This hotel, this fancy ass hotel that took a lot of work to find, yeah, this was all for Sloane. I knew that soon, she wouldn’t have the finer things anymore. She’d be set up in a small apartment in a decent area with furniture we could get immediately from a local box store. She’d eventually get her supply of nice shit when it was safe to ship it to her. But there’d be no more blowing money on fancy hotel rooms, designer clothes, all the accoutrement of her nice life she worked for.
I wanted her to have a fancy place to rest her head while she could.
That was some sappy, sentimental shit. Especially for me. But I did it anyway.
“Wow,” she said, doing a slow turn in the oversized room with two queen beds.
The colors were muted – a faint off-white wallpaper, champagne-colored silken sheets and comforters, deep brown nightstands, a dresser, and a small desk beside the giant floor-to-ceiling window. There wasn’t much of a view, not in this town anyway, but it would let the light filter in in the morning.
To the left inside the door was the bathroom that was the same size as the whole common room in the cabin, all sand-colored tile on the floor and in the walk-in shower with full glass doors. There was a tub that looked big enough for four.
I didn’t look away fast enough not to picture her in there. To think of joining her. And what would happen then.
“You’re just gonna have to get used to eating in bed,” I informed her as she looked around a little helplessly after putting her bags down on the desk.
“I can certainly try,” she agreed, kicking out of her heels. Seeing that, oddly, felt almost as intimate as having her curl up on me to keep warm at night. I guess because, for her, they weren’t just heels; it was part of her persona, the image of her, instead of the woman she was underneath it all.
So we took our food to the beds, eating while fighting over the TV. Since we hadn’t had one before, I never realized she would be such a pain in the ass about it.
“What is the point of it though?” she asked when I tried to insist on watching the seventh of the Fast & Furious movies. “Shouldn’t they have gotten their point across in the first movie?”
“The point isn’t about them making a point.” At her blank look, I shook my head. “It’s action. It’s about the… action. You’ve seriously never seen a single one of these?”
“I mean… I’ve seen that actor before. The bald one.”
“Vin Diesel,” I supplied.
“Yeah. He played the lawyer in Find Me Guilty.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said, choosing the first in the series, and putting it on before she could object. “Only you would find the single goddamn serious role that man has played. And bring it up in conversation as though everyone knows that shit.”
“He looked rather silly with the wig on,” she admitted, giving me a small smile before the movie started.
Then, yeah, I got the woman hooked on the least likely series you could imagine a girl like her enjoying.
“I think three is good for the night.”
“But they are just getting all back together!” she objected, having absentmindedly plowed through her Chinese… then a handful of her snacks. I was pretty sure in those six hours, she ate more food than she had in the past three days.
“It’s getting late,” I suggested, never having binged that many of the movies at once. And, well, it was enough.
“It’s barely eight!”
“You don’t want to try out that tub?” I tried.
And the way her eyes went all dreamy told me that I had said the right thing.
“You’ll stay, right?” she asked, making me start, turning back to look at her.
“What?” I asked, watching as she slipped off her glasses, rubbing at the bridge of her nose. She’d actually found a small stash of her contacts in one of her bags, but had opted for the glasses for the day. I couldn’t help but wonder if that was maybe because she was starting to feel comfortable around me.
“I know you need to get the luggage,” she supplied. “But can you stay while I take a bath?” she asked again, not able to make eye-contact. “I know. It’s stupid,” she agreed even though I hadn’t said anything. “I’ll get over it,” she added.
“Duchess, it’s only been a few days. It’s fine to still feel weird.”
“But you said…”
“That you need to shower,” I agreed. “And you did. The avoiding of it is the problem, not the needing to know you’re safe when you do it. Go take your bath,” I said, sitting back down on my bed.
So then she ran her bath.
I tried as hard as I could not to think about her in there.