by C L Green
His en suite is once again spotlessly presented. It has a big corner spa in one corner and large double shower in the other. A square vanity and toilet are tucked away to one side.
Jax quickly sets about setting off taps, adjusting water temperature and adding the salts to the bath. After a quick run through on the height at which to turn the water off and how to drive the jets, he grabs two fresh, black towels from a cupboard and lays them out on the sink ready for me.
“All set. Give me an extra minute and I’ll go see if I can dig you up some shorts and a t-shirt so you don’t have to put your dirty clothes back on.”
I nod as he quickly heads into his walk-in robe. I hear him shuffling about in drawers and then he reappears with a pair of black and yellow swimming shorts and a big white surfers t-shirt.
“Sorry, but I don’t think my normal shorts are gunna to fit you. These at least have a string tie, is that okay?” He says laying them next to the towels.
I look at the shorts like they are going to bite me and consider my choices. I could head back out to the car and grab my ‘camel toes’. Then again, they would probably be even worse than loose fitting men’s shorts that are going to hang down to my knees because he’s a giant, and I’m only five foot six.
I think I’ll risk it with the shorts.
“Fine by me, thanks.” I do appreciate that he is looking after me so well.
“Well, unless you are gunna change your mind on my offer to join you, shampoo and conditioner are in the shower unit, as well as body wash if you don’t mind smelling like a man. Are you sure you don’t want any company?” He says again raising his eyebrows and giving me another cheeky dimple display.
“Um, no thanks. I think I’d rather bathe alone if that’s okay?”
“Sure thing, meet me back in the lounge-room where you had your snooze when you’re done. Action, romance, comedy or horror, what’s your preference?” He asks as he spins on his heels and heads for the bedroom door.
“Action, most definitely, with a very good looking, muscle-bound man would be my preference.” I reply to his back.
“Oh, there’ll be a very good looking muscle-bound man alright, you’re looking at him. Now to find the action movie!”
I chuckle at his confidence as I watch him softly close the door behind him.
It’s not long before the bath is full and I am sliding into its hot, soft watery depths. I feel the heat penetrate through my skin to my bones and feel myself relaxing as my body sighs with the sheer pleasure of an end of day bath.
I love baths and I spend of lot of hours in mine at home. The bath is my favorite place to kick back and relax while I read a book on Kindle for IPhone.
I can spend hours in a bath, constantly sneaking small amounts of water out through the plug hole while topping up with hot again just to make the bath last as long as I can. I’ve even been known to ignore visitors at the door when I am in the midst of enjoying a bath because I love baths so much.
Jen would be pissed if she knew the number of times I’ve pretended I wasn’t home because I was in fact soaking in the bath reading a romance novel. It is for that same reason I make sure that I have my phone on vibrate when I’m in the bath in case visitors try to ring me to find out whether I am home or not.
I think my love of baths started young because we had a large family comprising my parents and four of us children. With so many people living under one roof, the house was often hectic and retreating to the bathroom was one of the only ways to get some quiet time away from the hustle and bustle.
I have one younger sister Evie who was born two years after me. She recently had her twenty-sixth birthday party out on the town which saw us ending up very drunk, playing mini-golf at an all-night amusement park, over one hundred kilometers from home. Evie is a lot of fun when she is drinking.
Evie is also very keen on horses, but unlike me, she stuck with them all through school and she now owns two beautiful Arabians of her own. She rides them a lot. Enough that they are fit enough to do full-length endurance rides on them five or six times a year.
Evie is clearly an advanced horse rider. She has to be to not only ride her lively Arabians regularly, but to ride them for what sometimes equates to hundreds of kilometers in a single day at an endurance ride. Endurance rides ride through various scenery and environments. These environments are the highest risk scenario for horses to go off tap and overreact because they are exposed to every single hazard known to the equine world while out on an endurance ride.
I know for a fact that Evie has taken a few falls when out and about at rides or out training. Somehow, unlike me, she is always able to bounce a whole lot better and apart from the odd strain or stiff bruise, she continues on her way without too many injuries. The falls don’t bother her at all.
Apart from our love of horses and alcohol, Evie and I do not have a lot in common.
Evie is what I consider to be an airhead. Good-looking and reasonably easy to get along with, her main failing being that she is constantly running late everywhere she goes. This habit appears to have started at conception when I think she was late for the line-up when they were handing out the genes for high IQ’s.
Luckily, being so good-looking she gets along in the world just fine as she has a large following of wealthy men chasing her around. From what I can see, all she needs to do is make sure she picks the richest one for a husband so he will be able to support her expensive horse habit.
One leaf I wish I had have taken out of Evie’s book was that I wish that I had been as committed to horse riding as her throughout my teenage years. Unfortunately, I had taken the dark path of following the boys around after school. I had done this instead of spending my time with the horses. Perhaps if I had have stuck with horses like her, I would now be a brave endurance rider too. Perhaps I’d even have rich boys chasing me around as well.
No use crying over spilled milk I suppose.
