“What are you doing? This isn’t your floor.”
“I’m walking you to your room.”
“That’s really not necessary.”
“I don’t mind,” he said. Either he was oblivious to my discomfort or intentionally ignoring it.
I opened the door to my room and turned to stretch my hand out to shake his. He looked at my hand for one beat, then two. He grabbed it, finally, but didn’t let go.
“Carolina—”
“Hector, don’t.”
“I’m trying not to.” He stepped closer to me, my hand still in his.
“You’re not doing a great job at it,” I said, my voice breathy.
“Then you know how much I’m hating this. I hate not being in control.” His voice deepened, and there was a hoarseness to it now.
I tried pulling my hand away from his grasp, but he was too strong. “Just one minute,” he pleaded. “I lose all control with you. Why do you do this to me?”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You are doing it by existing.”
“We really shouldn’t—” I started to say, but I leaned into his personal space as much as he was invading mine.
“No, we shouldn’t,” he said. He closed the remaining distance between us. His hand came up to the side of my face. He pushed back a strand of my hair and carefully tucked it behind my ear. His hand then lingered on my cheek, his thumb hovering near the corner of my mouth. My chest heaved when he looked at my lips; a hunger burned in his dilated pupils.
This was a moment that could change my life if I let it. It felt very much like the night that I picked him up from the bar, but it couldn’t be more different. He was sober, so there was no questioning what I found in his eyes, or what story his body told me, those muscles taut as he held himself back, his brows knitted together in pain—the pain of restraint.
We stood in the threshold of my hotel room, and he awaited the answer to the question his body was asking. He was charged like a wire, but ever the gentleman, wouldn’t step a foot in my room if I didn’t ask him to.
My body reacted to him too. How could it not? He let go of my hand and brought his second hand to the other side of my face. He was pleading now, and the skin on my arms broke into goosebumps at his touch.
I grabbed his hands and pulled them off my face. “I can’t,” I said panting.
Rejecting him wasn’t what my heart wanted, but like always, my head won over. “I want to. I really want to,” I reassured him as if the reaction in my body hadn’t already told him that. “But I can’t. There’s work to think about. I can be fired if we start anything, but I wouldn’t do that anyway. Not while you’re married, even if you are separated. And then there’s . . .”
“What?” he asked.
“Your wife, Hector. You’re going to see her tomorrow.”
“I know,” he hissed then took a step back.
“You wanted to try with her again, remember?”
His jaw was set now, and a muscle clicked over one side of his jaw. “Damn it, Carolina, I hate myself. I feel like I’m failing.”
“You aren’t failing.”
“I am. I’m failing myself, and I’m failing you. I promise I’ll try harder.”
I wanted to reach out to him, to touch him and reassure him he wasn’t failing. I wanted to ease the look of pain evident on his face, but I could only nod.
“I won’t try to touch you again. I promise.” It was the last thing he said before walking away from me. It was a vow that hurt more deeply than I could have imagined because now I knew.
Hector Medina was a man who kept his vows.