CHAPTER 10 - SCENT

I’ve been standing in the shower for twenty-two minutes trying to wash the feeling of his voice off my skin, which is not how water works but my body is still vibrating at a frequency that Knox Voss set two hours ago and no amount of hot water is going to reset whatever he rewired in my nervous system tonight.

I wrap a towel around myself and step into the hallway, and Knox’s bedroom door is open.

It’s never open at this hour. He keeps it shut the same way I keep mine shut – a boundary that exists more in theory than in practice but that we both maintain for the sake of the fiction that we’re normal people living under the same roof.

But tonight the light from his bedside lamp spills into the hallway in a warm stripe that crosses my bare feet, and I can see him sitting on the edge of his bed with his elbows on his knees like he’s been waiting.

He looks up and sees me in my towel with my hair dripping and water beading on my collarbone, and something shifts in his face that goes past want into a territory that doesn’t have a name.

He stands and walks toward me, and I back up until my shoulder blades hit the wall and he puts both hands flat on either side of my head and leans in and his nose traces a line from the hinge of my jaw down my neck to the dip of my collarbone, and the sound he makes when he inhales is not something I’ve heard a person make before.

His whole body shudders against me, and his forehead drops to the wall beside my head and his breath is hot against my neck when he says, “You have no idea what you smell like.”

He pulls back to look at my face and his eyes are wrong. The grey is gone and in its place is something bright and molten, a ring of gold around his pupils that glows in a way that eyes should not physically be able to glow, and I forget to breathe because I am looking at something that doesn’t belong on a human face.

I blink and it’s gone. Grey again.

He pushes off the wall and walks back to his room and closes the door, and I stand there with my towel slipping and my heart hammering.

During the whole encounter the knot at my chest loosened and the towel dropped low enough to expose most of my left breast and I didn’t notice but he did – his eyes flickered down for half a second before the gold hit and I was too busy having a crisis to register that I was practically naked in the hallway of my mother’s apartment.

I pull the towel tight and walk to my room and sit on the edge of my bed and something is on my pillow.

My underwear. The pair from the motorcycle day.

They’re clean – he washed them – but underneath the detergent is something warm and unmistakably HIM, and there’s a note tucked inside in his messy handwriting:

Wore these around my pillow last night. Your scent is mine now.

I should be disgusted. I should throw them away and tell my mom her fiancé’s son is a deranged pervert who steals underwear and writes notes about it like some kind of feral love letter.

I hold them to my face and breathe in.

His scent fills my lungs and my eyes close and my thighs press together and I lie back on my bed with the fabric against my face, and my free hand slides down my stomach, slow, tracing the same path his nose took down my neck an hour ago, down past my navel and over the waistband of my underwear – the clean pair, the ones I put on after the shower – and I press my palm flat against myself through the cotton just to feel how warm I already am before I’ve even started.

I push the underwear to the side and slide my middle finger between my folds, and the wetness is immediate and slick enough that my finger glides from my entrance up to my clit without friction, and the first contact against the swollen bud makes my stomach dip the way it does on the downward slope of a roller coaster.

I start circling the way he taught me – slow, on the left side, pressing just hard enough that I can feel my pulse beating against my own fingertip.

I breathe him in through the fabric against my mouth and the scent makes the sensation sharper somehow, like having a piece of him in my lungs amplifies whatever is happening between my legs.

I widen my circles and drag my finger down through my wetness to gather more of it before sliding back up to my clit, and the slippery heat of it makes the glide smoother and I increase the pressure until I can feel the tension starting to coil low in my belly.

I push two fingers inside myself and the stretch makes my lips part against his underwear and I can taste the faint remnant of his scent on my tongue now, and my fingers curl forward to that spot he mapped for me and the pressure from the inside combined with the heel of my palm grinding against my clit from the outside sends a spike of heat up through my core that makes my back lift off the mattress.

I start pumping my fingers slow, pressing into that spot with every inward stroke, and each time I push back in I exhale against the fabric and breathe him in on the inhale, and the rhythm of it – thrust and breathe and thrust and breathe – turns into something almost meditative until the pleasure builds past the point where meditation is possible.

I’m thinking about the shudder. The way his body convulsed when he smelled me, the way his forehead dropped to the wall like my scent physically undid him, and the idea that I could undo a man like Knox Voss with nothing but the way I smell after a shower makes my fingers speed up and my hips start rocking into my own hand.

I add a third finger and the stretch pulls a sound out of me that I muffle against the damp cotton still pressed to my face, and my thumb finds my clit and starts working it in fast tight circles while my fingers pump deeper and the wet sound of it fills my bedroom and I don’t care because all I can smell is him and all I can feel is the pressure cresting and all I can see behind my closed eyelids is the gold flash of eyes that don’t belong to anything human.

I cum with his name in my teeth and his underwear pressed against my open mouth, and the orgasm rolls through me in long waves that make my inner walls clench around my fingers over and over while my hips grind up against my own palm, and I ride it out until my legs stop shaking and my breathing slows and my hand goes limp between my thighs.

I fall asleep holding the underwear against my chest, and his scent follows me into a dream where his eyes are gold and something is growling my name in a voice that doesn’t belong to a human.

When I wake up in the morning, the underwear is gone from my hand.

He took them back.