by C. L. Stone
“Forget what?”
“You’re so smart, Sang Baby,” he said. His thumb traced along the edge of my jaw. I felt the urge to tilt my head back slightly, as if encouraging him to do it again. “You’re so smart, but there’s just so much you haven’t experienced, that you don’t know about.”
I tilted my head back, into his cupped hand. I wanted the warmth and his touch. “What don’t I know?”
He sucked in a breath. In the darkness, his eyes peered down at me. He huffed, shaking his head. He repositioned his hands to my forearms, rubbing in an effort to warm my skin. “You’re freezing.”
My body had been shaking, but before it must have been shock from getting pulled into the water. Now I trembled nearly uncontrollably. The wind bit into my skin, the water giving it an icy edge.
He picked me up, carrying me until he found his jacket and my shoes. He lowered me until I was standing. He bent over, picked up his jacket and brought it to my shoulders. “I can’t drive us back like this. You’ll get sick.”
I wanted to answer him, but a shiver was all I managed. I was afraid to speak, because I wasn’t sure I would be understood.
He sighed, collecting me into his arms and holding me close. The wind rocked wildly around us, kicking sand up to stick to our skin. North ducked his head close to mine, pressing his cheek to the top of my head.
I nearly buried myself into him.
A NIGHT AWAY
North drove back to the main road on Folly Beach. I trembled at the wind cutting into me so badly that my body hurt, like a thousand needles were burrowing underneath the surface of my skin.
When we got back to the main road, North pulled into the hotel’s parking lot. He parked as closed to the doors as he could. He urged me to get off the bike, stood up, and dusted himself off.
“We look like a wreck,” he said. He tugged the jacket across my shoulders tighter. “When we go in, go find the bathroom. There’s a hallway to the right. Try to clean yourself up. I don’t want anyone thinking I’ve kidnapped you.”
I meant to nod, but mostly trembled. “We’re staying here tonight?”
“I can’t drive you back like this. And it’ll drive Kota crazy.”
I stared at the hotel. The building seemed huge. I’d never been in a hotel. North led the way under an archway and through the automatic opening glass doors.
The lobby inside had a sitting area to the right, and a guest registry desk to the left. The counter was empty. Was the hotel closed?
North nudged me, pointing out a sign to the right that said “Restrooms.” I padded over, suddenly realizing I’d entered in my bare feet. North had put my shoes into the saddlebag of his bike. I marched to the bathroom, trying not to shake so badly that I ended up falling over.
The bathroom’s heater was working very well. I stood just inside the doorway, absorbing the warmth. When I caught my reflection in the mirror, I blanched.
There was a good sized bruise on my neck. My hair was wild from the bike and the wind. There were clumps of sand all over. With my soaked clothes and North’s oversized jacket on my frame, I resembled some homeless girl from a war zone in a faraway country.
I had a fleeting thought of wondering what I was doing there. Who was I to stay the night at a hotel an hour away from home? What in the world was I doing? Whatever happened to Sang, the invisible girl that no one looked at?
I shook the thoughts off. I approached the sink, turning on the hot water and rinsing the sand off my hands.
I tugged my fingers through my hair, trying to rake back the strands. When that didn’t work, I used the teeth of the clip to try to comb out what knots I could. I brushed the sand away, feeling guilty that I was dirtying the floor.
When my hair was tied back again, I shoved North’s jacket around me and zipped it up. I still looked like a hobo girl, but at least my hair wasn’t a nest.
I opened the door, and found North standing outside the door. He perked up when I came out, and held up a card key. “Ready?”
My body started to shake again from tiredness and chill, and my nerves rattled. I forced a nod.
North found my hand, tugging me toward an elevator a little further down the hall. It felt awkward that I hadn’t seen anyone else around here yet. It was like the entire hotel was empty. Whoever he’d done business with at the front desk had disappeared.
North pushed the button for the fourth floor. I stood close to him. He kept an arm around my shoulders, his jaw set.
