“Say something.”’
He studies my eyes.
“Can you control yourself from my amazing womanly charms enough so we can cut your hair and re-bandage your wound and get you some proper clothes? Can we just do that much?”
“Yes, Nurse Ann.” He says it in a way that makes it sound as if it might be a struggle for him.
That shouldn’t be hot.
Not hot,I tell myself.
“How long will it take if we drive in and then take a canoe?”
“Not long,” he says.
“We’ll get a canoe and supplies. After we eat a ton of food. Are you hungry?”
One word in a gust: “Yes.”
“Do you like…eggs? Meat? Hot buttery rolls? What do you like to eat?”
“All of it.” He watches me in a way that’s not just about food. My heart skips a beat.
Not hot,I remind myself.
The fastest way to ruin this whole thing is to get emotionally involved with him. For one thing, all my credibility and my power to help him as a journalist would go out the window if I fucked him.
I look around nervously. More cars. “Let’s go then. We don’t want somebody calling the cops.” I want to tuck the towel around him a little better, but that’s a bit…intimate.
I feel like we’re both on the knife edge of control.
I get up. “Hold the towel around yourself and come on. We’ll do this right and get you to some real grass. Not this pathetic stinky grass.”
Chapter Nineteen
Ann
I’ve never seenanybody eat so much. I’d expected it, for sure. I ordered five steak-and-egg breakfasts from the nearest delivery place in preparation for it. And he ate four of them, and the steak part of mine, sitting there on the hotel bed in the dorky University of Minnesota Golden Gophers sweatpants I got him at the gas station. Somehow they don’t look dorky on him.
I pull out my phone. I feel weird doing so many secret photos, so I do one above board. “Smile,” I say.
He glares.
“Oh, come on,” I say playfully. I take his picture, then I do a selfie of us. I want less and less to be taking his picture. Less and less to be doing this story.
He drinks glass after glass of water, like he’s trying to get the drugs out of his system.
The white of his bandage is stark against his massive chest, muscles marred with scars and dirt, the chest of a beast of battle.
There’s even something about the way he tears into the meat that’s hot. He transforms everything around him. He makes the world glitter darkly. He makes me feel alive.
I get hold of myself and pull a chair into the bathroom. “We need to cut your hair and trim your beard.”
He stiffens, and I think about what they’d done to him at the institute in terms of grooming—probably lopping off his locks in the minimum number of snips and snipping his beard before shoving him into the shower to be basically hosed off—by people who fear and hate him.
I go to him. “Let me, Kiro. Please?” I take his wrist and pull him in, and make him sit on the chair I brought in there. I drape a towel around his bare shoulders and start to comb out his dark curls. I go slowly, getting out the knots, careful not to pull.
“You don’t like my hair,” he says.