He hung up.

I looked at the time on my phone. I had fifteen minutes to shower. My room was all the way on the third floor, the communal showers another good ten minutes from there, down in the dorms. There was no way I was going to make it. I had two options: wait for her and invite her to stay in my room while I cleaned up, or leave her waiting for me.

It wasn’t a particularly chilly night. And she did make me watch her coming in another man’s mouth…

Thing was, I no longer wanted to punish her.

I didn’t want her pain, her insecurity, to scratch at the things that made her tick.

I stood there for twenty minutes, and at five past seven, when she showed up, her back to me, I approached and kissed her shoulder, watching the surprise and delight in her face when she turned and faced me.

“Whoa.” She grinned.

“I need to shower. Wait in my room?” I asked, like a normal person or something.

She smiled, saying something equally as ordinary. “Sure.”

I found her lying in my bed, flipping through my anatomy and sculpting books. The room was bare of any vibe or personality—I preferred it this way—but I still had my sculpting bullshit lying around. I stopped at the door and watched her, wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around my waist.

Mainly I couldn’t understand the way this made me feel—observing her on my bed, which smelled like me, going through my shit. The pleasure was unexpected. Foreign. My chest constricted, and I tried to take a deep breath, thinking maybe I’d pulled a diaphragm muscle.

Still, I couldn’t draw enough air to satisfy me.

“Oh, hey.” Her voice was raspy. Hoarse.

I strolled in, pretending I didn’t hear her. I grabbed a rolled-up pair of black jeans from my closet, planning on getting dressed behind a small recliner in the corner of my room.

“Thanks for the new drafting table.” She put the anatomy books aside.

“I broke yours, and you have to work on something,” I reminded her.

Hardly a charitable act.

“Drop the towel,” she said, all of a sudden.

I looked up, half my leg already in my jeans. She sat up in my bed, propped on her forearms, a summer-dream smile touching her face. I couldn’t explain it, but I could breathe her from across the room: lavender, cotton, and my own fucking demise.

“Drop it,” she repeated, all mischievous and…cute. Yeah. Okay. She was cute and pretty. Big fucking deal.

“What for?”

“So I can see you.” She wiggled her brows. “After all, you’ve seen me plenty.”

“I’m about to be balls deep in you in less than fifteen minutes if I have my way,” I said. “Buck naked.”

“Hardly the same.” She licked her lips, her freaky, multicolored eyes glittering like marbles. “There’s something vulnerable about standing naked in front of somebody.”

“Precisely.” I scoffed. “Why would I put myself in a vulnerable position?”

She held my gaze, her voice turning serious. “Because I asked you to.”

Momentarily speechless, I regarded her. She was serious. I stepped from the recliner, dropped my towel, and straightened to my full height, hands on hipbones.

Stark fucking naked.

The first time I’d been naked in front of a stranger since…never mind.

Completely naked. And I couldn’t even figure out why I was humoring her ass.

The silence wrapped around us, and I let it, because it was her fault shit had gotten weird.

“You’re ashamed.” She cocked her head, a curious expression on her face.

I snorted. Right. She’d be lucky to see a fitter body on a health magazine cover.

“What are you ashamed of, Vaughn?”

I sneered. It didn’t matter.

She stood up and walked toward me, cupped my face with her tiny hands. It almost felt maternal. “You’re beautiful.” She kissed the tip of my nose, closing her eyes. “So beautiful,” she whispered.

A tear rolled down one of her cheeks. I didn’t understand what was happening, and yet somehow, I wasn’t surprised when she cried. I just didn’t want to fucking see it.

I wrapped my arms around her, trying to comfort her because she…what? Pitied me? Em-fucking-barrassing, but apparently I was willing to go this far to be inside her. My knee-jerk reaction was to kick her out. My plan was so close to execution, and this was going nowhere fast.

But I couldn’t.

And not for lack of trying.

We hugged—me naked, her wetting my shoulder with her tears—for what seemed like ten minutes before she pulled back and kissed my lips.

“Thank you,” she said.

“For what?”

“For allowing yourself this one moment of being a boy. And for letting me witness it.”

Down in my cellar, I lit a joint and passed her one of two cans of beer I’d taken from Harry’s fridge. He was still in the hospital, and he’d been transferred to one in central London, so getting drunk around here wasn’t really in his near future.