Perfect stranger

Daphne

My eyes feel like they've been glued shut. I force them open anyway, and the ceiling above me is wrong, too high, painted a gray I don't recognize.

I lie still for a second, trying to piece last night back together. The club. The dizziness. Silas's hands on me, his voice saying things I don't want to remember yet. A stranger's voice cutting through the noise. After that, nothing. Just fragments, heat, a jacket that smelled like cedar.

This isn't my room.

I sit up too fast, and the world tilts before it settles. I look down at myself. I'm wearing a shirt, plain white, way too big, hanging off one shoulder and stopping somewhere mid thigh. Not mine.

I lift the duvet, my heart in my throat, praying I won't find any trace of blood, anything that would hint I lost my virginity. There's nothing. Except I'm wearing nothing but the shirt. Nothing else at all. Whoever brought me here stripped me completely naked.

The bathroom door opens, and steam rolls out ahead of him. His hair is damp, dark strands pushed back off his face, and a line of water is still tracking down from his throat, over his chest, disappearing under the towel slung low on his hips. Every thought in my head empties out at the sight of him.

He's older than me, maybe by two decades, built like something carved rather than born, chest and arms scored with old scars and ink that trail down over muscle I have no business staring at this hard. My mouth goes dry before I remember to close it.

"You're awake," he says, like this is a normal thing to say to a woman waking up in his bed in his shirt.

"Who... how did I..." I can't finish the sentence. I try again. "Did you? Did we? Did you do anything to me?"

He doesn't answer right away. Just smirks as he slowly crosses the room and sits at the edge of the bed. Up close, his eyes are darker than I expected, and there's nothing in them I can read. Just blank. Soulless.

"Are you sore?"

The question catches me off guard enough that I answer honestly. "No."

"Any ache between your legs?"

Heat crawls up my neck. "No."

"Then I didn't touch you." A pause, something almost like humor pulling at one corner of his mouth. "If I fucked you, you wouldn't be getting out of bed the whole day."

The heat that was climbing my neck floods lower, fast, and I hate how much that sentence does to me. I hate that some part of my body is disappointed by his answer instead of relieved.

"Get up. Get dressed." He stands, moving toward a wardrobe against the far wall like the conversation is already over. "I'll drop you home."

I try to sit with the fact of last night instead, and it lands all at once, ugly and complete. Silas's hands. The drug. And after, this man's face swimming above me while I begged him, out loud, more than once, to fuck me. My stomach drops.

"I'm so sorry about last night. Things I asked you to do to me... I don't know why I said..."

"Don't." He doesn't turn around. "You were drugged. I know exactly why you said it. It's not something you need to apologize for."

It doesn't make the shame smaller. If anything, it makes it worse.

"Your clothes were ruined," he says, pulling open a drawer. "I haven't gotten them to a laundromat yet, so you'll have to make do with something of mine for now."

"Thank you." My voice comes out smaller than I want it to.

I push the duvet back and swing my legs over the side of the bed, and the second my feet hit the floor I understand this was a mistake. My legs have the structural integrity of wet paper. I stand, sway, and reach for the first solid thing in reach, which turns out to be him.

He catches me before I go down, one arm hooking around my waist, and it happens so fast neither of us sees it coming, my hand fisting in the towel at his hip as I try to steady myself. The towel loses the fight.

I stand frozen at the sight before me. He is huge.

He doesn't so much as flinch, doesn't scramble for the towel pooled at his feet, just watches me with an expression that might be amusement if I could focus on his face right now instead of what's hanging between his legs.

I snap myself out of it almost immediately.

"God, I'm sorry." The words come out strangled.

"Don't worry about it." If anything, he sounds entertained.

I bend down to snatch the towel off the floor, and my eyes betray me on the way up, catching on him fully before I can stop them. I swallow. Hard. By the time I make myself look at his face instead, I'm sure he saw exactly where my eyes went.

I shove the towel at him without a word. He takes it, wraps it back around his waist with maddening ease, like his whole body wasn't just on display in front of a woman he met a few hours ago.

I don't wait for whatever comes next. I bolt for the bathroom and shut the door behind me, pressing my back against it, breathing like I've just run somewhere instead of stumbled six feet across a bedroom.

He's a stranger. I don't even know his fucking name, or what he does. I said please to a complete stranger and begged him to touch me, and now I've just seen enough of him to know exactly what I was begging for, and my whole body is humming like it wants a second chance to ask.

I press my thighs together and feel exactly how wet I am, more than I think I've ever been in my life, and it makes no sense. None of this makes sense.

I turn the shower on, cold, and stand under it until my head stops spinning and I can pretend, for a few minutes at least, that my body isn't still asking questions I have no idea how to answer.