woke up at the crack of dawn to go on a boat ride? I heard you would be there. I haven’t been myself in a while. I haven’t felt more at ease, or sure of what I should do next, than when I’m looking at you.”
“I was in a rough way on that trip, Pen. But every moment I spent with you started to patch me back together. Even now, in the middle of our fight, in the middle of this uncanny situation, I haven’t felt more at ease, or sure of what I should do next, than when I’m looking at you.”
He remembers, too, then. He thinks about it too.
I have to get out of here. Have to remove myself from his soft hands and his deep, syrupy voice, and those words that don’t quite match the puzzle pieces of what he did after.
Of course, I don’t think things through, when I stand in the middle of the tub, fully naked. I freeze beneath his gaze. Beneath hungry eyes that widen, then darken, immediately. God, the way his chest collapses with an exhale makes me immediately wet.
I don’t bother to cover myself—the bubbles are doing a pretty good job. That’s when I realize just how sudsy I am. I break his hungry stare and realize that I can’t rinse off in this tub. And because my heart and body just can’t help themselves, I bite my bottom lip, and ask, “Would you help me rinse off?”