He doesn’t answer right away, so I just lie there and let myself look at him in the half-light and the flickering of the fire. It’s a luxury, looking at him like this: stark naked and half-asleep. Relaxed. Defenseless and oddly sweet.
And beautiful. Just so fucking beautiful.
You’re not alone in that opinion, I think.
How many other women have laid like this, thinking the exact same —
I half-roll, half-stand from the couch before I can finish that thought, manage to get my feet under myself before I fall over completely, even though I feel like my bones are made of rubber. Seth just casts me a skeptical glance from the floor.
“Be right back,” I say, and head for the bathroom.
Twenty minutes later, I’m carefully removing my eyelashes when he knocks on the bathroom door.
“Come in, I’m just — ow.”
I accidentally yank on my own eyelash. How do people wear these all the time? They’re hell.
“Just making sure you hadn’t fallen in,” he says, stepping through the door. He’s wearing a very fluffy, very white robe, a second one dangling from his hands.
“Still undoing my face,” I say, leaning on the counter. I’m still fully naked, and in the mirror I can see the slow path his eyes take down my body, not that he makes any effort to hide it. “You’re not supposed to see this part.”
“Which?” he asks, blatantly not making eye contact.
I’m still watching him look at me in the mirror.
“The part where I either put on or remove makeup,” I say. “Really, if I were any good at being ladylike, you’d never see me without my face on.”
“You can’t possibly be worried about whether or not I think you’re ladylike,” he teases, finally looking at my face again.
“Don’t tell me what I can’t worry about,” I tease back, finally pulling the final eyelash from my right eye and flicking it onto the counter, then blinking a dozen times in a row.
“Brought you one in case you were cold,” he says, holding up the fluffy, white robe.
I take it from him, pull it on, knot the belt, reach into my hair and start searching out bobby pins.
“I’ll be out in a few,” I tell him, pulling one out. “I’m sure there are several issues of Fancy Horses or Overpriced Trinkets or Spend All Your Money magazine out there.”
“I’ve already got too many fancy horses,” he says, stepping into the bathroom until he’s right behind me, looking at me over my head, in the mirror.
Then, lightly, gently, he runs his fingers over my hair and deftly pulls out a bobby pin, puts it on the counter. He pulls out another, and I let my eyes close.
God, everything he does feels good.
“You worried about Ava?” he asks, after a moment.
I sigh, fingertips rooted on the cold countertop.
“Of course,” I admit. “She’s my baby sister. She’s known this man, what, a year? It’s — “
I stop myself before I can say even less time than I knew Nolan, because we’re not fighting tonight. By God, not tonight.
“ — Not long enough,” I say.
He pulls another pin out, gently probes my hair with his fingers, searching for the next one.
“No,” he says, quietly.
Pull, probe. My head nods with the gentle rhythm.
“Speaking of idiot younger siblings, Caleb just gave up his academic career over a twenty-two-year-old,” he says, and my eyes fly open.
“What?” I ask, cautious. I know what it sounds like, but I can’t possibly be right.
“He got caught fucking his student,” he says. “Took all the blame, and now he doesn’t have a job and probably can’t ever teach again.”
My mouth falls open.
“They’re sleeping on my sofa bed right now,” he says dryly. Probe, pull. “Hopefully they’re sleeping. It’s not the sturdiest bed.”
“Caleb fucked his student?” I say, still very stuck on that part of the statement.
“He did,” Seth says, pulling out another bobby pin. “I gotta say, it’s nice not being the worst brother for a while.”
“Why are you the worst?” I ask, without thinking.
Seth just meets my eyes briefly in the mirror, then goes back to my hair.
“You know,” he says.
Right.
“I think I got ‘em all,” he says. My hair’s come out of the low knot that the bobby pins held it in, though it’s still full of mousse and hairspray and several other kinds of goop. I push my fingers into it, shake the rest free as best I can. Scrunching. Combing.
It is… not my best look.
“Thanks,” I tell him, but he’s already halfway across the bathroom, pulling a washcloth from a towel rack, running it under the water.
“Here,” he says, and rubs it over my chest.
I’d totally forgotten my heart tattoo is still covered up, and for a moment, I’m tempted to leave it that way. Let it stay secret. Let him wonder what it really looks like, because I’m afraid that he’ll take one look at it and my entire soul will be laid bare: the heartbreak and the crying and the slow getting over him, the lacing myself back together with yoga and painting and karaoke with friends and reading late into the night.
I don’t want him to know all that. I want him to think that we fuck and then we fight and I stop thinking about it. I want to be the heartless witch he thinks I am, but I might have ruined that by getting a prominent tattoo of a literal heart.
After a moment, Seth frowns, then looks down at the washcloth, which has done almost nothing to budge the concealer.
“That’s gonna need the big guns,” I tell him.
He raises his eyebrows, looks from my tattoo to my face and back.
“I don’t know what that means,” he finally says.
He already knows about the tattoo. What’s the point of hiding it, really?
“Here,” I say, and grab a package of makeup removal wipes, then hand it to him.
“These are the big guns?” he asks, pulling one out. It’s decidedly smaller and flimsier than the washcloth, and I can’t blame him for being skeptical.
“It’ll work,” I say, and he shrugs.
I lean back against the bathroom counter, hands against the edge, and he works in slow circles, taking the thick, sticky concealer off. It takes five wipes and several minutes, and if he thinks anything about the tattoo he’s revealing, he doesn’t say it.
The bathrobe opens as he works, and when the whole thing is revealed, so are the edges of both nipples.
For once, that’s not what he’s looking at. He’s looking at the tattoo, the heart with gears and levers, the heart that’s riveted together and indestructible.
Neither of us says a word. We both know when I got this and if he doesn’t know exactly why, he’s certainly smart enough to guess.
After a long moment, he reaches out and touches it. He doesn’t ask permission, but we both know he doesn’t need to: alone like this in hotel rooms, amidst our bad decisions, my yes is automatic and understood.
“I like it,” he finally says. “It fits.”
“Thanks,” I say, and his hand trails down my sternum, over the raven, falls away from me.