As if the universe thinks I’m owed even more punishment, the bathroom door opens and Sylvie emerges, a cloud of steam following her towel-clad body into the room.
A gentleman would look away, give her a little privacy, but I’m no fool. If she didn’t want to be watched, she would’ve dressed in the fucking bathroom, so I don’t pull my eyes from her, even when she looks over at me to find me watching.
Her skin is flushed, and I imagine she’s like every other woman I’ve encountered and turns the water temp up high enough to scald flesh from the damn bone. Gravity-forced water droplets run down her arms and chest, and I swallow with the need to lick them from her skin, all the while thankful of the thick blankets on the bed that are keeping my attraction to her hidden.
She rolls her eyes at me as she turns around to dig through her suitcase, and the small butterfly tattoo on her shoulder blade should bring back memories, but nothing about it is familiar. I know I’ve seen it because I do some of my best work when a girl is bent over in front of me, but I still can’t seem to conjure it from my memory.
She seems as shameless as I’m acting this morning when she drops her towel to her feet, the heart shape of her ass making me grip my dick and squeeze.
She looks back at me over her shoulder, that little butterfly right under her chin.
She got it to honor her grandmother. The woman would spend hours in her tiny flower garden watching them as if they were majestic creatures.
I don’t know what I look like, what expression I have on my face as the memory hits me in the chest, but she doesn’t seem very impressed before turning her head back around.
My heart races, knowing she told me that the night we were together. There’s no way I just made that shit up in my head.
I squeeze my eyes, trying to pull anything else from that night that I possibly can, but nothing comes flooding back.
I’ve imagined her in a million different positions, whispering things to me as I brought her to orgasms. I can’t trust that what I’m picturing isn’t fantasy rather than what really happened, but I cling to the fact about her tattoo, knowing she looked at me that night exactly like she did just a moment ago.
My eyes ache, both from lack of sleep as well as scrunching them closed as I try to force the memories back in.
My hands on her hips, the way she moaned when I’d move my hips and hit that spot inside of her as she begged me not to stop, to go harder, to make her scream.
“Fuck,” I groan, my balls tightening.
“Are you seriously fucking jacking off over there?”
I snap my eyes open to find her glaring at me, fully dressed in jeans and a sweater, hands on her hips in the same stubborn way she stood last night.
“No,” I argue, but follow her eyes to the blankets where my hand is very obviously still gripping my dick from earlier. “Morning wood.”
It’s a shitty explanation, but it’s all she’s going to get from me right now as I stand from the bed, knowing my erection is comically tenting my briefs.
To her credit, she doesn’t drop her eyes below my waist as I stand at the edge of the bed.
With a huff, she spins back around and reenters the bathroom with a small, zipped bag in her hands.
I spend a few moments watching her reflection in the bathroom mirror as she applies makeup, and despite her not needing a fucking drop of it, I’m smart enough not to voice my own opinion.
Instead, I tug the asshole role back on and shove the bathroom door completely open as I walk behind her inside. I feel her eyes on me as I lift the toilet lid to piss.
She doesn’t chastise me or huff or act grossed out. She also doesn’t pull her eyes from watching me in the mirror as I turn on the shower and strip out of my boxers and climb inside. Through the glass door, I catch her eyes on me more than once as I wash my body, and when she finally walks out of the room, I turn into fourteen-year-old Dylan Pratt again when it only takes a handful of strokes to bring myself to orgasm in the shower.
***
I don’t even have to look at Sylvie to know she’s upset as we approach her grandfather’s property. Her breathing changes, and she begins to fidget in her seat.
I park, taking in the pile of broken furniture on the porch, the three obviously broken-down cars parked in the front yard, and multiple rusting appliances. It looks like the beginning of a scrapyard, only worse.
The house is small, but I can immediately tell from the way she’s acting that the home she left so many years ago didn’t look like this.
And that’s just one more piece to the puzzle, something she had to have told me that night. How else would I know that she left Telluride for college and has never been back?
Jesus, what the hell happened that night? I don’t have lengthy conversations with women I bring home.
“It doesn’t look so bad,” I say, feeling like an idiot the second the words leave my mouth.