He fists my hair one more time, asking me to stand, and I do, still watching his face. I want to see the moment he opens his eyes. But he spins me around and wraps me up in his arms, hugging me tightly, burying his face in a mess of hair, breathing hard on my neck. So hard that it tickles my ear and causes a shiver to race up my body.
An embrace that is something other than sex. Something more than sex. Something I can’t quite recognize, let alone define.
“Come, shower with me,” he says after a few seconds of ragged breathing from both of us. “And then I have a surprise for you.”
“A surprise?”
“The box,” he says as he nods to the wrapped package still sitting on my coffee table. “You have to open that box and then I’m taking you somewhere.”
“You are?” I ask, as he leads me down the hallway, searching out the bathroom. I point to the closed door across from my bedroom and he opens it and feels around on the wall for the switch. The fluorescent light takes a moment to flicker and decide if it wants to work, and then flashes on with an intensity that makes me blink.
“Oh, Grace,” Vaughn says. “This is not a bathroom. It’s too small to allow us to f**k. And there’s no tub.” He turns back to look at me and drops my hand so he can loosen his tie and drag it over his head. He reaches over my shoulder, the warmth of his arm pressing against my bare skin, and checks the back of the door, finds a hook, and then hangs it up and goes to work unbuttoning his dress shirt. My eyes are transfixed by his fingers as they nimbly undo each button, starting from the bottom and working his way up.
I gulp a little as his chest appears. I’ve seen it before, of course. But here in my tiny, extremely inadequate bathroom everything is different. It’s not the vacation fantasy. It’s not a one-night stand. It’s not a… relationship.
What is it?
“Why do you have that look on your face?” he asks me as he shrugs off his crisp white shirt and hangs it on the small hook with his tie. I have a moment of panic that the hook will distort that perfect garment and ruin it.
“What?” I have to take a deep breath because my heart is beating so fast. Why am I feeling like this?
“What’s wrong with you? You look… afflicted.”
I swallow hard. And shake my head. “Nothing, I’m just hungry.”
“Oh.” He reaches for me, pulls me into his chest in another one of those hugs, and then leans into my neck. “Let’s wash up and you can change. We’re going to eat.”
“We are?”
“Yes, baby. I have to feed you. You need to eat.”
“Who are you?”
He laughs so loud he startles me and I step back a pace. This makes him stop and frown. “Tell me,” he says in the authoritative tone I’m used to. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“What are we doing?”
He stares at me with that famous intent gaze, his deep blue eyes bearing down on me with confusion. I think I’m sending it right back, because I’m so off balance I might faint. “We’re f**king, Grace. We’re f**king, we’re showering, we’re eating, we’re discussing. In that order. We’ve just checked off number one and we’re about to complete number two. Then we will go eat and have a conversation. Clear?”
I nod. OK, I can deal with that. I move over to the shower and turn it on. The stall is barely big enough for me, let alone the both of us together. So I jump in before the water is even hot and begin to wash myself, taking care not to get my hair wet so I don’t have to worry about it.
He finishes taking off his clothes and steps to the shower, ready to get in. But I put a hand up. “I’ll be done in a minute and then you can get in alone.”
“You must be joking.”
“No,” I say with chattering teeth since the water is not quite hot yet, “there’s really no room—”
He physically moves me backwards until I’m pressed up against the cold tile wall, and steps in. He sucks in a breath at the water temperature and then adjusts it, standing over me to shield me from the cold. A few seconds later the hot water steams up the tiny stall, and he turns to me with a bar of soap and a wicked grin.
“I made a mess. It’s my job to clean you up.” He lifts up my arm and rubs the soap up and down the length of it, paying close attention to the crevice of my elbow and my ticklish armpit. He chastises me with a simple, “Shhh,” when I giggle and pull away. And I bite my lip and let him continue. He does this for every limb, his deft fingers slipping between my legs and into my folds to massage my clit with the sweet-smelling suds. I groan, I can’t help it.
“One more f**k before we call it a night? I don’t know when I’ll be able to come back again.”
I look up at him and imagine him as Vaughn the man and not Vaughn the movie star. What would it be like to have a relationship with him? Like a real relationship? Is he this attentive all the time? Or does he just want something from me?
I shake my head no to his offer.
He grins. Not a big, wolfish one, but a slight, sympathetic one that tells me he knows. He can see right through me. He knows I’m having some kind of… emotional experience.
“Grace,” he says softly as his fingers slip between my folds. “Relax, let me do this for you. It gives me pleasure.”
I close my eyes and shake my head again, grabbing his hand and taking the soap from him. I lather myself up after that, quickly, as he watches with a keen and still hungry eye. And then I slip under his arm and rinse off in the water. When I open my eyes, he’s staring at me with a smile.