My two brothers are older than me. Mitch is thirty-one years old, married with two children of his own and living over in Western Australia working in one of the mines. He’s a genuinely nice guy and we only see him every couple of years or so at Christmas. This is when he takes a full three months leave from the mines and bundles his family into the car, hooks his caravan on the back and snails his way across Australia to visit us. After what are always a few great weeks with him around, he then snails his way back home again.
The oldest child in our family is Gavin who is thirty-three. Gavin is the big success of us all and he is some sort of director in a shipping firm in Melbourne. Unmarried, Gavin is a very good looking guy who plays football for a local team on the weekends. His good looks, director title and footy fit body make him a hit with any woman he meets.
This unfortunately has the downside of him being a cocky womanizing asshole. He is definitely one of those guys that woman swoon over, even though they know he is a player who can’t settle on one woman for more than five minutes. In fact he is happy to take multiple women at the same time if the women agree, which to my utter astonishment appears to happen a lot.
Although I don’t agree with his free and easy life style, he loves me and I love him, so we agree to just not talk about it, at all. I never ask him if he is seeing anyone and he never brings a woman home to mum and dads for social events so we are all cool with that.
Mum and dad themselves are just your basic hardworking parents. Dad has worked in the public service all of his life and has always made enough money to keep his family covered.
Mum has worked part-time for as long as I can remember helping arrange flowers at a local florist near their home. Money has never been short for my parents and all of us kids were given as much schooling as we liked. We were always offered as many after school activities as we could have ever want and we had heaps of friends.
Dad will be retiring soon and I suspect mum will do so at the same time just so they can spend more time together.
Speaking honestly, I have
to admit that neither of my parents are the sharpest tools in the proverbial toolshed. It took me until adulthood to realize this and once I did, I started to find it harder and harder to spend time under the same roof as them.
There are only so many conversations you can have about what they read in the newspaper or watch on the news. Unfortunately public affairs appears to be their sole form of intellectual expansion.
Lucky for me, I had settled myself into a nice steady, reasonably well paying job by age twenty-one. Due to this, it had only taken me three years to save enough money for a deposit for my own home. Not the person to waste money paying someone else’s mortgage, I stayed home until I could afford my own mortgage and then moved out.
My relationship with my parents has changed a lot since I left home and I now pretty much avoid them at all costs. I only spend time visiting them when there is a family get together. I call them once a week to check they are okay, but apart from that I’d rather spend time with my friends than with my family. Everyone is clear that I am the black sheep of the family and I’m happy for it to stay that way.
As I relax even more, my mind continues to wander.
I start to wonder if I can now classify Jax as my friend. It’s hard to work out what is going on between us considering I’m here because I’m a paying client of his. How does this work when he tells me he’s interested and he wants to see where this is going? What does that mean? Does that mean he just wants to be friends?
That’s okay but I must admit I kind of like the idea of friends with benefits even better. With a body like that surely he knows how to use it?
I start to ponder the sad fact that it’s been a while since I’ve shown any interest in a man other than as a one-night stand to go home with. This is because the guys you meet out and about in bars and clubs are mostly player types who are dead end streets waiting to happen.
Usually I wake up in the morning, take a closer look at what I have hooked up with under the influence of too many Bourbons and then begin an exit strategy. My exit strategies more often than not involve sneaking out before they even wake up.
So far, this has been fine with me. I work long hours and I like my privacy. For the first time I start to wonder what it would be like to have Jax as a regular boyfriend. I wonder what Jax would be like as a person to spend my weekends with and play with horses all-day. In among all this I have to wonder why Jax seems so together, the complete package of looks and personality and yet he doesn’t have a girlfriend or wife?
Maybe God just does love me a lot at the moment.
I must remember to donate to the Salvation Army or some other charity next week to pay the big guy back on the favors he is granting on me.
Chapter Seven
Spooning
“That spa is amazing.” I announce as I wander into his lounge room about half an hour later. “I could have stayed in there for hours except I was starting to feel a bit rude leaving you out here on your own.”
“You should have accepted my offer and we could both still be in there now. You might want to remember that for next time.” He says looking up at me with his cheeky grin.
There is going to be a next time?
That is an interesting take on my current spontaneous sleepover arrangement. I glance around the now brightly lit room for a second. My eyes cast over the display unit and the photograph frames strewn across it.
Even though it was dark before, I swear there were more frames on there before. It was littered with them earlier but now it is looking sparsely covered.
My eyes soon return to gaze at Jax who is now lazily reclining on a section of his massive couch. His hair has dried all messy and it is wildly flopping over his eyes. His white t-shirt stretches within an inch of its life across his chest. I can't help cast my eyes down the front of his blue jeans to where his feet, now sexily bare, cross over one another. He is leaning back looking relaxed and comfortable.
“Um, is there any chance I can use your washing machine and dryer for these?” I ask holding my now tightly balled up dirty clothes out in front of me. I have balled them up so I can hide my underwear discreetly in the center.
“Sure, I’ll show you where the powder is.” He throws himself forward, pushing his recliner down with his feet and launches out of his chair.
