6. Samuel
Eleven more days. I can do this without taking myself out with Mr. Barron”s rifle. Maybe.
I hear the pitter-patter of Ruby’s feet as she jogs up the stairs, but my focus is on the discarded bikini top on the living room floor. I know little about marble, but I doubt that this is good for the tiles.
With a big swig, I down the rest of my wine before I get up and walk back inside the house. Grumbling to myself, I take Ruby’s stuff with me and pick up her bikini top from the living room floor, because my mom raised me right.
Unfortunately, my manners bring me nothing but trouble. Now that I have a hold of her things, I have to put them somewhere. I put her book and her headphones on the living room table while I contemplate throwing her bikini top into the garden.
I didn’t have to wash any of my stuff so far, so I avoided talking to Ruby about the whole laundry topic. As much as I like to live in a clean environment, which is already hard when you have to share a house with Ruby, I won’t start acting like her personal housekeeper. But I know for a fact that her wet stuff will be lying around somewhere until it gets moldy if I don’t say anything.
And that’s the only reason I walk up the stairs and knock on her door.
The shower is running and I’m sure she didn’t hear me knock, but like I said, I don’t want to see her shit everywhere. I knock a second time and when I don’t get a reaction, I open the door and walk in.
“Did you change your mind?” she yells from the bathroom, and I can picture the self-righteous smile on her face. Not sharklike, like her father’s. More wolfish, and horribly charming.
As much as I hate to admit it, Ruby is hot. It’s hard not to notice with the way she flaunts her body, like she has exhibitionistic tendencies. But it’s not just the outfits. She’s the type of woman that would look good in a fucking burlap sack.
In any other scenario, I would have a girl like her pinned against the nearest wall or bent over the kitchen counter until she can’t remember her name and begs for mercy.
But Ruby is just Ruby. Her charming little act may fool my dick, but it won’t fool my brain. I don’t know what it is exactly, but something about her just makes my skin crawl.
I tried my hardest to avert my gaze whenever she walked past me, tried to ignore it when she lolled around on that lounger. Despite that, thoughts about her started creeping into my mind. Thoughts that are so dirty that not even a pressure washer straight to my eye socket could get rid of them.
“Everything alright, James? Or do you need me to perform CPR?” she yells with a laugh and I realize that I have been standing in her room like a statue for too long already.
“You left your shit at the pool,” I yell back.
“Thank you for bringing me my stuff. Hey, could you throw my top in here? I don’t want my floor to get wet.”
I clench my jaw so hard that I hear a grating sound as I walk towards her bathroom. Simple task, Sam. Just throw her stuff in there without looking and walk back out to your room.
As I stand in her spacious, fogged-up bathroom, I once again feel like I’m frozen in place. As if my goddamn dick just took over my spinal cord, keeping me from leaving the unfortunate situation I got myself into.
At least I find the conscience to throw her stuff on the floor before I lean against her sink, gripping the cold ceramic so hard that I hope they did a good job of mounting that thing.
Maybe she put something in my wine. The very wine I saw her pour into my glass and drink as well but I didn’t see her fetch the bottle so she could have—I am aware of the fact that I try to shift the responsibility for all of this towards anything but my own apparent weakness.
The glass of her shower cabin is frosted, and I can only make out her silhouette as she washes herself. She tilts her head back to rinse out her hair, and I wonder if her neck is sensitive. If she’d cry out if I left my mark on her.
The sudden silence after she turns off the shower shakes me out of my horrible daydreams. Ruby holds her arm out to me like a princess, drops of water gliding down her skin.
“Since you’re still here, would you be so kind as to hand me my towel?”
I contemplate leaving without a word, but the prospect of a butt-naked Ruby possibly chasing after me keeps me from doing so. If I give her the dumb towel, she’s at least a bit clothed, and then I can leave.
Should leave. Quickly.
“Earth to James,” she says. “They are on the shelf right next to you.”
With a grumble, I hand her a big white towel. All of them have her initials stitched on them, and I’m not even surprised anymore. She’s such a spoiled brat it makes me sick.
