What's Said in Silence

Sera-XIV

I always wanted to travel overseas...

The sentence that had shook me to my core so much so that I didn't check my phone for the rest of the night. I had tried to reason with myself that, while he might have figured out I fled the US, that didn't necessarily mean he knew which country I was in. As long as I didn't show my face that much I would be fine. I was starting to understand the appeal of wearing a mask twenty-four seven.  

I shut the water off and shoved the curtains back. I rang the excess water out of my hair before getting out of the tub and wrapping my body in the towel. I had fallen in love with these dark grey towels the first time I tried them. They were the right kind of fluffy, soft but didn't feel like I was trying to dry off with a blanket. 

I opened the bathroom door and was just about to walk back to my room, when something on the door caught my eye. There on the white door was a large black hand print. Again. I thought back to the last time he had left a hand print on the door. I remembered the exhilaration from it and the way I wanted that hand print permanently tattooed on my skin. A reaction that I shouldn't have had to something so strange. It had left me confused for days and had taken hours to clean off, completely. 

Absolutely. The. Fuck. Not.

My face heated up and my knuckled curled into fists. Did he not realize that I was the one that had to clean up his messes after his little pranks? I understood it was my job to clean up after him, but this was excessive and dare I say childish. Any previous amusement dissipated. 

Before I could think about what I was doing, I marched down the hall and stood in front of his door. I raised my fist and pounded on it before I had the chance to back down. I waited while I heard some rustling of papers from the other side. I didn't hear any footsteps, per usual, but knew he had moved and stood just on the  other side of the door. I knocked again while still trying to hold on to my fizzling anger. 

A whoosh of cold hair brushed across my skin as he pulled the door open. It was about that time that I realized I was still in a towel. I was in a towel, dripping wet, standing in his doorway. I squared my shoulders, steeling myself against any unwanted embarrassment. I had a point to make and, dammit, I was going to make it. 

He stood there just looking down at me for a minute. He stepped forward and leaned down until I felt the soft brushes of his breath across my skin, making it difficult to steady my own. I forced myself to swallow the lump that had formed in my throat. 

"Something I can do for you, Sera?" He asked, each word came out with deliberate slowness. That beautiful, bourbon voice wrapped around me and could have sent me to the floor from the weight of it. My gaze dropped down to his lips, which were dangerously close to my own, before I forced them back up to stare into the black mesh of the masks eyes. With any remaining cognitive function I had left, I raised my arm and pointed in the direction of the bathroom door. 

He turned his head slightly to follow where my hand was pointing. A single chuckle came out of him. "What about it?" 

Was he challenging me? Did he find this amusing, assuming I was concerned about him playing the role of peeping-tom? I should have been, but instead I had been more concerned about a stain. I wasn't intimidated by his slight stalking, but he seemed to think otherwise. To prove him wrong, I grabbed a hold of his wrist and drug him out of the room and down the hall- which probably would have been much harder if he hadn't willingly followed.  

When we reached the bathroom door, I swiped my hand across the black paint. It did nothing but smear it, making a bigger stain than before. He seemed to understand my point because a smile tugged at the corners of his lips. 

"You're worried about the stain." He said. It was more a statement than a question but I nodded my head anyways. His hand came up to his mouth and his thumb stroked across his lower lip, making my stomach flip. Such a simple movement should not cause the feelings that it did to stir deep down. But then again, everything this man did was either erotic or beautiful in its own right. 

"I'll clean it," He started, "on one condition." Oh no. My stomach knotted. I hated conditional favors, they never ended up being in my favor. He dropped his hand and bent down, grazing the nose of his mask against my own. "Kiss me."

I blinked a few times sure I had heard him wrong. When he didn't correct himself, I realized I hadn't. My breathing hitched and my body felt like cement had been poured in it. He must've seen every thought that ran through my mind in my eyes because he challenged further, dropping his voice to a low whisper,  "Unless, my little fox is frightened."