Chapter 17 #2
A green toothbrush appeared around the door, gripped in her splinted hand, followed by Florrie’s round eyes sideways through the crack. ‘I can’t squeeze the toothpaste,’ she told him forlornly.
‘Give it here.’ He beckoned her out of hiding. ‘We’re way past this, aren’t we, after today?’
For a beat, as she emerged, still in her merino ski top and her bottom half in only black boyshorts underwear and one sports sock, he felt bad for saying anything. She was smiling grimly, and mortified.
‘I managed to get some of my clothes off.’
He handed her back the toothbrush with a blob of her Italian brand toothpaste on it. She gripped it in a childlike fist, her splinted thumb sticking out, and slunk back behind the door.
He listened to the swish of her brushing. ‘Marvis Jasmin Mint toothpaste?’ he said into the gap between the door and the frame, not really knowing what he was questioning. ‘You live in Italy, not Norway?’
He heard her spit and run the tap before she shouted, ‘Neither. I lived in Italy the last six months. And before that, Lech, and before that it was Val d’Isere – or was it Crans-Montana?
And before that it was Lake Louise, Courmayeur and Alta Badia, and of course, there was Levi in Lapland.
’ The door opened and she stepped out again bringing the fresh scent of jasmine and mint. ‘Happy?’
It was getting harder to style out his attraction for her, but he summoned every ounce of grit within him to make his next remark sound casual. ‘Is that what you meant when you said you’d had lots of jobs?’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘The next words out of your mouth better not be chalet girl, or you’ll be in a world of pain.’ She was squaring up with her bandaged hands. The sight brought an instant smile, but it was so sweet and so sad seeing her like this too, his smile couldn’t last for long.
‘I really wasn’t going to say that,’ he said, not quite knowing why she’d object to it. She was sensitive about something to do with her work. Who’d made her feel that way? His eyes were drawn now to her hands as she let them fall to her sides.
Her mind seemed to be racing off elsewhere. ‘Do you know where to find scissors in this place?’ she said.
‘Huh?’
‘I can’t…’ She swallowed her words in mortified defeat. ‘I can’t get this base layer top off over the plaster cast.’
‘Oh. Right, of course. One second.’ As he hurried from workbench to workbench, he gave himself a stern talking to.
He’d have to switch off all the lurid stuff his brain was suggesting right now and treat her with respect if he was going to be required to cut her from her clothes.
She was vulnerable and embarrassed. He had to be cool.
‘Found them!’ Roz’s sewing table had fabric shears.
When he returned, she was holding the tiny slinky pyjama top, pink and mint-green stripes with tiny Christmas trees dotted all over. It didn’t seem so easy to tease her about the silly little jammies now that he was about to help her put them on.
He tried not to gulp as he approached and she turned her back on him, her hair spilling down to the small of her spine.
He pictured her asking him to help her brush out those long waves and how obligingly, and how slowly, he’d do it, how she’d close her eyes swimmingly soft like the mermaid of the fjords that she was.
Oh shit. He was in deep, deep trouble, thinking like this.
She still had her back to him, waiting.
‘I won’t look,’ he told her, the scissors heavy in his hand. He’d have liked to sound suavely reassuring, but all hope of that had gone out the window, considering what he was about to do.
He could see her blushes colouring her cheek when she turned her head to tell him off. ‘You’ll have to look! What if you cut me, or my hair?’
‘OK, I’ll half look.’ He scrunched one eye shut.
It was a weak joke, and neither felt much like laughing as he opened the blades and slid them between the fabric of her base-layer top, skintight, like his, but thicker.
Roz’s fabric shears sliced through the material with a soft rasping sound that sent a surprising thrill through him.
He planted his feet, swallowed hard, and moved the blades further into the cut as he guided them along the sleeve.
As he sheared away the material, he found he needed to lift her hair away from her shoulder, but there were so many tiny strands to shift.
He didn’t want to accidentally cut one single hair on her head; he’d already caused Florrie so much damage.
He worked the blades, continuing their journey right up to the top’s crew collar, which he snipped through in a satisfyingly clean cut.
The whole right shoulder of the base layer peeled away to reveal freckled skin.
He commanded his eyes to behave, and he ignored his mouth greedily wanting to know what her skin tasted like in the soft spot behind the curved shell of her ear where the gold butterfly back of a stud earring called upon him to take her whole lobe into his mouth and suck.
Florrie shifted her feet. He heard her swallow. He forced himself to keep cutting, right the way across the other shoulder and down her torso to her side.
The cold touch of the scissors at her hip made her inhale sharply.
The fabric peeled away entirely and dropped to the floor at their feet.
Florrie stood stock still as though waiting for something, and it dawned on his stupefied brain that he was going to have to peel the simple white bandeau bra from her body too. If this was a test of his strength, it was a very unfair one.
Placing the shears aside, he tucked his fingertips into the bandeau at the soft slopes of her sides and tugged it down softly, fighting with the last scrap of honour within him not to imagine the fabric dragging down, revealing her breasts.
She quickly covered herself with her bandaged arm and he made sure to stay fixed resolutely behind her, where her long hair covered so much of her skin.
He commanded his body not to react as he stooped to stretch the band down over the curve of her waist, her hips and the black shorts, shutting his eyes tightly, exaggeratedly, for its journey down over her legs to her ankles until she could step out of the damn thing, and he abandoned it on the floor.
He then felt for her remaining sock in his self-imposed darkness and pulled that free from her foot.
‘Shorts,’ she said in a voice so thin it barely reached his ears. The instruction did, however, find his hands, and he stayed kneeling on the floor at her heels and, for the first time in his life, feeling like he wanted to pray in worship.
He raised his hands to her hips and tugged down the elastic waistband, making quick work of this task, and making sure to graze her skin as little as possible, when in truth he wanted to grip her ankles in his hands and kiss his way up her legs.
Instead, he got to his feet and hastily, wordlessly put the underwear into her waiting hand, like kids passing a secret note in class, and they both attempted to ignore the moment, like he hadn’t just stripped her bare.
He heard her turn her head as if checking his eyes were actually closed. They were.
‘Could you just…?’ She passed him her pyjamas.
He heard her suppress a snicker as he fumbled with the shorts trying to distinguish the front from the back with his eyes shut, and when he dropped to her feet once more, she leaned her uninjured wrist on his shoulder for balance. Between them, she wriggled easily into her pyjama shorts.
‘Now, pull this over my head.’
Standing, he had to open his eyes for this part, as it took a moment to unfurl the soft camisole and arrange the silly little spaghetti straps of pink satiny stuff in such a way as she’d be able to slip into them.
‘Hands up,’ he said, over her shoulder, in a voice that didn’t sound like his own.