“No, you’re a genius, which is basically the same thing.” She chuckled. “Don’t make me insist that Lil babysits you while she’s there. Trust me, you don’t want her on your case. When this girl is right… she’s right.”
That time I flinched, but at least Troy didn’t see it. Her father on the other hand was a different story. He watched me like I was the only thing that he saw.
“Thanks for the warning,” he said tightly as he stood.
A few seconds later after pulling her in for a hug and giving me a cold stare with an indifferent ‘goodnight,’ Damien disappeared.
“Seriously,” Troy said as she turned to me. “What did you have to do to convince him to come home for dinner?”
I swallowed my groan and forced my shoulders to shrug. “I guess it was just the mention of how good your spaghetti and meatballs taste freshly cooked.”
I let Troy shower first figuring there was less of a chance for running into Damien if I stayed holed up in her room for a little while. But, when it was my turn for the bathroom, I instead searched out more punishment.
He was like that string on a sweater - the one that you keep pulling even when you know better.
I should’ve just gone into the bathroom. I should not have quietly padded down the rest of the carpeted hall to the doors to the master bedroom. And, seeing a dim light from underneath the frame, I should not have put my ear up against the door.
Seconds of nothing made me about to turn away but then I heard it - a grunt or a groan. Immediately, I wondered if he was ok. Shaking, my fingers reached for the handle on the door. Years of practice carefully pouring one beaker into another made my hand push down with steady pressure.
The door popped open and I retreated for a second. Standing frozen in the hall, I expected it to fly open any moment and reveal a burning statue of brooding in its wake. It didn’t. So, I continued to tug at that string.
Peeking into the room, I saw that the bed was empty. Messed on one side, but still empty.
Where was he?
In the dark, I could only see the outlines of what I knew was dark cherry furniture, deep navy curtains always closed over the windows, and a king-size bed that had white bedding with a navy velour blanket at the bottom; Troy would always steal that blanket for me when we watched movies downstairs.
My eyes trailed along the light that streamed from the bathroom. It wasn’t just the light that filtered through, it was also the sound of the shower.
I groaned because that meant I was safe… safe to continue.
I moved up to the bathroom door hearing the grunts louder now and even though they sounded like it, I knew he wasn’t in pain. I knew exactly what he was doing, and the thrill lit up my body like a Christmas tree.
Tug, tug, tug.
There was no stopping me now. I was going to keep pulling on this obsession of mine until the whole thing unraveled.
Troy was the last thing from my mind as I approached the bathroom. If she went looking for me and found me here, I had no excuse for what I was doing right now. Thankfully, the door was cracked open so all I had to do was put my fingertips on the solid, dark wood and push.
Slowly, I glimpsed further into the room, aided by the mirror on the wall - the full length mirror - that reflected everything happening behind the glass door of the shower. I gulped. I never thought twice about that mirror until now when I could only imagine all the purposes for its placement.
Because I’d let in more cool air, the steam on the mirror cleared to reveal something even hotter, an image to match the muffled sounds I’d just caught from the hall.
Damien stood, one hand on the wall in front of him. Through the steam, his face shone clear, the one lock of hair that escaped the rest. Dripping water, the hard outline of his jaw, down to the tightening of his facial muscles as they clenched. The defined outline of his neck down to his shoulder, the round bulge of bicep, and the flexing and release of his forearm.
My mouth went completely dry.
I knew… well, I had a very educated guess as to what he was doing. But to see it?
The heavy heat in the air stuck in the back of my throat as I watched his arm move, tugging on his long erection with determined force.
My fingers curled on the doorframe for support as moisture pooled between my legs.
Greedily, my gaze ate up his chest as the water ran down it. The rise and fall was unsteady even though the way he pleasured himself was with measured precision - like this was one more equation, one more reaction, that he would orchestrate with pleasurable preciseness.
No matter how I squinted, there was still steam clouding the door at waist-height. I could have cried. I’d never been so close to a completely naked man. He was perfect… and I didn’t have to see all of him to know.
My breaths came faster - just like the desire rushing through my veins. My hand slid down off the door and before I could stop myself, it found its way beneath the waistband of my shorts and underwear to where I was swollen and needy. I bit down hard on my lower lip as I rubbed myself, my eyes glued to Damien.
I wasn’t practiced at this. I’d only touched myself a few times - a few more since that day he’d spoken in our class - but still, I was standing and my shorts were constricting, so my fingers worked clumsily, hastily - the complete opposite of Damien. His strokes became harder and faster. Tears pricked at the corner of my eyes because I wished I could see all of him. Instead, I focused on the rhythmic pumping of his arm and the tempo of his grunts.
I whimpered quietly, frustrated because I wasn’t moving fast enough, hard enough - and in the right ways.
But he was.
Harder. Faster. More demanding.
One tear leaked down my cheek when I saw him come - and when I heard my name rip from his lips.
I hadn’t been wrong.
Earlier… I hadn’t been wrong.
