Primal Instinct

21- WAKING UP P.2

I scanned the room for my own clothes. They were folded on a low bench by the window. Someone had taken the time to straighten them, smooth the fabric, stack everything in a neat pile. Not Trenton. I couldn’t see him folding anything gently like that. Lyric then. Or maybe his mother.

The idea of his mother anywhere near the bed where I’d just… Nope again.

I crossed the room with slow, careful steps. Each one reminded me of the tension my body had held, the way my muscles had trembled against his sheets. Even though the fever had passed, there were traces left behind—soft pulsing warmth low in my belly, my n*****s dragging oversensitized against cotton when I moved too quickly, the faint urge to seek pressure and heat instead of escape.

Normal, I told myself. Your hormones are crashing. You’re coming down from whatever biological horror-show your body decided to throw. That’s all.

I paused by the glass wall. The view was obscene. The estate terraced down the mountain below, pieces of it visible between the gray-green sea of pines. The town lay somewhere deeper in the valley, hidden beneath layers of mist and shadow. The sky was lightening quickly now, the pale disk of the moon still faint against the soft blue.

I pressed my palm against the glass. Cold seeped into my skin.

“This is insane,” I breathed. “You should be in Atlanta, stuck in traffic, mad about office coffee. Not standing in your boss’s room on a mountain after accidentally almost bonding with a monster.”

My reflection in the glass stared back at me, hair a wild mess of curls, eyes bruised around the edges from lack of sleep. For a second, as the light shifted, my irises caught it—amber warming into something brighter, edged with the faintest swirl of pink.

I blinked. It was gone.

“Right,” I muttered. “Definitely just sleep deprivation.”

I moved away from the window before the view could make me start questioning more than my life choices. My fingers brushed the dresser as I passed. It was smooth, solid, a dark wood that matched the beams overhead. A single picture frame sat on top, face down. I didn’t touch it. Something about the way it lay there felt deliberately unfinished, like a door he’d slammed but hadn’t locked.

On the nightstand, my phone rested beside his watch.

I grabbed it like a lifeline. No signal. Of course. Still, the familiar weight of it in my hand helped. My wallpaper was the same: a picture of me on a rooftop bar with two girlfriends, all of us laughing, the Atlanta skyline blazing behind us. It felt like someone else’s life. Someone else’s body smiling back.

My wrist throbbed again. I rubbed it absently.

“I need to get out of here,” I told the room.

I grabbed my clothes and ducked into the bathroom. The mirror showed me the full picture of myself. My flushed cheeks, swollen mouth, faint shadows where his stubble had rasped against my neck. No bites. No visible marks beyond that bruise on my hip and the whisper of his fingers on my wrist.

I shouldn’t have been relieved by that. Or disappointed. But I was both, somehow.

The shower was big enough to fit four people, with dark stone walls and a rainfall head. I refused to look at it too long in case images from last night tried to crawl back into my mind. I splashed cool water on my face instead, letting it drip down my neck, grounding myself in the simple sensation of temperature and weight.

Once I’d changed back into my own clothes, I folded his shirt and hesitated.

Leave it on the bed? On the chair? Take it?

My fingers tightened reflexively around the soft fabric. My chest squeezed. No. I wasn’t taking anything. This wasn’t that. We weren’t that. I placed it carefully on the chair where I’d first seen it, smoothing the wrinkles away like that might erase the memory of his body against mine.

One last look around the room—at the unmade bed, at the view, at the evidence of him scattered like pieces of some puzzle I wasn’t allowed to solve—and I moved to the door. My hand hovered over the handle.

From somewhere in the house, faint but distinct, a door slammed. Heavy footsteps echoed down a distant corridor. I froze, heart vaulting into my throat. He’s here. The hum under my sternum kicked up, answering like someone had snapped their fingers.

I swallowed hard and turned the handle anyway. I couldn’t stand the idea of being caught in his bed, in his room, surrounded by his scent and last night’s ghost.