The bed was wrong. Hard, not soft like the one at her hotel. And dark. So dark. She always left the lamp on at the desk when she went to bed, mostly so she wouldn’t bang her skins or stub her toes in the night if she got up.
The bed rocked and dipped again, and it was like massive hands reached down from above and shook her fully awake. She turned on her side, a little shocked to find another person there, just beyond her shoulder.
Cason.
Of course. They were watching a movie. She was tired. She must have fallen asleep and he’d carried her to bed. She did a quick mental scan and found she was still wearing his t-shirt. She wasn’t totally wet, like her dream, but her arm closest to the big form to her left was damp. She pulled it back before her grainy, sleep heavy eyes flew to the shadow’s face.
He was dreaming. Twitching and moving all over the place, which would explain the whole tossing ship trick that her sleepy subconscious decided to play on her. When her eyes finally adjusted to the total darkness of the room, she could see that the thin covers were completely flattened around Cason’s massive outline. She reached out and brushed her fingertips against the sheets pulled up around his shoulders and wasn’t entirely surprised to find them soaking.
As if that little brush of her fingertips had the force of a full-on grip and shake, Cason startled awake. He shot upright, chest and shoulders heaving, his breaths loud, rattling out of his chest like a chainsaw.
“Whoa,” Noemi whispered, like she was talking down an enraged bear. “It’s okay. It’s just me. I think you were- having either a really good dream… or a really bad one.”
Cason ran a hand through his hair, a dark outline moving in a cloak of blue black dark. That was the best her eyes could do with blinds that shuttered the outside world out completely and no glowing guide lights in the room. No clock on the nightstand on Cason’s side, no glowing phone, no night light. Nothing.
Cason’s other hand plucked at the damp sheets, peeling them away like a second skin. “Jesus,” he cursed, without turning his head to look at her. “I’m sorry. Don’t usually try and drown my partner in bed. At least not on the first night over. I try and save all the nefarious stuff for when they’re too emotionally invested to find me disgusting and to leave in the middle of the night after cussing me out.”
Noemi blew out a breath. She maneuvered herself upright against unfamiliar pillows and a surprisingly plush upholstered headboard. “I’m not going to do that.”
Cason ran a hand through his damp hair again. She could tell that it was plastered to his head, since the dark outline, a damn impressive dark outline, didn’t look right. “Sorry. I- I’ll get us some new sheets.”
“It’s alright.” She’d never actually been in a situation like this and it was surprisingly a few shades less awkward than she thought it would be. “I’ll get them. Why don’t you go have a warm bath?” She couldn’t exactly see his lips curl up, but she had the feeling he was smiling at her, that knowing, disarming smile that guys like him could so effortlessly produce.
“A bath?”
“It usually fixes all my problems.”
“Only if you’ll join me after.”
Now that definitely wouldn’t fix all her problems. All it would do was create a whole different set. She’d never bathed with anyone. The shower was one thing. A bath… that involved sitting down. Naked. Probably rubbing up a whole lot of skin against a whole lot of other skin that didn’t belong to her. In essence, it was strangely intimate, even though she’d had Cason’s more private regions in her mouth not more than a few hours ago and had told him a heck of a lot more about her fantasies than she’d ever done with Rob, even after a few years.
“After you’re out, maybe.”
Cason chuckled, low and dark in his throat. “Okay. I’ll leave it up to you.” He pushed back the blankets and slid effortlessly from the bed, like he wasn’t still drenched in his own sweat.
It wasn’t until a few minutes later, when the tub cranked on from down the hall and the pipes in the house actually shuddered like it was built in the last century, not the nineties like she figured it to be, that she realized he was a master of communication. As in, he mastered it without communicating at all. Without having to.
She didn’t ask him what the dream was about.
She didn’t ask him what could be so bad that he sweated through a sheet and a quilt and soaked the bed below him. That kind of thing probably wasn’t the good kind of dream. Did it have to do with the wicked scar on his back that he’d downplayed?