I should take some of those towels with me when I leave, though, because they are shockingly soft and I’m getting too old to put up with our scratchy ones. I deserve a bit of luxury.
“Thank you.” She smiles broadly as she steps out of the shower, the towel wrapped around her body, and I wish I had given her a bigger one.
“You need anything else? A massage, a fruit platter?” Shaking my head, I walk towards the door. I need to get out of this room before I do something I regret.
“James, wait,” she suddenly says, and I suppress the urge to storm off.
If I make it too obvious that I need to get away from her, she’ll think that she got under my skin, but if I stay, she will get under my skin. It dawns on me that I can’t win, no matter what I do.
She looks up at me through her thick eyelashes, a slight red hue on her cheeks from spending the day out in the sun. Her hand lingers on my arm until I glare down at her and she pulls it away.
“Thank you for spending the evening with me,” she says in a sickeningly sweet tone. It’s like honey, but not in a good way. It sticks to the synapses in my brain and makes it impossible to think straight.
“I think you have a heatstroke, you didn’t slam any doors shut in the past hour.”
She just laughs while she walks back to her bathroom and leaves me standing in the doorway like an idiot.
“Goodnight, James,” she says and I finally find the power to leave her room.
I need to take a shower. I feel sweaty and somehow I also reek of Ruby”s weird sunscreen, or tanning oil, or whatever she uses. But I need to take a quick detour before I hop in the shower.
There’s not enough booze in my room, so I walk down to the bar in the living room and grab a bottle of whiskey. I don’t know what to do first, drink or shower, but maybe I’ll take the entire bottle in there with me. If Ruby continues to torment me like this, there won’t be a single drop of alcohol left in this house on the day that I can finally leave.
Eleven more days, and after this evening, I have a feeling that those eleven days are going to be hard for me. In every sense, because while I still have an antipathy towards Ruby, my cock views that differently.
I relish the familiar burn of the whiskey as I sit down on the edge of my bed. A cigarette would be wonderful, but I don’t want to smoke inside of the house, so I stick to drinking and repeatedly running my fingers through my hair. I’ve let it grow out for a while now, but it’s still unusual to feel more than a few millimeters of hair underneath my fingertips.
Somehow, my shirt feels way too constricting. This entire house feels constricting, and I try to keep calm as I get out of my clothes. The tattooed snake on my right forearm looks at me mockingly. Well, either that or I’m finally losing my mind.
My cock begs for my attention as I place the bottle of whiskey on the sink before I step into the shower, but I ignore it. Hell, I’d rather run around with a raging boner for days before I sink so deep that I get myself off to the thought of Ruby.
The ice-cold water stings on my skin, but at least it helps to get the situation down there under control. I don’t know why my body even reacts to her the way it does. Maybe my last time was too long ago, and I should have joined Max and Logan on one of their weekend trips before I came here.
In the next two days,I don’t see or hear much from Ruby. I still knock on her door every few hours to make sure that she didn’t run off, but apart from that, it’s peaceful. Whenever she leaves her room, I vanish to the home gym or somewhere else, which has absolutely nothing to do with me avoiding her.
Somehow, I naively thought that she may have lost interest.
“You’re avoiding me,” she states with a smirk as she flops down on the living room couch right next to me. It was a dumb idea to work down here, but the Wi-Fi in my room wasn’t working properly and I was sure that she wouldn’t come out of her room until noon.
On second glance, I spot the red popsicle in her hand and my stomach drops.
“I’m not avoiding you.”
“You are. What are you working on?”
“None of your business.”
Swiftly, I collect the documents that are scattered on the table, hoping that she didn’t see the blurry headshot of her father on one of them. But she’s looking somewhere else. I can tell by the way I feel her goddamn gaze on my arms.
“Tell me, please,” she says with a grin before she wraps her lips around the popsicle, sucking on it waymore provocative than necessary while she looks straight at me.
“Do you need a hearing aid? It’s none of your business.”
