Chapter 4
Chapter four
Jana
The sheets are too soft. That's the first thing I register when the door shuts behind him. The silk against my thighs, my stomach, my bare skin—it should feel luxurious. Instead it feels like an accusation. Every thread a reminder of what just happened. What he did to me. What he didn't finish.
I lie still for a long moment, listening. My body hasn't gotten the message that he's gone.
My pulse still hammers at the base of my throat—a hard, insistent beat that I feel in my temples, behind my sternum, low in my belly.
My core still clenches around nothing, that hollow, throbbing ache refusing to quiet no matter how many slow breaths I drag in.
I shift against the sheets and immediately regret it.
The silk drags across sensitized skin and I go rigid, jaw tight, a sharp exhale escaping through my nose.
Stop.
I press my thighs together. The pressure is a mistake—a small, electric reminder of exactly how thoroughly he took me apart without finishing what he started.
My fingers curl into the pillow beside my head and I force myself to breathe through it.
In. Out. The ache doesn't recede. It sits low and breathing, a pulse of its own, and I hate it.
I hate that it won't cooperate. I hate that my body is still waiting, and ready, still expecting something that isn't coming.
He left me like this on purpose.
Asshole.
He brought me to the edge with those hands, that mouth, that devastating, deliberate patience—and then he stopped. Pulled back. Walked away like I was a chore he'd completed.
The tremor starts in my legs first. A fine, violent shudder that works its way up my thighs, through my hips, into my chest. I roll onto my side and curl tight, knees to my chest, fist pressed hard against my belly. The ache between my legs is a deep, resonant throb. I squeeze my eyes shut.
It meant nothing.
I say it to the inside of my skull. Say it until the syllables lose shape.
It was reflex. He's a man who knows exactly how to use his body, his hands, his mouth—and I'm a woman who hasn't been touched in longer than I want to admit. That's the entire equation. There's no other variable.
But my body isn't interested in equations. It remembers the rough drag of his jaw against my inner thigh. The way his fingers pressed into my hips as if he was mapping me, conquering lands he intended to revisit.
It remembers the sound I made.
God. The sounds I made.
Anger cuts through the haze. Not just at him—at myself. At the way I arched into his touch. The way my hands found his hair and held on. I handed him a weapon and watched him pocket it, and he didn't even have the decency to use it. He just kept it.
I sit up. The motion is abrupt, stiff. The silk falls away and the air of the room hits my skin and I'm moving before I decide to move—across the floor, into the bathroom, cold marble under my bare feet.
The woman in the mirror looks wrecked.
Lips swollen. Eyes too dark, too wide. A faint sheen across her skin like she's been running. I stare at her for three seconds, then turn the shower handle all the way to cold and step inside.
The shock slaps me with hundreds of frozen needles.
Cold water pounds every inch of exposed skin—shoulders, chest, stomach—and I inhale sharply, the sound ragged in the tiled space.
I stand under the spray and breathe through my teeth and wait for the relief that's supposed to come. The reset. The clean, numbing distance.
Only, it doesn't.
The frigid water runs over my body and instead of erasing the memory of his hands, it seals it.
Every place the water hits is a place he touched.
The spray against my inner arms. The rivulets running down the back of my thighs.
My skin stays tight, aware, hyper-sensitized.
I press my forehead against the tile and wait. It doesn’t help.
I scrub at my arms, my neck, the curve of my shoulders.
Trying to wash away his scent. The smell of musk and something warm and dark that got into my lungs and lodged there like smoke.
It clings. Even under the cold spray, even with luxury boutique soap, I catch traces of it and my stomach tightens in response before I can stop it.
The ache doesn't wash away. It dims, slightly. Enough to function.
Two weeks. I repeat it under the spray. Two weeks and you walk away.
I dry off with a rough towel, drag on my own clothes—cotton shorts, a worn tank top, the soft gray hoodie I grabbed at the last minute when I packed.
My clothes. The ones that belong to my life, not this one.
I pull the hoodie over my head and breathe in the familiar smell of my own laundry detergent and my chest unknots, fractionally.
Then I walk out of the bathroom and stop.
He's back.
The air changes before I fully process the visual.