When we got to the fourth floor, the doors opened to a green carpeted hallway. North lead the way down the corridor, stopping at a room almost at the end.
I don’t know what I expected of a hotel room. I’d seen a handful over the years on television but I supposed I never paid too much attention to it. There was a single large bed, with a headboard made of bamboo rods stuck together. There was a lime green couch, a coffee table, a single desk with an office chair, an entertainment center. The setup made me think of my own bedroom at home, with a single small bed and a bookshelf. My bedroom was more barren than a hotel room.
North opened a door that lead to a bathroom. He flicked on the switch, leaning his head inside to look around. He turned back to me, curling his fingers. “Take your clothes off,” he said.
My eyes widened at him.
His head tilted and he frowned, then he shook his head. “I mean inside here. Take them off, wash the sand off. And then hop into the shower to warm up and get clean.” He stepped out of the bathroom and motioned to me to get in.
I padded inside. He closed the door. I turned, shivering where I stood.
The promise of warm water sounded good. I hurried to turn on the hot water, eager to strip and settle into a bath.
While the tub filled, I fiddled with a tray on the counter, fingering a coffee maker and a packet of coffee and the cups. I smoothed my hand over the towels, smelling the bleach and the other cleaners used in the space. It was heady and made me want to sneeze.
When the water was high enough, I left the faucet running and I stripped out of my clothes, dipping my toe into the warm water. I had meant to do what he said and wash my clothes first, but I was too eager to get warm.
I put my foot in and then stopped, tugging myself out of the bath again. The heat made my skin tingle painfully as much as the cold did. I eased my way into the water slowly, going as fast as I could. I drew the curtain closed, just to capture the heat.
When I was finally settled in and the warm water wrapped around me, I breathed out. I didn’t care to wash. I just wanted to absorb as much heat as I could.
When I thought about North, I forced myself to wash. He probably needed to warm up, too. I used the shampoo, thinking of how Gabriel would probably have a fit, but secretly delighting in the idea of him probably lecturing me and getting him to wash my hair again. I rinsed out as much of the sand as I could.
I wanted to stay forever, but after a while, I was starting to fight off sleep. Thinking of the bed so close, I groaned, summoning up the strength to pull myself from the water.
I let the water start to drain, yanking back the curtain and grabbing for one of the towels. When I stepped from the tub though, something about the room bugged me, and I didn’t understand it for a moment. My poor, tired brain didn’t want to process.
Then I realized my clothes were gone.
I blushed, realizing North had probably been inside the bathroom. Did I not lock the door?
As if North had heard my thoughts, there was a gentle knock on the door. “Sang?”
“Yes?” I asked, wrapping the towel around my body. “What is it?”
North opened the door poking his head in. His eyes caught my face, lowered quickly to the towel and looked up again. He had a towel wrapped around his waist, tied off at the edge of his hips. I got an eyeful of his muscular broad chest, and the lines of his abs. Dark hair trailed up from under the towel toward his belly button. It distracted me from his face.
“You good?” he ask
ed.
I nodded, not too sure what he was asking of me exactly.
He entered, crossed the room and picked up a blow dryer that was plugged into the wall. He unplugged it, then left the bathroom, curling his fingers at me to follow.
I crossed my arms against my chest to keep the towel tight around me, walking out into the main room behind him. My skirt and shirt and his T-shirt and jeans were sitting on top of the heater against the wall. My underwear was spread out on the desk, along with a pair of black boxer briefs. He plugged in the dryer.
“I’ve washed everything,” he said. He pointed to our underwear. “But dry these and we’ll sleep in them.”
I blushed, taking the blow dryer from his hands. I wondered how he managed to wash the clothes. Did he do it in the sink while I was in the bath? I hadn’t heard him. He must have found a sink somewhere else.
I hadn’t thought far enough ahead to consider what to sleep in. There was a certain bit of comfort in the way Academy guys seemed to always be thinking ahead.
