Chapter Eleven
Eleven
She rationally knew there was no way out of what they had to do now.
She had no ammunition to convince him with.
No plan that made more sense than just letting this happen.
Apparently, from the outside they had something that looked like killer chemistry.
And she knew the word was killer, too, because eleven thousand people had said so on some video captioned they are so hot I want to jump down a well.
It was the weirdest thing in the world.
They should hate me, she thought. I should be getting death threats the way that Mabel did, she thought. I bet he loves nothing better than having her sit that juicy butt right on his gorgeous— she started to read, then had to hurl her phone into the footwell of the truck to avoid the rest.
He asked her if she was okay.
She didn’t know how to tell him no.
But she sort of wished she had once they got to the hotel for their next stop, about ten miles from the center of Hartford—grander than the first, all plush furniture and marble-effect floors and chandeliers—and the woman behind the desk winked.
She winked, and then said the most horrifying and preposterous words Daisy could have imagined:
“I saw you accidentally booked two rooms, so I’ve upgraded you to a suite.”
And apparently, they were the most horrifying and preposterous words to Miller, too. Because despite him arguing for this very thing, he stiffened the moment she spoke. She actually felt it through the space between their almost touching arms, as if his tension had set the air there on fire.
It burned.
She wanted to rip herself away.
Instead she smiled and nodded, and took the key, then started in the direction of the elevators.
Only to find he wasn’t following her. He was still standing at the reception desk, staring at the person behind it with the wildest eyes she had ever seen him have.
As if he had been shot, and just hadn’t yet realized he was dead.
She had to grab ahold of his jacket and yank him away.
And he let her, until the elevator doors were closed around them. Then he ripped away so fast and so fiercely she almost ended up holding a torn sleeve. She heard fabric and threads pop. Something definitely started to give. But she let go in time it seemed, and now he was free.
He just didn’t look free.
He looked like he was trying to superglue himself to the other side of the elevator from her. His hands were practically clutching pearls he didn’t have. “Under no circumstances can we do this,” he said.
As if he wasn’t the one who had come up with it.
“You were the one who said this was a good idea.”
“And I was wrong. I take it back. Let’s stop.”
“But why is this the dealbreaker?”
He straightened then. Exited the elevator on their floor in a calm and together sort of manner.
Like he was trying to seem more reasonable.
He just didn’t say anything reasonable, once they were by the hotel room door of doom.
“Listen,” he whispered, in this dark and desperate sort of way.
“I know what happens when there’s only one bed. ”
At which point she felt so thrown it took her three attempts to open the door.
She practically stumbled inside, mind reeling from all the horrors he had just unleashed.
And the horrors only got worse when she saw he hadn’t followed her.
He was still standing in the doorway, expression near haunted by the thought of what she was going to do to him in there.
Because apparently it had to be what she was going to do.
“Oh, so you think this is me trapping you into some gross sex I don’t want,” she said, once she’d managed to calm herself enough to speak. One hand on her hip, expression steely—just to really drive home how outrageous he was being.
But somehow that didn’t make anything better.
Instead he just looked as close to boggled as she had ever seen him.
Then somehow, he said this. “Dear god, no, I think I’m going to wake up with my face accidentally in your butt.
And don’t say well, I can just sleep in the bed, and you can sleep in the bathtub.
Because we both know it’ll somehow happen anyway.
I’ll sleepwalk in the night and fall forehead first into your ass cheeks. ”
She honestly didn’t know what to say for a full thirty seconds.
He had to have gone mad. The food thing had cracked him like an egg.
“How would that ever happen?” she gasped.
And thank god, he had the decency to look chagrined.
Like he knew he was being ridiculous, and needed to explain.
“I don’t know but it seems to in romance novels all the time.”
“A second ago you didn’t even understand enemies-to-lovers.”
“Yeah, but you said all that and so I looked it up and there are all these tropes we seem to be stumbling into. Only now they seem less like tropes and more like curses. I’m being made to pay for my crimes against romance by a spell some TimTommers attached to my immortal soul,” he burst out with, and oh, she came very close to laughing at that.