“Whatever,” she says with a laugh. “Won’t force you to talk about it.” With a shrug of her shoulders, she leans back on the couch. Still violating my personal space, but at least she has her eyes set on the TV now. Even with the volume turned high, I can still hear the lewd sounds that come from her.
I can’t understand why her ridiculous American Pie attempts at flirting start to work on me, but I don’t like it one bit. There’s too much blood in my dick and too little in my brain as I speak up.
“You would like to force me, wouldn’t you?”
I’m impressed by my stupidity. But the way her lips look wrapped around the popsicle, slightly swollen and red, makes my thoughts spiral into dangerous territory.
My pent-up arousal from a few days ago isn’t helping my case, and I wish I could just grab her and use that fucking pretty mouth until her throat is too sore to talk to me in that tone.
Or to talk to me at all.
Ruby laughs as she gets up and walks around the couch until she’s standing behind me. I think I lost my usual reaction time as I entered this house, probably too much booze and too little training, but as I feel her nails grazing over my chest, it’s already too late.
“Actually, I prefer to be the one that gets roughed up a bit, but don’t tell anyone,” she whispers in my ear, and my whole body tenses up.
I don’t know how she does it, but somehow she deletes millennia of evolution from my brain. As if she’s slowly turning me back into a caveman who wants to grab her by her hair and drag her back to his cave.
When I finally collect my composure enough to react appropriately, Ruby is long gone. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her walking up the stairs with a mountain of laundry in her arms and I remember I wanted to ask her about the washing machine.
Unfortunately, my throat feels too dry to yell, so I get up from the couch. Something small and black lies on the floor as I walk past my door and I mindlessly pick it up. Probably Ruby’s shit again.
Just as I want to knock on her door, my phone vibrates. It’s not the one I got for this job but the other one, so I rush back to my room, the black piece of fabric still in my hand. I throw it on my bed as I lock the door behind me and dash towards the bathroom, where I turn on the shower to cover the sound of my voice.
“Now you’re able to use your fucking phone?” I’m not far away enough from Ruby to yell at Max the way I want to.
“Calm down, Sammy, I missed you too,” he chuckles.
“Cut the bullshit, Max. You know I’m still your superior, right?”
“The captain said we’re all equally important.”
I groan and pinch the bridge of my nose. My ears are ringing again and I fear that I’m going to end up with a coronary disease if things continue to go this way.
“What do you want? And why did none of you fuckers pick up the phone when I called at least ten times?”
“Well, at first we were out drinking and Rockwell told us to shut off our phones. Said something about you being pissed. Then we were on a short mission, nothing big. And after that, I had to get Logan”s hand out of some guy”s ribcage and all of my stuff was bloodied and I didn’t want to get my phone dirty and…”
“Max,” I stop him before he’s talking for another five minutes. “Did you just call me to talk my ear off?”
“Kinda.”
“Idiot.”
“How’s the mission going? Bet you’re gonna take your sweet time with gathering evidence. Rockwell showed us the file of the little missy you’re guarding.”
I hear his grin through the phone and my blood starts to boil.
“Are you kidding me?”
“No, why?”
“Why was there no file before he sent me here? What is wrong with all of you? When did this task force turn into an understaffed Waffle House?”
Someone is yelling in the background and from the sound of his voice, I figure it must be Logan.
“Logan asks if she’s single,” Max blurts into the phone, completely ignoring me.
“No,” I say and I’m shocked at how quick this lieleft me. “And she’s not even that hot, just goddamn annoying.”
“Lie after lie, Sammy. Hurts a bit, given the fact that you’re my best friend…”
“You’re not—” Before I can make Max cry, there’s a knock on my door, followed by Ruby calling out for me.
“James?” Max screeches into the phone before I turn it on mute. I want to place it on the sink but it slips down the ceramic.
“Who are you talking to?” Ruby asks through the closed door and my patience is wearing so thin that I struggle to come up with a good explanation.
“No one. I was watching a video. And why the hell are you eavesdropping? What are you, a preschooler?” I say as I pace around the room.
