The Boy Who Lives In My Garage > jariana (COMPLETED)

eight

"You want to take a shower?" I ask as I lead Justin toward the bathroom. As soon as my parents left for work and Alyssa left for her babysitting job, I'd headed out to the garage and invited Justin inside. The blankets I took out to him last night probably did little more than take the edge off the cold.

"You've got hot water, right?" he asks.

"Lots of it." In the bathroom, I remove a pink towel and washcloth from the cupboard.

"Cute," he says, looking around at the too-pink décor.

"Beggars can't be choosers." I pull back the shower curtain. The salmon-colored shower curtain. With ruffles.

He shakes his head. "You need a brother."

"No kidding. Okay, the water goes from zero to scalding in three seconds flat, so don't burn yourself. There's soap and shampoo. Need anything else?"

"Nope." He sets his ever-present backpack on the ground, removes his jacket, and reaches past me. When his arm brushes against mine, I get a rush equivalent to riding a roller coaster. He turns on the water. In the shower. Where he will soon be very naked. In my house. In the room right next to mine.

I clear my throat and force myself to take a step back. "Yell if you need anything."

Justin closes the door, and I head to my bedroom, trying very hard not to think about what's happening on the other side of that door. Or kind of trying, at least. I make a half-assed attempt at picking up dirty laundry, throwing away old magazines, and stacking school stuff in a corner. When I'm finished, the room is still far from clean, but it's as presentable as it's going to get.

The faucet squeaks as Justin turns off the water. I flop onto my unmade bed and don't think about Justin wrapping one of the towels that I've used a hundred times around his waist. The thought doesn't even cross my mind. Not once. On TV, the Travel Channel is showcasing some tropical island that looks like paradise compared to the snow-covered ground outside my window.

It would look even better with a towel-wrapped Justin standing on its shores.

As the camera pans across a waterfall too perfect to be real, Justin steps out of the bathroom. He sets his backpack on the ground and enters my room. The plain white T-shirt he's wearing is damp in a few places. It's more revealing than his sweatshirt and jacket. It makes it easy to see how he was able to win the fight: muscles. Lots of them. The jeans he's wearing add to my attraction. They're darker and tighter than the other pair. Not that I'm paying close attention or anything. Not at all. "How was the shower?"

"Warm." He looks around my bedroom but doesn't make any comments, sarcastic or otherwise. When he sees the bulletin board near my bed, he takes a few steps closer to examine the pictures.

It feels like he's studying me instead of the wall. Like he'll see something in those pictures the same way he saw something in the grade school pictures downstairs. I fidget with a loose thread on my comforter. "How are your hands?"

He pulls his gaze away from the bulletin board. "Much better than last night, thanks to you." When he makes and releases fists, the motions aren't smooth, but it seems like he's in less pain than he was in last night. "How's my face look?"

There's some bruising around his eyes, and he's a little swollen, but not bad. It's sexier than I want it to be. "Badass." The word "dangerous" also crosses my mind, along with a thought of the other person in the fight. A potentially innocent person who might be in even worse shape than Justin this morning.

He laughs. "See? You've got a thing for tough guys."

I push the negative thoughts out of my mind. "Yeah, whatever," I say, even though he's right.