But what was done was done and right now she just wanted to get away from everyone and relax.
“I hope you have a restful night,” Elfa told her, stepping aside so that Em could enter the bathing area. “I’ll come to collect you in the morning for the second Trial—if it’s necessary, of course.”
Em wanted to ask why in the world it wouldn’t be necessary, but she was too tired. To be honest, she felt almost on the verge of tears, which was something that rarely happened to her. Generally, she was in very good control of her emotions.
It’s these wretched Menopause hormones! she told herself. They’ve got me so mixed up I don’t know what to do with myself!
It was absolutely true. One moment she was so horny she wanted to climb Rarev like a tree and the next she was just about to burst into tears and bawl like a baby. Really, she had to get hold of herself!
“Thank you,” she said to Elfa. “We’ll see you in the morning.”
Then she turned and—with vast relief—closed the crystal panel behind her as she entered the bathing area.
25
The first thing Em wanted was a toilet and thank goodness, the Rigellen one which was tucked away in an alcove in the corner, appeared to be fairly straight forward. There was no paper to clean oneself afterwards, but there was a sort of bidet attachment which, when she pushed a button, squirted her with water and then with warm air to dry her bum.
After relieving herself, Em looked around for a mirror and a shower. She needed to assess the damage the alien sea creature had done to her and then she wanted a good hot shower to soothe her frazzled nerves. A soak in the tub would have been even nicer, she thought, but she didn’t see anything that resembled a bathtub, so that idea was out.
As a matter of fact, she didn’t see anything that resembled a shower, either, but there was a crystalline mirror that covered one whole wall of the roughly rectangular room.
Wincing, Em worked her way out of the Venetian Blinds dress. She was glad to see there was a crystal cupboard beside the mirror, which appeared to have towels and robes stacked inside it, so she needn’t put the damn thing back on. Once she finally got it off, she assessed her injuries.
The sucker marks on her wrist looked like a weird tattoo, she thought. They wrapped around her flesh, almost all the way up her forearm, making an odd, almost leopard pattern print on her pale skin.
Her right breast looked rather worse. Not only had the tentacle wrapped around it bitten into her flesh, one of the suckers had latched directly onto her nipple. The little nubbin of flesh was swollen to twice the size of the other and it was a dark, bruised, purplish color. It was also incredibly tender—Em could barely stand to brush it with her fingertips and even then she hissed in pain at her own touch.
You could let Rarev heal it—the same way he healed your arm, suggested a naughty little voice in her head—the one that had been speaking to her ever since she’d started on this mission with the Monstrum Kindred. The one she was finding it increasingly difficult to ignore.
Shut up! Em told it rudely. I’m not asking him to heal me in such an intimate place and that’s final!
Especially since his method of healing involved kissing her.
Just the thought of that—of the big Monstrum on his knees before her, gently kissing her wounded nipple while he stroked those warm, velvety hands of his over her naked flesh—caused Em to feel as though she was having some kind of hot flash right between her thighs.
Grimly, she squeezed her legs together and attempted to think of other things. Such as how in the world she was supposed to take a shower when there didn’t appear to be any shower stall in what was supposed to be a bathing chamber!
She scanned the walls, wondering if there was some kind of hidden chamber for bathing, but none of the wall panels seemed to give way, no matter how much she tapped and rapped on them. There was nothing on the floor either, which was plain sliver metal which felt cold to her bare feet.
She was just about to give up when, in the corner of the mirror wall, she found a cluster of small buttons. One was blue, one was red, one was orange, and one was green.
Wondering what would happen, Em pressed the blue button…and was rewarded by a deluge of warm water coming from overhead.
Gasping, she looked up to see that a million tiny holes had opened in the ceiling and water was pouring from all of them. Good lord, was this what Elfa had meant when she said their bathing apparatus was confusing? Well, she had certainly been right, Em decided. The Rigellen version of a shower was rather like being caught in the middle of a tropical monsoon, but at least it washed away the slime from the tentacles that had gripped her. She rubbed her skin and rinsed her hair, letting the warm water run all over her naked body.