His disapproval makes me scowl and fist my hands, like I can punch the wall and change what he said.
“What do you mean, no?” I sound like a brat again, but I guess that’s just who I am now.
“I already told you that was good. Try again.” I hear a familiar sound–a plastic lid twisting off. I turn my head and see a jar in his hands; it’s bruise cream.
Something in my chest goes thump-thump and I realize it’s my heart freaking the fuck out, kicking so hard I almost didn’t recognize it. I face the wall again when he raises his eyebrows at me pointedly, and his presence at my back suddenly feels even heavier and more significant than before. Like sure, he was paying attention to me, but now it’s like he’s payingextraattention. Not just to me talking and being a little shit, but to everything about me.
“Um… I…”
He starts applying the cream to the parts of my neck and back that the tank top doesn’t cover, to the old bruises and the new ones, even the one on my jaw, and I just sigh, and my mind finally just… shuts up. For a little while, it’s just quiet. And all I focus on is the way he gently doctors me up, putting cream on my minor hurts like I’m worth that kind of treatment. And I stare at the corner.
It feels…
It feels nice.
I sigh heavily and sway a little. He puts the lid back on the jar. “What are you going to do the next time you feel like you can’t sleep, can’t breathe, can’t think? Hm?”
“I’ll… tell you?” I guess, thinking that he’s a control freak so he’ll probably like that.
“Good boy.”I guessed right. “Come here.”
He turns me around and for some weird reason, the room almost seems too big now. Like I got shrunk while I was standing there in time-out, and now everything else is too far away. I’ve got too much space, too much room to think. I take a shaky breath and struggle against my sudden shyness–yeah, me, shy, what the fuck?--to look at him.
He’s staring at me, no surprise. And it settles me to have him watching me just as closely as before.
I clear my throat, rub the back of my neck, feel the lingering soft cream there and kind of want to die because it’s so good. “So, I guess… I’ll go now?”
“You’re not going back to Kira’s tonight,” he says matter-of-factly, like he’s in charge, and he is. “It’s late. I’ll show you the guest room. Shower. Change. Sleep. Got it?”
“Um… yeah.”
He pulls me through the dark house, up the stairs and into a spacious room with an ensuite. It’s not too big, which I like, and the bed looks soft but without all the fluffy blankets and pillows that cover my bed at Kira’s place. There’s a chair near a nightstand and a lamp, and a set of drawers, but I don’t get a lot of time to take it in before he’s pushing me into the bathroom. He flicks the light on, and I blink against the sudden brightness.
“Shower,” he says. He points to a cabinet on the wall. “There are towels and some spare clothes in there.”
I nod, and he closes me in the room, leaving me alone with my thoughts. Alone with the stark reality of what just happened. What I justlethappen.
Holy fuck.
“Shit,” I murmur, and shake my head at myself. “What the fuck am I doing…?”
It’s late, and I’m tired, and even if I was well rested I’d have no clue what to do, so I just do as I’m told. I peel off the pink tank top and the pants, turn the shower to full blast, and soak in the heat for a little while. The soaps here are different from Kira’s, too. They smell like Young-gi. I use a lot of soap.
Once I’m scrubbed clean and dry, I pull on some soft clothes that, yes, I smell first because the laundry detergent smells like Young-gi, too. I stumble tiredly out of the bathroom, hoping I’ll be able to sleep at least a little bit, only to freeze when I see him sitting in the chair near the bed, illuminated under a cone of yellow light from the lamp.
“Um…?”
“Come here.”
His command slips right past my ‘fuck you, you’re not my boss’ instinct, probably because he just had me in literal time-out and I’m not my usual bratty self right now, and I tiptoe over to him like I’m afraid of being too loud. He grabs my hands, checks my knuckles, and hums with approval at how much better they look now that they’re clean.
“Good boy.”
“You don’t have to say it every time I do something–”
“Get into bed,” he interrupts me.
“Bossy motherfucker,” I sigh, too tired to put much bite into it. I flounce onto the bed dramatically and yank the covers over top of my legs. “There. In bed. You can go now.”