He stands near the window, of course, always framed by windows, always backlit, always positioned like he owns whatever room he occupies.
He's changed. Dark gray sweatpants riding low on his hips.
Black t-shirt, sleeves cut close to biceps that have no business looking like that at whatever hour of the morning this is.
He holds two glasses of water with the casual authority of a man who has never once questioned whether his presence is welcome.
My pulse spikes. Hard and immediate, a single violent kick behind my sternum that I feel all the way to my fingertips.
Calm down. I order my body, fruitlessly.
He turns his head and finds me in the doorway, and the eye contact alone accelerates my breathing—tightens it, shallows it, makes me draw one careful breath through my nose to steady myself.
I catch his scent from here. That same warm, dark note that the shower failed to scrub from my memory. My stomach knots.
I hate him.
"Drink," he says. Not a command. A fact, delivered quietly, as if my hydration is simply one of many things he's already decided to manage.
I don't move.
He walks toward me, unhurried, each step measured and deliberate.
Stops two feet away and extends a glass.
The cool condensation catches the light.
His knuckles graze my fingers as he presses it into my palm—barely anything, skin to skin for less than a second—and the contact fires straight down my spine, arrives at the base of my stomach as a low, unwelcome pulse.
My grip tightens around the glass.
"I'm not thirsty," I say. The words come out clipped.
"You are." His eyes hold mine. Dark, steady, giving away nothing. "Drink."
I drink. Not because he told me to. Because my throat is dry and I refuse to be petty about water. I swallow, and Ihis gaze tracks the movement at my throat, until I lower the glass and look directly at him.
"I need to go to the bookstore," I say.
A beat of silence. "Which one."
"The campus store. I need a business journal that’s been on backorder online and the professor wants a physical copy by Thursday." I keep my voice level, matter-of-fact. "I need to go today."
He takes a slow sip from his own glass. Watching me over the rim. "I'll have it delivered."
"You don't know which edition."
"Tell me."
"I need to go," I say, and something sharper bleeds into my voice now, something I don't entirely try to contain. "I didn't agree to be your prisoner. I agreed to two weeks. That doesn't mean I stop being a person with a life and a schedule and things I need to handle."
He's quiet for a moment. Not the quiet of someone searching for words—the quiet of someone deciding which ones to deploy.
"Get dressed," he says finally. "Something practical."
I blink. "You're taking me."
"I'm going with you." His tone makes the distinction feel important. "There's a difference."
***
The SUV is black, matte finish, no logos on the exterior. Inside it smells like leather and the scent of a car that's been detailed too recently, too thoroughly. The seats are firm. The space between us is not large enough.
I sit with my back straight, knees together, hands loose in my lap, staring at the city moving past the passenger window. I am extremely aware that he is eighteen inches to my left.
I watch the reflection of his hands in the glass. Those hands. I know exactly what those hands are capable of now, how precisely they move, how much pressure they apply, how they feel wrapped around my hips—
I look back at the window.
Stop. I shut down the spark the thoughts ignited before they lick through my body and become a raging fire.
The silence in the car has a texture. It isn't empty—it's full of everything neither of us is saying, everything from last night still sitting between us like an object neither of us will pick up.
I watch the city and try to think about the textbook, about Dr. Okafor's syllabus, about anything grounded and academic and entirely unrelated to the man beside me.
At a red light, he shifts in his seat. Just a small adjustment—shoulder rolling back, spine settling—and the movement in my peripheral vision ripples like a disturbance in water.
I track it without turning my head. The t-shirt pulls slightly across his chest when he moves.
I follow the line of his forearm against the wheel.
The way his jaw sits in profile, clean and hard.
The light changes. He accelerates smoothly, unhurried, and the motion presses me back into my seat.
He doesn't speak. Neither do I. The quiet accumulates, and by the time we reach campus, I feel like I've been holding my breath for the entire drive.
The bookstore is warm, slightly overcrowded for a Tuesday afternoon, and the new book smell warms the cold spaces left from our drive.
My shoulders drop a fraction the moment I step inside.
My first campus job was at this bookstore and returning here, even if for a little while, returns part of my soul.
I’m Jana Spears again and not just some guy’s prize.