With that, Turner and Castiel were walking in the direction of the spare bedroom they’d stored their meager belongings in earlier, leaving Liner and I standing at the back door waiting on the dog.
“Not too bad, was it?” he asked.
I pursed my lips.
“I guess not,” I admitted. “It was definitely more comfortable than when I met Hoax.”
He grunted out a reply. “I can imagine…Hoax has never been one to hide his feelings well, though. You probably wouldn’t have any idea what Castiel thought unless he flat out told you.”
I didn’t know what to say or think of that.
So I chose to say nothing.
“You looked freaked out about the shower,” he said. “Do you want to use mine until they leave?”
Until you leave? was left unsaid.
I opened my mouth to say no, but ‘yes’ came out instead.
“I would, thank you,” I said softly. “I’m just not…Tara sometimes...” I shivered. “The shower isn’t a good place for me.”
His eyes narrowed. “You’ll have to tell me about your shower demons one day.”
I thought about that and decided that maybe I would.
Maybe I’d tell him everything one day.
Then he might realize that I was a lost cause and think ‘good riddance’ as I was shipped out to parts unknown.
“One day,” I confirmed. “Just…not today. Thinking about it makes me not want to shower for at least a week. And yeah, I cleaned up dog vomit off your chest today. I feel like I need one.”
My attempt at humor didn’t go over well, and I could tell that he wanted to say something more.
Instead, he let Monster in and then walked into my room, then into the bathroom, and collected all my stuff that he’d bought me out of the shower and off the counters.
Then he closed and locked the door that led to the bathroom and continued on to his room with me following behind him like a lost puppy.
After placing all my stuff down on his counter, he lifted a couple of towels out of a cabinet, then took a robe off the back of the door.
“I don’t ever use this,” he said. “Got it for Christmas last year.”
I smiled at it.
“It’s nice,” I said to him.
He spared a glance at it, then scoffed. “Do you honestly see a man like me wearing a robe like this?”
The robe really was nice.
Big and plush. Soft. Definitely not something I’d expect to see on a man like Liner.
Then again, maybe I could.
Having something so smooth and soft against skin that looked just as smooth and soft? It looked like a match made in heaven.
“I think you might enjoy it if you tried it,” I admitted.
He rolled his eyes and tossed both the towel and the robe to the counter, then turned until we were face to face, only inches apart.
“Do you want me to show you how to work the shower?” he asked.
I looked at said shower and searched for why he would think that I’d need him to turn on the shower, and then realized that he was right. Or he would’ve been if I hadn’t already used it once before. Then, I’d had no clue. Mostly because there were no freakin’ knobs to turn or levers to pull. Also, there was no shower head.
It’d taken quite a bit of me fiddling with things before I’d figured it out.
“Umm,” I said softly. “No thanks. I figured it out already.”
He grinned and walked right into the shower.
Liner’s bathroom was set up as one large room with the shower and the toilet area in a recessed alcove that broke it off from the rest of the room. The shower portion took up what looked like over half the length of the room but was walled off by a glass partition. A massive tub cut off the lower portion of the shower from the top portion, shielding the modesty of those within if there happened to be more than one person in the room at the time.
“Wow,” I said, finally taking my first good look at the bathroom. “This is nice.”
It was really nice.
Really, really nice.
And I knew nice. My father had every single luxury that was known to man. If there was something he wanted, he made it happen.
He had the money and the means to make anything happen.
But this place? It was honestly not something I’d have expected of Liner.
He didn’t seem like the type of man that allowed things like this to be in his place.
“I had it remodeled,” he explained. “When I moved in, the bathroom was absolute shit. It looked like the previous owners intended to start something similar, but either ran out of desire to do it, or money. My guess is money. I just kind of finished it. I like it now. Other than this.”
He pressed his finger to a button, and a whirring sound began in the walls, followed shortly by shower heads opening up from the walls.