I twist the hot-water knob until my skin tingles with the heat, as if I could scald the hurt away.
Even after all I’ve endured, my weakness for Caleb remains. I fear him, yet I need him.
And Ihatemyself for it.
I am here, I think, to try to scour away that need. To replace it, perhaps, with need for someone else.
I am drawn to Logan, hypnotized by him, mesmerized, entranced, enthralled.
He is so kind. So thoughtful.
So warm.
But beneath that is a core of ice and steel; behind his indigo eyes lurks the cunning of a predator, I sometimes think, the ferocity of a warrior.
And that, as much I as fear it, also makes me feel safe.
Eventually I know I can linger in the shower no longer, and I turn the water off, find a thick rust-red towel folded into neat thirds under the sink, wrap it around my tingling body. Wrap another around my head to sop up some of the water; my hair is so thick that without a blow dryer, it will be damp for hours. I peek my head out of the bathroom and sense that I’m still alone. I find the bag with my new clothes in it by the front door. I have it in my hand, and at that moment, the deadbolt knob twists, the door swings in toward me, and my heart leaps into my throat.
BEEPBEEPEBEEPBEEP
Cocoa leaps at me, barking, puts wet paws on my bare shoulders.
Utter chaos ensues for a wild moment.
Logan is shoving at Cocoa, who is blocking the doorway, which in turn has me stumbling backward. Beyond Logan, rain is sluicing down in hammering bucketfuls, so thick it obscures my view of the street beyond.
The alarm is beeping faster and faster, and Cocoa is top of me, barking, tail wagging, smearing muddy paw prints on me and on the towel, and her claws catch in the cotton of the towel and loosen it, threatening to tug it away. Logan steps over Cocoa, stabbing at the alarm panel to disarm it, then slamming the door closed.
I shove Cocoa away with one hand, trying to stand up while holding the towel in place with the other.
Logan is soaked to the bone, his gray T-shirt all but see-through now, sticking to abs so grooved and ridged and hard they could be carved from stone, sticking to his lean upper body, hard, chiseled pectorals, broad shoulders. His hair is lank and stringy and sticking to his cheeks and chin.
Rainwater puddles at his feet, and his eyes are hot blue orbs, locked on mine. Neither of us moves. I am not breathing.
The towel covering my torso is hanging loose around me, held up only by one of my hands, the other still fending off Cocoa’s muddy and exuberant greetings.
“Cocoa...sit.” His voice is faint, as if he has to remember how to speak. “Stay, Cocoa.”
The dog sits... on my feet. Wet fur, on my feet. She stinks of wet dog, a pungent smell.
I unwind the towel wrapped in a turban around my hair and hand it to Logan, who, without looking away from me, kneels beside his dog, unclips her leash, and wipes her down carefully and lovingly, each one of her paws, her legs, her long body, her floppy ears, over and over until she’s wiggling to get free.
“Go to your room, Cocoa. Go lay down.” His voice is still faint, and he’s still staring at me, and I can’t move, paralyzed somehow by the superheated blue of Logan’s gaze.
Cocoa barks once, and then trots into her room.
My back is the wall, cold against my bare spine. I need to cover myself, but I can’t.
Logan is in front of me, standing tall and broad mere inches away, and he’s wet too, but now he’s so warm he feels like he could be steaming. I smell him, man-scent as pungent as wet dog.
He lifts his shirt, peels it off, baring a torso that is a sculpted wonder of lean, corded muscle. He isn’t a mammoth bear of a man, not like the only other male body I’ve seen in this state of undress. Clad in those faded blue jeans and nothing else, he is tall, over six feet, but he is a man of razor sharpness, each muscle defined as if cut into his body, each muscle lean and hard. He has no spare flesh or muscle, nothing extra, nothing unneeded. He is all hard lines and deeply etched grooves. There are scars, too. Thin white lines crisscrossing his left pectoral, his right bicep, and left forearm high up near the elbow. Two round puckered scars on his right shoulder, one in the meat of his muscle, the other higher up on the collarbone, and a third lower down, just beneath his ribs. There are tattoos coloring the skin on his shoulder, a nearly indecipherable jumble of images on his left arm from collarbone to just above the elbow, so that they’d be all but hidden if he wore a short-sleeve shirt. I see cartoon pinup girls and flames and a Jolly Roger made of a grinning skull and crossed assault rifles and initials in Old English lettering nearly hidden in a snarl of barbed wire, phrases I can’t quite make out in the same lettering. The whole tangle of images begins just above his elbow, designed as if to grow out of a tree whose roots wrap around his bicep, the jumble of images and designs forming the trunk, and the branches extending in skeletal fingers across his collarbone and back toward his shoulder blades.
My fingers itch to trace the images, to sort them and name them and find out their stories.
His shirt plops to the floor, a wet sound. Water streams in rivulets down his face, over his neck and shoulders, and followsthe line of his sternum, over his diaphragm, and into the deeply etched grooves of his abdomen.
“You got mud on you,” he murmurs, his voice a smooth basso ribbon sliding over me. His fingers trace across the upper slope of my breast, through the muddy paw print.