North left me to take his own shower. I swept the blow dryer on high across our underwear. I touched the material, testing it, wanting to put mine on before he got back.
I had my underwear on and was fumbling with shaking fingers to get the bra hooked behind my back when the bathroom door opened again. My heart skipped, and I stuffed my arms over my breasts, half turned.
North stood just outside the bathroom door. His intense eyes swept down my body before lifting to my face. “Sorry,” he said, his cheeks tinting. “I...”
“It’s okay,” I said. We’d been through enough. I wasn’t sure if it was my tired mind, or my eagerness to want to get to sleep, but I felt dismissive of some modesty for the moment, especially since he was in a towel and I’d just been blow drying his underwear.
North blinked at me for a moment and I stood frozen, unsure what to do next. North surprised me by coming into the room toward me. “Turn around,” he said.
Maybe it was because I was used to Gabriel ordering me about when it came to my hair and clothes, but I turned my back to North as if he were Gabriel. North stood behind me. I could feel the ripples of heat from him, fresh from a hot shower.
He caught the edges of the bra straps and straightened them before hooking the back into place. His fingers slipped over my skin, crossing over my ribs. I forced back the urge to tremble.
“Thank you,” I said softly, starting to turn.
“Keep facing the wall.”
I turned back, staring blankly at the window curtains. I ran my fingers through my hair, twisting it slightly to ring out the last bit of water.
From the noises, I could tell North was removing the towel and putting the boxer briefs on. “Okay,” he finally said.
I turned slowly. He’d seen me in underwear before, but it’d been a while and it wasn’t exactly the best of circumstances then, either. I kept my eyes focused on his chest and up, but it was hard not to catch glimpses of his frame below the waistline. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted lines from his hips that curved down toward his underwear, making almost a V. I tried not to pay attention to his crotch, but my eyes kept wanting to dart there. I mean, I knew the differences between boys and girls, of course, but I’d had a limited viewing from encyclopedia pictures and nothing from real life.
North didn’t hide the fact that he was scanning my body, his face intense, frowning. His fingers drifted out, and he touched a spot at my collar bone. “Where’d you get that?”
I flinched and felt the area with my finger, finding a bruise. “I don’t remember,” I said. “I think maybe when Gabriel accidentally knocked the brush into me.”
“And that one?” he asked, pointing to a small one on my left side by my ribs.
I shrugged. “Nathan.” I didn’t want to mention it was probably during the tickle fight. It looked fresh.
“And that?” He pointed to one on my forearm.
“I don’t know.” I really couldn’t remember. I hadn’t noticed them before. When I saw certain ones, it just triggered a memory of one of a number of times the boys bumped into me for one reason or another.
He grunted. “We’re too rough with you.”
“I’m not a China doll,” I said. “I can handle a few bruises.”
North rolled his eyes and turned toward the large bed. He yanked off the top blanket, dropping it to the floor and kicking it out of the way. Underneath was a thinner blanket. He pulled it back, and the sheet below it before turning back to me. “Ready to sleep?”
I tiptoed forward, crossing my arms over my stomach. I’d slept in the same bed with him before. I’d slept in his bed. This was someone else’s bed and we were so many miles away from anyone we both knew.
And we were both in our underwear.
I climbed in quickly, tugging the sheet and blanket up around my shoulders.
North collected our phones to put on the night stand. He climbed into the bed next to me and clicked the light off.
In the darkness, I felt myself sinking into the bed. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by the fact that I was in an unfamiliar bed in a place where other people slept. I inched over closer to North, wanting to feel him there since I couldn’t see him. I didn’t want to be alone.
My fingers brushed his arm. It seemed to be all he needed. His arms encircled me, dragging me over until he had his bicep tucked under my head. He pulled our pillows closer together. He drew me up until I was close enough that he could dip his face into my hair.
What caught me off guard was when our stomachs touched together. A hunger ignited inside me. Sensations swept through my body. I was desperate for some sort of distraction so I didn’t have to think about it. “North?”
