39 Tension

Hunter stepped out of the bathroom and closed the door behind him. He had been in the shower so long that a cloud of steam followed behind him as he made his way out into the bedroom.

Ash wore a large men's shirt with a band logo on it and just her underwear. She had worked backstage at a concert when she was sixteen and the production team had given all the staffers free shirts.

Ash worked a lot of odd jobs around the city when she had time off from school. She would have found work in a restaurant or cleaning houses over the holidays had Hunter not asked her to come here.

She saw that Hunter was wearing only a towel and she made sure to keep her eyes on his face. She felt the gravity of her hormones forcing her gaze downward to his crotch but she struggled against it. She resolved to plant her gaze right on the space between Hunter's eyes. Even as she concentrated on doing just that, she still wavered and admired his broad shoulders and impressive chiseled abdomen as he walked over to her on the bed.

For a second, she wondered if she had been truly insane to turn this beautiful boy down.

[I could have just said that I loved him back and we would have been spent by now,] she thought with a tinge of regret.

Ash straightened her back as Hunter stood over her. She looked up at him, gazing past his chiseled chest and into his face. His eyes regarded her coldly.

"Is it okay that I wear this to bed? I don't really own any pajamas," Ash said, trying to sound casual.

Hunter blinked slowly.

"You're just going to make this hard for me, aren't you?" His voice was nearly a whisper.

He pushed her down on the bed and hovered over her. He grabbed both of her hands to pin her down. Ash stared at him, feeling overwhelmed. She saw the beads of water from his hair fall and felt some of the drops land on her face. She stared into his cold blue eyes and felt his towel over her legs.

In another time and place, they would have ravaged each other. She would have wrapped her legs around him and he would have plunged himself into her. He would have filled his hands with her breasts and she would have marked the skin of his back with her nails. They would have kissed hungrily and rutted like the animals they were deep down.

But that was somewhere else and definitely not in the present. Here, they were people. And people were complicated animals with rules, manners, and complex emotions. And unfortunately for these two young people, they were more complicated than regular humans.

They stared at each other for what seemed like a long time, even though only a few seconds had gone by. Their feelings bubbled under the surface, but their faces were stone-set and unreadable.

"You're not going to hurt me, are you?" Ash asked, breaking the tension.

Hunter let go of her hands and straightened himself up. He put his hand over his face and shook his head, as though he regretted what just happened.

"I'm going to get dressed," he said.

"I'll go brush my teeth then," Ash said and walked quickly to the bathroom.

Hunter took a deep breath just as the bathroom door closed. He opened the closet and quickly got dressed in a set of pajamas.

Ash turned the water on in the sink and splashed her face. She had already brushed her teeth before, but she just made up an excuse to get out of the room. Being in the same room as Hunter was so hard: there were too many feelings involved with him. There was so much push and pull about whether she should be with him or not.

For the first time that night, she wondered: Was this what love felt like?