Chapter Sixteen
Sixteen
He didn’t seem bothered by the fact that her score was two, and his was zero.
But it definitely bothered her. It made her lean away from the idea of him enjoying anything about it, or even just playing a game somehow, and more toward the very weird and disturbing idea that he was doing all this as some sort of favor.
She had gotten his career back on track by putting her neck and her business on the line. He paid her in orgasms.
Ridiculous, of course, to think so.
Yet she couldn’t quite shake the idea. It felt as if it were something like that, something businesslike and transactional.
Which would have been fine, if both of them had agreed to this businesslike and transactional arrangement.
But as neither of them had, it seemed more disastrous and incredibly damaging to their emotional states.
Or in his case: creating damage by making him have an emotion.
Though she had no idea what the emotion actually was.
He seemed quiet, occasionally. Gaze turned inward, like he was going over and over something in his mind.
But then when they got to their hotel room—a functional sort of thing at a squat little Marriott between the convention center they had just left and the place in Chicago they were headed toward—he asked her if she wanted to watch a zombie double bill on some random channel.
And he didn’t even mean he wanted to squabble about it.
He got on the bed with her. Propped himself up next to her.
They watched it side by side, with popcorn in between them.
She wasn’t even sure where he got the popcorn from.
Or what he was doing eating it, considering his usual rule about no movie snacks.
But he did it. She saw him out of the corner of her eye.
Tentatively taking a kernel or two, and almost sort of testing them out.
She came close to asking him several times if he was okay.
But every time she did, he would make a comment about the movie. A weird comment, that didn’t really sound like him. “You know, in the book version of this they kiss,” he said, just as the lead actors argued onscreen. “It suggests that they’re supposed to be together at the end.”
He almost sounded wistful about it, too.
And to the point where she found herself looking at him a little too long.
At the steady way he was staring at the screen.
How still he was, suddenly. If I leant over now and did something like what he’s describing, would he object?
she thought. Is he saying that what we’re doing is a kissing kind of thing? That he would like it to be?
Though of course if he had, why wouldn’t he have acted on it?
They had fucked in some sort of way twice now, and he hadn’t done anything of the kind. In fact, he had never even gotten excited or comfortable enough to come. Never mind do anything as intimate as kissing. Impossible, she told herself, as she drifted off to the strains of the next movie.
Selena, she heard Jim saying, desperately, brokenly.
And then the next thing she knew, she was waking to darkness and silence.
Heart pounding, like it usually did when she watched zombies before bed.
Unsettled, trembling a little, self-soothing as always by reaching for the blanket.
But just as she did, she felt it shift around her.
All the way over her shoulders, right up to her ears.
Gentle, and so much so she could have believed the whole thing was a dream.
She wasn’t used to someone being there.
Or even if there was someone, they usually weren’t the sort to do something like this.
They were the sort to say that doing something like this was for soppy fools.
Hell—Caleb Miller was that sort, too. He put it in his books, but he didn’t believe in it.
Yet when she reached back to feel the hand on her, she knew it was his.
She could feel the heavy thickness of his fingers, the solid knuckles.
That scar, like a little crisscross, below them.
And then there was his reaction—startled, at first. Trying to demur.
“Threw the covers off like a dipshit,” he whispered.
But then something seemed to shift. He stopped trying to pull back, and after a moment’s hesitation, turned his hand.
A little clumsily, but he did it, and once he had he just squeezed hers.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It hasn’t happened in the night. Nothing is waiting for you in the darkness. And even if there was, well, come on now. You know I’d get that head shot before it was on you.”
Like he knew. He knew exactly why those movies scared her, and exactly what she loved about them, too.
Waking up to horrors, everything gone, being unable to escape those two facts.
And then maybe, just maybe, having someone there to watch your back.
Someone who wouldn’t usually be there. Someone who learnt to value you, in a way nobody ever really did in real life.
In real life, people had choices other than her.
And they chose the others. They usually chose.
She had no idea why he wasn’t choosing right now. Like he said, nothing had actually happened. He was just there, in the darkness, holding her hand. Telling her he’d kill imaginary threats for her.
It was unsettling.
She had to talk about it in movie terms just to get out the million questions she wanted to ask him.
“So is this who you secretly are, then? The one who looks out for the only other survivor of some harrowing nightmare? At the window, watching her run for her life, sniping out her enemies before they get to her?” she asked.
Though even that seemed like she’d gone too far.
He was silent for a long, long while.
Then finally, “Pretty sure I’m actually the asshole.”
“I don’t know if the asshole would do something like this.”
“Well, usually the asshole wouldn’t even be in the position to.
He’d fuck it up before he was. Hell, look how I got here.
A mistake, a weird confluence of bizarre events.
All of it made up, just a game. Nothing real here at all.
Could never be real for me,” he said, voice almost light, almost breezy about it.
Until he got to those last six.
Yeah, those last six words seemed to crawl out of him, rough and rusted over. Remember when he almost said about wanting a family, her mind whispered. Then she simply had to keep pushing. “Is that why you can’t sleep? Thinking it couldn’t be? Thinking you could never be that way?”
“That was just a story. I made it sound like a bigger deal than it is. You know, for the crowd. So you could be the big heroine saving me from my own torment, or some bullshit like that. But really, there is no torment. I’m an insomniac.
Exhaustion puts me out like a light, every time. Nothing deeper than that.”
“If it was that simple, you should be dead to the world now.”
“Why? Because I spent all day sitting on my ass in a car or a comfy chair?”
“You did other things besides that,” she said, unthinking.
But oh, she thought a lot the second she felt him tense.
Because clearly, he wasn’t imagining she meant the stairs he’d climbed up to the hotel room they now had to share.
I need the exercise, he’d said, but she was thinking it was something else.
Discomfort with the idea of being in an elevator with her again.
And now she’d gone and talked about it.
Most likely he was going to make a run for it.
She even tried to head him off before he could—and then he cut in.
He gave her a little scoffing laugh. “Give me a break. I could do that ten times over and not wear myself out,” he said, so casually and with such a note of eye roll in his voice that it felt like getting whiplash.
She almost didn’t turn to look at him, in case it had done a number on her neck.
But in the end she had to.
It was important to see how serious he was before she said what she wanted to. And there it was, his expression half cut by darkness but still somehow clear as day. You must be fucking joking, it said. Like all he cared about was driving home his incredible sexual prowess.
“You fucking show-off.”
“It’s not really showing off if it’s a simple fact.”
“Oh, so you can just go all night, then, I suppose.”
“Of course I can. If someone wants me to.”
She tried to smother her reaction to that.
But she knew he had heard her breath catch.
It was the reason his gaze darkened. The reason he shifted a little, just like in the elevator. Like a hunter sensing prey, she thought, and knew she should be nervous, maybe even recoil. But then he said, “You like the sound of that, Em?”
And his voice was all low and rumbly. She felt his thumb stroke over her knuckles—practically an embrace from someone like him. Plus there was that thing, the thing on the end. The name he used for her, suddenly sliced down to something even more endearing than before.
It was very hard to fear.
Or even fight.
In fact she almost moaned a yes, and the only thing that stopped her wasn’t either of those two emotions. It was thinking of that scoreline. “I like the sound of doing something for you,” she said.
But all she got was an eye roll.
“Oh, what’s the matter, don’t like being in debt to a man you hate?
Well, you’re not, because that’s not how it works.
I mean, Jesus, you really think making a woman feel good in a way she never has before isn’t enough of a goal on its own?
Like it’s not something I could just want for its own sake. ”
“Well, you know, it’s not usually the case.”