It feels too small, this house feels too small, and I want to bring an entire continent between her and me.
“Calm down, I was just asking.” And with that, she walks back to her own room, her door falling shut just a few seconds later.
Why is everyone telling me to calm down today? I am fucking calm.
Max’s hysterical laughter almost shreds my eardrums as I pick the phone back up.
“You know I love you man, but I don’t know where I should start to make fun of you,” he forces out in between laughing fits and something in me just gives up. I don’t even want to yell at him anymore. I’d probably do the same if I was in his situation.
“Did Rockwell get the picture of the rifle?” I ask in an attempt to switch the topic.
“Yeah, told Charlie to do a bit of digging.”
“Great, because Charlie proved to be competent so far. Tell Rockwell that he has to stop giving him important tasks. And you—you’ll text me before you call, understand?”
“Yes, Sir,” Max groans.
“Really, Max. She has ears like a goddamn hare and I don’t want to give her any reason to snoop around. She already saw some of my documents.”
“She what?! I don’t think you should go around calling someone incompetent, Sammy.”
“Stop it with the fucking nickname or I’ll board the next flight and then not even Logan will be able to keep you safe.”
“Logan, did you hear that—”
“Go and annoy Cabrera,” I say. Just when I want to hang up, Max yells something into the phone.
“—wants updates in ten days.”
My finger was already hovering over the end call button. I’m too quick and hang up before I can reply.
But I’m not complaining. If I gather enough stuff until I talk to Rockwell next week, maybe I can leave before my self-set deadline of two weeks is over.
I splash a bit of cold water on my face before I leave the bathroom. The black piece of fabric on my pillow distracts me, standing out from the white sheets like a sore thumb. I already know that it must be something that belongs to Ruby, but as I pick it up, I realize what exactly I’m holding.
Black lace, a thong so tiny that I know it covers nothing. There are no coincidences in this house and I doubt this thing ended up in front of my door because of one.
Before I can stop myself, I imagine how it would look on her body, painfully aware of my growing erection that presses into the zipper of my jeans as I absentmindedly palm myself through the fabric.
Anger rushes through me as I realize I stepped right into her dumb little trap. But I can’t take it any longer. If I don’t take care of that issue,I’m probably going to implode during her next try to woo me.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt so pathetic because of a girl in my life. Not even during puberty. My belt hits the floor as embarrassment about what I let her do to me washes over me. But I’m too far gone and a tiny, deranged part of me doesn’t want her to stop.
She would probably enjoy it, I think to myself as I take my cock out of my boxers. She would look at me with this dirty smile while I’m sitting here all desperate, breaths coming out in short, quiet pants as I’m stroking myself, her thong wrapped around my cock.
Because this right here is the closest I’ll ever allow myself to get to feeling her body. She’s dangerous enough as it is. I don’t know what will happen if I get a taste of her.
Apart from that, I absolutely do not want that,I try to remind myself while images of Ruby run through my mind. The places I could fuck her in this house, the things I could do to her...
I clench my jaw as I come, not letting a single sound leave me. I already know she’s prone to listening and I won’t give her the satisfaction of hearing this.
My cum runs over my fist, dripping down from the black lace, and the weak part of me wishes it would run down her face while she’s kneeling in front of me.
My plan of getting her out of my system worked wonderfully. The ten seconds of bliss vanish as quickly as they came, replaced by even more regret and anger than before.
I walk back to the bathroom, washing the evidence of my stupidity off of my hand and her thong as I look at myself in the mirror.
Deep down, I know that no amount of jacking off would be a substitute for what my body really wants.
Her.
Day six and I already fucked up. I take a deep breath to keep myself from doing something mature, like smashing the mirror in, because I can’t stand to look at myself right now.
But even less, I’d want to explain to Mr. Barron, or worse, to Ruby, what happened. So I just change into joggers and a shirt before I stomp towards the home gym.
As if I could get rid of the thoughts that plague me when I throw punch after punch at the boxing bag for the next few hours.