CREATURE

・chapter 39・

It was Boxing Day morning, and Roman had not slept well the night before. At all. If anyone was to ask why exactly he hadn't been able to get to sleep, he would undoubtedly have said something about struggling with insomnia or having had a long day. Certainly, he would not have said anything about the singular thing that had been on his mind between midnight and 4am.

When the morning did arrive, he was even less thrilled with the arrival of a new day than he usually was. It was still early, and rather than packing, which meant that he would have to confront the white shirt that had been hanging over the cupboard door for the past two days, he'd taken the dogs out for a run. Once he returned, he put himself through the coldest shower the plumbing would allow, hoping that set his head straight. Instead, the cold water just reminded him of a particular set of long legs wrapped around his waist, damp fingertips just barely touching his neck, and a stormy set of eyes that were going to haunt him far into the afterlife.

And much like that too recent memory, the shirt that hung over his cupboard door should serve as a warning, he told himself. A great, big, flashing warning that things that smelled like vanilla and honeysuckle were off limits.

Dressed, but still no less agitated with himself, he snatched the shirt off the cupboard door and flung it into his bag with a stubborn huff. It had been a long night. For all the wrong reasons. Because in between playing back their lakeside conversation at least a thousand times, her stripping down to her unnecessarily pretty underwear on a deserted beach, and touching his neck like she could break it, something had gone horribly wrong.

Horribly, terribly, inconceivably, wrong. Over the past three days, multiple parts of her identity had gone crashing into one another at breakneck speed. All these once isolated parts came ricocheting together, and one part he hadn't really acknowledged, hadn't really entertained if he was being honest, got stuck in his head.

She was attractive.

Fine, there it was.

She was attractive. Very attractive, very pretty, very beautiful, whatever. He'd always thought she was attractive, he wasn't blind. He'd made observations before, mostly healthy, harmless observations, that maybe her hair was nice or that her waist had this lovely, touchable little dip to it. And nothing, not his aunt's hints or his sister's incessant questioning would have gotten him to admit it out loud.

Because they were just that, observations. With no intent or impulse tied to them, just observations. There was a very clear, definite line between these observations and the shit that had kept him up until morning.

And he still wasn't admitting it out loud, not to himself and certainly not to anyone else. Because this is just what time off did to him, it freed up just enough of his headspace to start thinking up trouble. No, they'd go back to London, and she'd...

She'd probably serve him a much-needed reminder regarding the extent of her interest in him.

He snatched his wallet off the nightstand and made his way downstairs. It would be fine. It was all going to be just fine, they were going to head back and all these thoughts would just disappear. Midway down the landing he started hearing voices coming from the kitchen, instinctively able to pick out a particular silvery, slightly melodic one from among them.

He'd spent the whole night being restless, being confused, but when he heard that voice, he realized just how much he didn't want that reminder. He didn't want to know that she was sleeping with a shitfaced idiot who didn't know his left from his right, or that she thought of him as nothing but a washed-up star past his prime, or that she didn't want anything but the occasional hello-how-are-you from him. Reasons be damned, he just didn't want to know any of those things.