“Yeah, Baby.”
“Did you let Kota know we were here?”
He blew a sigh against my head. “Yeah. I told him.”
“Are we in trouble?”
He smirked against my head. “Probably. But you don’t have to worry about it tonight.”
“Are they going to be okay?”
“Last I heard, they managed to clear everyone out without the cops getting called in. The house is a wreck, though. I’ll have some work to do tomorrow. You’re going to have to have a chat with little miss Danielle and that sister when we get back.”
I let my lungs fill up, a mix of the bleached sheets and his faded musk, the soap we’d used. “I’m sorry,” I said in a small voice.
“For what?”
“For letting Rocky get that close. I didn’t know what he wanted and I knew you all were trying to get along with him.”
“It’s not your fault and it doesn’t matter,” he said. He wrapped his arm over my waist, with his hand splayed out across my back, tugging me close. “To be honest, I kind of like the way things turned out.”
“Oh?”
His head dipped down slightly, until his lips were against my forehead. “It made a perfect excuse to come out here with you. Next time I might get into a fight with Silas. Maybe we were wrong about how to handle this. Maybe I should pretend to be your boyfriend.”
My heart tripped over itself. The darkness gave me some courage and my mouth spit out the words, “We’ll be only pretending?”
The silence that followed felt like a lifetime. His chest shifted and his fingers against my back tightened, pulling at me. My own heart stopped, terrified at what I’d just said and the implications of what it meant. The other half of me wanted desperately for something to make sense to me, something that everyone else at school seemed to understand better than I did. Maybe instead of faking, if it became real, maybe the Academy rules could change, too. The ones I wasn’t sure about, but felt existed.
North pulled back, moving to hover over me. My eyes had adjusted enough that I caught the outline of his face. While I couldn’t see his eyes, I felt the intensity of him looking at me. My hands drifted up, catching his shoulders. My skin tingled from head to toe, electrified.
“Sang,” he said in a low tone, ne
arly a whisper. “You want to be mine?”
My tongue danced behind my lips. I don’t know what I’d been thinking before, but now I was desperate for just the right words. What did it mean? Was he asking me to be his girlfriend? What did it mean for Nathan? Or Kota? Or Victor? My heart trembled with the thought of disappointing any of them again. I’d taken North’s advice. I’d let them worry about who did what with me, dating or otherwise. North’s question felt like something more decisive. And I had no way of knowing the full implications of my answer.
Maybe it was because he was right in front of me, or because of the moonlight and the sea, and the magic of the North Shore still lingering in the back of my mind. Maybe it was my curiosity and my own need to feel closer to them, any of them, when I often felt like I was on the outside looking in.
And I was embarrassed to answer, as if saying a flat out yes would draw out some form of rejection from North. Would he say no? Did he think it was silly? “If you want me,” I said when I managed to find my voice again.
North’s fingers clasped at my hand, pulling my palm to his lips. He kissed, his lips spreading across my skin as he puckered. “Baby, we’re a bad match,” he spoke into my hand. He kissed it again. “We’re night and day. You’re so fucking cute, and sweet.” He kissed my fingertips. “And soft. And then you’ve got me, and I’m...”
Was he trying to be nice to tell me why we shouldn’t? I yanked my hand from his grasp, hurt that it sounded like he was rejecting me and just trying to be nice about it. “Are you saying you don’t want to?”
North jerked his head back, easing up higher as he propped himself up on his hands in like a push up over me. “I didn’t say that.”
“Why did you ask me if you didn’t want to?”
“That’s not what I fucking said, Sang. Don’t put words in my mouth.”
The panic I’d been fighting all evening bubbled to the surface, consuming me. “You just said we were a bad match.”
North grunted, he pulled back until he was sitting up, pulling the blanket away. He sat back on his heels, kneeling on the bed. “I was trying to warn you that we’re different.”