His body came down from release, beautifully, like a fire slowly dying out - the orange-black embers just as entrancing as the flame had been. And then the horror set in as he turned off the shower. My fingers slipped and slid over me. Needing it - and needing it now. More tears leaked down my cheek as my orgasm eluded me and Damien reached to open the shower door.
No, no, no.
One more minute.
He was going to see me. Damien was going to catch me, watching him jerk off in the shower, while my hand was buried in my core, getting off on the sight.
He’d kill me.
My internship would be over. Everything.
I made it until the door was open just an inch, when his face just became crystal clear from behind the glass, before I pulled my fingers off me with a cry and turned and fled from the room.
I didn’t breathe again until I was in the bathroom with the door locked. Frantically, I yanked the shower handle and turned it all the way cold. My clothes were off barely a second later and I was sitting up on the counter determined to finish what I’d started.
My eyes squeezed shut until I saw him, clothed in water, muscles stretching and outlined in liquid, and the strain on his face just before he came. And then I heard it - ‘Lilith;’ he’d been imagining me.
My hips jerked as my own orgasm finally showed my clumsy fingers mercy. Heat flashed through my body, tingles reaching right down to my toes. My chest heaved as I began to breath in air with some semblance of normalcy. I only had a few seconds… I’d already been in here too long and I hadn’t even showered yet.
On unsteady legs, I stepped into the cold stream.
It wasn’t nearly enough to make me stop wanting him. It wasn’t nearly enough to quench my hunger for him.
Especially now. Now that I saw that his need for me, the one I worried I could have imagined, was no longer hypothetical.
Chapter Five
Lilith
The weekend felt like an entire month.
With each passing minute, I worried that he’d seen me in the bathroom on Friday. He’d seen me and that was why he was go
ne in the morning and had been a ghost since.
Now, I was sure that the door to the lab was going to be locked. I’d been waiting all day for this moment - to see him again - and, at the same time, there didn’t seem to be a doubt in my mind that he was going to turn me away. My breath caught when the handle released and I was back inside the lab.
“Damien?” His head jerked up from where he’d been looking through one of the microscopes, unaware of my entrance.
The string between us was pulled taut for a moment as we both stared at each other, images from the other night flashing through my mind, and, in a strange way, it seemed the same for him.
“I know you think that the tasks I’ve given you are menial; however, I will need you to do something more than stand there and stare at me today.”
My spine straightened like I’d been shocked.
Jerk.
“And what would that be?” I said sweetly, dropping my bag onto the ground and slowly walking towards him.
He could be grouchy all he wanted, but what he didn’t know was that I knew that he wanted me too. He wasn’t unaffected. And that made all the difference when he tried to treat me coldly.
“I need you to take notes for me,” he said gruffly, looking down at the notebook beside him. “It will save me time from having to look away each time to write something down.”
I stared for an instant, unsure if I was hearing him correctly.
“Seriously?” The question slipped from my mouth. “You sure you don’t want me mopping the floors or washing the windows?” I teased, trying - and failing - to hold back a smirk from my lips.
His melted-chocolate eyes glinted dangerously at me. He’d started it.
“If that’s what you prefer, I can survive without you,” he growled, beginning to tug his notes back closer to him.
I practically jumped forward to stop him. I was cheeky, but I wasn’t stupid. My body hummed with the thought of being close to him for the evening. And in the lab, anything within arm’s reach was considered close since he normally relegated me to the other side of the room.
I didn’t bother with the lab coat; it was too far, and I didn’t want him to change his mind.
Pulling out the stool next to him, I sat down, my breath stuck in my lungs until I was fully seated. Close. Our arms were almost touching. Close. I could feel the heat radiating off his body - or maybe it was off of mine.
Without looking at me, he pushed the notebook and pen in front of me. I wanted to ask why he didn’t just put it into the computer in the first place - and not just because I would be the one left copying it over at some point this week. Then again, I couldn’t imagine him noting his observations any other way. This was traditional. Methodical. Everything he did was in the perfect, precise measures. Everything except the things involving me.
I stared at him, my tongue too thick to say anything even if I had something to say. It was almost picturesque, the way his head bent down to look into the scope. My eyes traced over the familiar profile from the shower the other night, his granite jawline, the perfect arch of his nose… right down to the same lock of hair that fell onto the top of the microscope because it was unable to stay in place.
My hand scribbled every time he spoke, recording counts and thoughts, numbers of living or dead cells, any changes to the basic make-up of their contents: nuclei, mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulum. I should have been paying attention - this was what I came here for, to learn from his genius. Instead, my mind merged the two images… the man in front of me with the man from the shower.
And the only changes that I could focus on or describe with any degree of certainty or accuracy were the ones happening in my body.
“Do you want me to show you everything? Do you want to see it all?” It took a second for me to register his words and the grit in his voice.
My heart raced. He knew I was there - in his room, watching him. But, instead of scolding me, he was tempting me with more.
Show me everything? Like see all of him?