She had to pinch her lips together to stop it happening. Now was not the time to find him amusing. It was the time to make fun of him. “Okay, first of all: You think it’s TimTom now?”
“Goddamn it, I know what it is, I’m being absurd on purpose.”
“Well, I can see that, considering the rest of what you said.”
“The rest was deadly serious, Emmett. I’m not about to just molest you.”
“I wouldn’t think you were molesting me. I would think the soul of someone else had entirely possessed your body, and that when we exorcised them out of you, you’d be real pissed that my butt got on your face.”
He went to argue after that. His finger even came up to jab at her.
Then he seemed to process what she had said, and sagged.
Sighed. Shook his head almost ruefully. “Jesus, why was that so reassuring?” he asked, almost to himself.
As if it were a mystery, instead of the most understandable concept in the world.
Nobody wanted their worst enemy to believe they wanted them.
And so much so that it was almost a relief to get to spell that out.
“Because now you know I will never imagine you’re being a creep. I will never imagine that you want me. The very idea is preposterous to me in so many ways I don’t know where to begin. Just as I would hope that you would think the same of me, no matter what happens,” she said.
And when she did, that relief in him deepened.
It stretched, catlike, behind his dark eyes.
Quirked up the corner of his mouth, in a way she found so familiar she named it without even thinking.
He’s going to say something he thinks is funny, she thought.
And sure enough: “You could probably ask me to put my face in your butt and I wouldn’t believe it was a proposition.
I’d just think you desperately needed a colonoscopy and I was the only person available to perform the procedure. ”
After which, she had no choice.
She had to go with the bit. Just like she used to with him.
Only somehow different, at the same time.
Faster, she wanted to call it. But the moment she let rip with what she wanted to say, she knew that wasn’t it.
“So, like, after the zombies kill everyone else,” she said, and there it was. Not speed, but ease.
It was getting easy to do this.
“Exactly. The only doctor is me. The only equipment is my eyeballs,” he said, and she barely paused before answering. No assessing her words from all angles first. No preparing for any possible attack. Just straight out with it.
“Couldn’t you at least use a small telescope? Or maybe a jeweler’s loupe?”
“So the hospitals aren’t accessible but somehow I have a thing that assesses whether diamonds are real?” He shook his head, full of an impressive amount of faux sorrow. “I’m disappointed in you, Emmett. Usually you’re the one insisting on the verisimilitude of the zombie apocalypse.”
“You think your eyes doing a Bugs Bunny awooga and then going up my butt is a greater level of verisimilitude than inserting a tiny magnifying thing?” she asked, then caught the curl of his lip he had tried to hide. More than a curl, it seemed like. “Were you going to laugh then, motherfucker?”
“Of course not. I am furious right now.”
“About the Bugs thing, or the topic at hand?” she asked, but even as she did she was changing her mind. “You know what, don’t answer that. I know you’re just trying to pick a different, sillier fight so you can distract me from said topic at hand.”
“I don’t even remember what the topic was.”
“You probably trying to justify sleeping in a stairwell.”
“Actually I was thinking of the balcony,” he said, and pointed at the drawn burgundy curtains behind her. As if seeing where it was would help anything he was saying make sense.
“Because dying of hypothermia is gonna help us with this.”
“Well, you know, when I’m dead I won’t have to do any of it anymore.”
Don’t say that, she wanted to say automatically. In fact, it almost just kicked right out of her. Like it had with him, she thought, like he did when you talked about walking into the ocean. Though somehow, that just made it feel weirder.
She had to switch to frustration at the last second.
“You were the one who said we should. You were the one who said we could do it. That you could do it. Now suddenly you’re having second thoughts over a slightly unexpected bump in the road?” she asked, as sassy as she could be about it.
And he bought it, thank god.
“The bump is more than that and you know it. I saw you panic down there.”
“Yeah, but not because I thought we might accidentally grope each other.”
She pulled a face on grope, just to really drive it home.