I made a sound and added the noodles to the boiling water.
We made small talk. Mostly she asked me about Scotland and I answered. The conversation stayed the same while we ate and the storm still raged outside. Underneath the light conversation, a tension was building. I didn’t know if she felt it too or if it was purely my own frustrations starting to come to a head, but it made me feel restless and moody.
There was so much between us that wasn’t said, and the hurt I was responsible for would flash in her eyes every so often, there only long enough for me to recognize it before it was gone again. It was a relief when she went to bed, saying the events of the day had made her tired.
I thought once she was gone and I was alone, the tension coiled inside me would lessen, that it would go away. It didn’t. It got worse. It was like being away from her made my body want to search for her.
Maybe I should just admit it.
I wanted her.
I had feelings for her.
Frankie made me feel.
I growled in frustration. But even still, what I said earlier held true. There was no future for us; there couldn’t be.
The next thing I knew I was standing in her doorway, peering into her dark room at the bed, wondering if she was asleep yet. She wasn’t in the bed. She was standing at the window, looking out at the moon. She was wearing a pair of boxer shorts and a tank top, an outfit that left little to the imagination.
Lust slammed into me so quickly that I almost stumbled. The need to touch her, to claim her, almost had me across the room and pushing her onto the bed.
But I held back, needing to tell her.
“I’ve thought about it too.”
She jumped, my voice startling her, and she turned, glancing at me over her shoulder through the dark.
“Since the other night on the beach, I’ve thought of little else.” The more I did this talking thing, the easier it became. And when she looked at me like that, with her blue eyes wide like I was doing something extraordinary by just telling her what I was thinking, it made me want to make things up to say just so she would keep on looking at me.
“Charming, I—”
I held up my hand and she stopped. “I just wanted you to know that. I didn’t want you to think that I hadn’t thought of you at all. Because I have. You make me… feel. I thought I had bypassed that a long time ago. And that’s why we—why I can’t be with you. I can’t even think about being with you. Because it’s selfish. Because if I let you close to me, I would do what I do best. I would kill you.”
“Charming, you would never kill me.”
“Yes, I would. Just not the kind of killing I usually do. This kind would be slow. It would start with you pretending you were okay with who I am. I would take away pieces of you one by one until you were just like me: dead.”
“Charming,” she whispered, taking a step toward me.
“For the first time since becoming an Escort, I care if someone lives or dies,” I whispered. “I won’t kill you. I won’t take the only life I value on this earth away.”
“If you had wanted to push me away, you should have told me I was fat, thrown me out of the house, or left me out there today in that storm. But what you just said… those words… all they did was pull me closer to you.”
See, this is what happens when a guy tries to talk.
It backfires.
“I should have known you were crazy enough to twist what I said into something romantic.”
“Ahh, now you try the insults,” she said, a smile creeping into her voice.
“If I was insulting you, you would feel insulted,” I muttered.
“Hmmm,” she said, taking a step toward me.
“I’m not trying to pull you closer.”
She took another step and another. “What if I want to be closer?”
“Didn’t you hear anything I just said?”
“I heard.” She stopped directly in front of me, tipped her chin back, and looked up. “So you do this noble thing, you stay away from me, and you ‘save my life’ by not being with me.”
She hooked her fingers in the belt loops on the front of my jeans and tugged, bringing me that much closer. “But what about you?”
“Me?” How was I supposed to think with her hands in such close proximity to the fly of my jeans?
She made a sound of agreement and released my belt loops, but instead of pulling back, she ran her hands along my sides and across my lower back.
It was the first time she ever touched me… well, touched me first. Usually she didn’t touch me until my lips were devouring hers. Most of the blood flow left my brain and all rushed downward… into my jeans. I knew once the brain downstairs took over, I wouldn’t be leaving this room. It took everything in me to reach around and pull her hands away, to gently return them to her sides.
I didn’t look back as I left the room because if I had, I wouldn’t have left it at all.
It occurred me then the reason I spent so much time doing the wrong thing was because doing the right thing was too damn hard.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“Butterfly - any of various insects of the order Lepidoptera, characteristically having slender bodies, knobbed antennae, and four broad, usually colorful wings.”
Frankie
I couldn’t sleep. I felt restless and hot, like someone left the oven door open in the house on a hot day. I gave up on the bed and left my room, wandering down the hall and stopping at Charming’s door. It was open and a small lamp beside the bed showed me he wasn’t in bed either.
The past two days had been like a rollercoaster ride. And the things he said, the words he whispered… it was official. He was it for me. That was the only thing I knew for sure right now. Well, that and I wanted him. Badly.
I wandered through the house, not finding him in the places I thought he would be. So I went down the stairs toward a part of the house I hadn’t seen yet. As soon as my feet hit the floor, I knew he was down there. The sound of his heavy breathing and swift movements beckoned me onward until I was standing in the open door of the most impressive home gym I’d ever seen.
It was huge. But it would have to be because sitting in the center of the all-white room was a full-sized boxing ring.
Charming was in the center of the ring, going through movements that up until now I had only watched on TV.
I stood in the doorway a long time. Watching him move was mesmerizing. His body was so fluid, so strong. It’s like he was exactly sure about every punch and jab he made. His skin glistened with the sheen of sweat and his usually perfect hair was ruffled and damp around his ears and forehead. The gloves on his hands were big. They looked heavy, but somehow strapped onto the ends of his arms, they seemed small.