A quick demo on the use of the all-in-one washing machine and dryer later, Jax turns to me and offers to take my tightly balled clothes out of my hands. I guess that he plans to shove them in the machine for me.
Acutely aware of my hidden underwear in the center of the ball, I balk his offered hands and try to sidestep to the machine to put the clothes in myself.
“I’ve got this.” I quickly let him know that I need no help to place the clothes into the machine. In one swift maneuver I fling the entire tightly wrapped ball into the machine and slam the door shut.
“Mmmmmmm. Don’t you need to separate those so they wash properly?” I see his eyebrows lifting and a mischievous twinkle appears in his eyes. “A tight ball like that is not going to wash well.”
“They’re fine just the way they are.” I mumble looking back at him, trying to blank the expression on my face.
I do this so he won’t see I’m fibbing to him and that it is going against all my inner self-control not to re-open the door and carefully loosen and separate all the items.
“Don’t you want me to see your underwear?” He asks, piercing me with a look that dares me to lie.
“How do you know my underwear is even in there?” I throw the taunt at him, cocking a leg and tipping my hip out to show my ‘prove it’ attitude. “Who's to say I didn’t put it back on?”
“Well I didn’t pick out that very thin, white t-shirt by accident. I have some incriminating evidence that you are not, in fact, wearing a brazier. The panty situation I have yet to assess.”
I feel a flood of heat burn across my cheeks as I quickly drop my eyes to my chest.
Oh my god.
Sure enough, clear as day I can see the dark shadows of my nipples peering at me through the front of my shirt.
Cheeky bastard.
I look back up to his blue eyes and see them intensively examining my chest. There is a broad, appreciative grin beaming across his face. He is most pleased with himself and seemingly the view as well.
“Right then,” I announce turning back to the washing machine while I gather my thoughts. “I guess this means I’ll separate the washing and you’ll be off to find me a better t-shirt or even more preferably, a thick jumper to wear. Perhaps even a cable knit, the thicker, the better.”
“Spoilsport,” he mutters as I hear his bare feet slapping on the tiles as he retreats down his hallway.
*****
“Do you want a drink?” Jax asks me as I make my way warily back into the lounge-room in the replacement thick, black, t-shirt he has now found me. This time I was sure to do a full check in the mirror to make sure that nothing was visible to errant eyes.
As long as it doesn’t get too cold I should be okay.
He is squatting down in front of his entertainment unit fiddling about inserting a DVD into his player with one hand, while he presses a series of remote buttons with the other. I can't help appreciate the picture before me as his shirt stretches across his shoulders while he hunches forward. A small strip of skin is laid bare above his jeans.
“Sounds great, do you have any bourbon?”
“Sure. Straight, with water, ice or do you want Coke?” He asks as he finishes what he is doing and heads for the kitchen again.
“Diet Coke, caffeine free, if you’ve got it. Normal Coke will do at a pinch though. Ice would be good too.”
I don’t hear him reply and wonder if there is any chance I am going to get diet Coke. I am the only person I know who drinks bourbon with caffeine free diet Coke but I started the habit all those years ago when I’d needed to lose weight. After that, the habit stuck.
It seems like another paradox because drinking the hardes
t liquor one can buy with a soft-assed caffeine and sugar free mixer is in itself a bit odd. I am however aware that I do love a bourbon and sugar is a definite no-no for me. Also if I drink caffeine at this time of night it may just wipe out any chance of me getting any sleep tonight.
Jax returns a short time later with a tall Coke filled highball glass tinkling with ice. “Sorry, it’s got caffeine in it but it is diet Coke. I found a leftover bottle of diet in the fridge, it’s probably Teagan’s.”
I doubt I’ll be feeling asleep on the couch then, probably a good thing.
I take a quick sip to test the mix of the drink and note it’s strong. Is this guy trying to get me drunk?
“What’s the movie you’ve primed up?” I ask.
“Gone in Sixty Seconds. A family staple that never fails to impress its audience.”
He smirks at me as he dims the light in the room and heads back to the couch with his own drink in hand. “Enough action for your liking?”
I decide not to reply because it’s clear he has decided not to pick a move with a muscle-bound guy because you can’t exactly classify Nicholas Cage as muscle-bound. He’s sexy of course, but in no way is he classified as muscle-bound against say the likes of Dwayne Johnson or Vin Diesel.
My eyes dart around the room as I consider my choices on where to sit and I decide to take the safe bet, the far end of the couch from where Jax is sitting. My butt has barely touched the soft leather when I feel a strong arm wrap its way around my waist. With a quick yank, I am dragged sideways to slam against Jax’s side.
Amazingly I manage to succeed in covering my glass during this manhandling and avoid spilling my drink.
“Why did you sit all the way over there?” He asks.
Not too sure how to answer that question I decide that silence might be the best policy so I just roll my eyes at him and shrug. I really am out of my depth here as although I probably want nothing more than to crawl into his lap, it all seems a bit odd after spending only one day with the guy.