Of course, that’s what I wanted to see. And touch. And taste.
My mouth watered, along with the lower parts of my body, forcing me to cross my legs and clamp them tight; the pleated uniform skirt did nothing to help my situation.
“Yes,” I blurted breathlessly before I shook my head and continued, “I-I mean… I-I didn’t realize that you saw—” I stopped abruptly when his head jerked up, flames in his eyes melting through the rest of the words on the tip of my tongue.
“Do you want me to show you everything that I’ve examined so far?” he growled angrily through clenched teeth. “So, you can understand what I’m looking at right now?”
I coughed - choking on my foolish assumption. Heat quickly diffused into my cheeks as I stared blankly at the pen in my hand.
He was talking about the petri dishes he’d been going through.
He wasn’t talking about himself… about seeing all of him naked.
“Y-yes,” I stammered. “That would be r-really helpful. Thank you.”
I nodded as I spoke, keeping my head down and away. It didn’t matter if he wanted me - this man, of all people, was controlled and regimented enough to not act on it.
Damien Milanovic spent his entire life creating, observing, and measuring reactions. He knew how much to add of something to get the exact result that he wanted - or what not to add to an element so that it didn’t change. It didn’t matter how much he wanted me, if he never provided the catalyst to act on it, this reaction between us would never be completed.
In silent defeat, I slid over to his now-empty seat and put my eyes up to the slots on the microscope as he rearranged the dishes for me to look through in order.
Cells weren’t the only thing that was magnified as I sat there. Doubt. Foolishness. Hurt. Longing. They all became larger and clearer. I just waited for my body to get the message from my mind; it still sat there thrumming with need, probably leaking onto his chair, because he was still close to me.
And in my world, that was always more than enough to cause an irreversible change.
“Thank you,” I said quietly, hazarding a quick glance as his face as I sat back. He’d taken the past twenty minutes out of his work to explain to me the chemical process I was watching, the time progression as the drug he created affected the cancer cells in the dish in different doses. He showed me instances where it had done nothing to some where it disrupted the cell membrane or the protein functions within the cell.
In spite of my embarrassing assumption - and the almost slip-up I’d made about spying on him - he wasn’t gruff or curt. He didn’t stay silent until I was forced to ask questions about what I was looking at. No, he pre-emptively told me what to expect with each slide. He was patient. He took the time to make sure I understood some of the processes that my chemistry classes wouldn’t have covered at this point in my studies.
Lost in my own thoughts, I scooted back onto my stool, adjusting my skirt that had ridden up higher the first time I switched seats. I resumed my position as diligent scribe to this gorgeous genius.
He switched out the last dish for a new one, his stare intensified as he leaned down and glanced into the scope. Without thinking and forgetting that I was here to help, his hand instinctively reached over to grab his pen to write down what sample it was and instead grabbed my hand.
His head flung up at the same time as mine swung over to his. Our gazes clashed, both shocked by the touch, both wondering what was going to happen.
It wasn’t time that passed, but tension. Back and forth between us, the tug of war between boundaries and desire waged. But he didn’t let go of my hand. That point of contact alone felt like his touch might as well have been between my legs for how much I craved it.
I wondered what the microscope would show if I put the fingers he touched underneath it. Lightning, most likely. Little storms of desire thundering in each cell.
“What did you see?” he rasped as his stare seeped right thro
ugh me. In his eyes, I saw the same storms that I felt in my skin.
But this time, I wouldn’t be foolish.
“Well,” I began, ignoring his hand that was still over mine. “In the first few, I saw the minor changes to the cell membrane, but after that—”
An animalistic growl erupted from him. “Not in the microscope, Lilith. What did you see the other night?” he demanded.
Did I hear him right?
Was I imagining it?
“I know you were there,” he continued. I should’ve felt embarrassed, having been caught. Instead, I only felt more turned on knowing that he knew what I’d done. “I know you were watching me. What. Did. You. See?”
My chin ticked up a notch. Now was not the time to apologize or to shy away. Now… this… was the cusp of it all: the line we shouldn’t cross, the edge we shouldn’t go over.
“I saw you,” I said, my voice thick and heavy with need, “I saw you in the shower… not being unfeeling.”
I wouldn’t let it go. I wasn’t going to give him the opportunity to degrade whatever happened next - to write it off as nothing.
His top lip twitched up, like there was a feral animal inside of him that had been caged inside this lab for too long, held prisoner by strict rules and wrong assumptions that he’d made about himself.
“And what did you do?” he pushed as he crowded me, our hands still the only place that we were touching.
“I w-watched.” He couldn’t know what else, right?”
“What else?” Oh, God… he could…
I steeled myself, hardly able to breathe.
“I touched myself,” I whispered, losing myself in his eyes. “I touched myself while I watched you do the same, b-but you…finished… before I could. So, I ran.”
“But you did come, didn’t you?” His voice was like the finest sandpaper over my skin, polishing my desire until it was so bright, I was afraid it was going to blind me.
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