Tracy Wolff - Shredded

I don’t know how long I stand there, thinking, waiting, trying to figure out the right thing to do. Walk away or knock. Knock or walk away.

And in the end I do exactly what I always knew I would do, exactly what I have to do to stay sane.

I turn and walk away.

It’s a little after four-thirty in the morning when I finish folding the last of my laundry and start the long trek back up to my room with my laundry basket in front of my face. This is the perfect time to wash clothes—everyone’s asleep and I had all the machines to myself—but at the same time, it’s going to be a long day. The two hours of sleep I managed to grab aren’t going to do me much good come afternoon rush at the coffee bar.

I’m on the stairs, on the landing halfway between the second floor and the third, laundry basket in front of my face, when I bump into a solid wall of … something. For a second I freak out as images of Harvey flip through my head at lightning speed. But before I can do more than register my fear, two strong, cold hands reach out and grab my shoulders to steady me. And though I still can’t see who it is, I can tell from the way he’s touching me that it’s Z in front of me.

“Hey, Ophelia. You okay?” The heavy basket is gently removed from my arms and I find myself staring into the concerned blue of Z’s midnight eyes.

“I’m fine,” I tell him. Which is true, as long as you don’t count the fact that my heart is beating like a metronome on high. It’s as though being this close to him actually causes my body to completely wig out.

“You sure?” He’s got the basket balanced in one hand and the other wraps around my elbow as he guides me up the last of the stairs. “I didn’t hurt you?”

I smile at him. “I’m good, Z.”

He came. He came. I can’t believe he came. I can’t believe he came. Even though I didn’t want him to, even though I told him I needed space. He came anyway.

The words are a happy mantra inside me as we walk the short distance down the hallway to my door. He came. He came. He came.

When we get to my room, we pause awkwardly while I fumble my key out of my sweatpants pocket. Once I get the door opened, he hands me my basket and takes a few steps back, like he can’t get out of here fast enough.

That’s when it occurs to me that maybe he’s not here for me. Maybe he was leaving one of the other girls’ rooms and I just happened to be coming up the stairs at the worst possible time. Maybe I ran into him because he was here, having sex, with somebody else.

Just the thought makes me sick. So sick that it’s all I can do not to burst into tears before I can even fumble the door shut. But I’ve cried enough over this guy. Cried more over him in the last week than I have over Remi in the last eleven months. There’s something wrong there, and it’s about time I put it to rights. About time I stop worrying about Z Michaels and start worrying about me.

Except now that I look at him, really look at him, he doesn’t look like he’s just crawled out of anyone’s bed. He’s dripping wet and shivering so badly that I can almost hear his teeth knocking together from where I’m standing.

I drop the basket inside the door of my apartment, then reach for him. “What happened to you?” I demand, pulling him inside and locking the door behind him. For the first time, I register just how cold his body is.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” I ask, brow raised. “Is that why you look like you’re one very small step away from hypothermia?”

I walk over to the thermostat, turn it up to eighty. Then I come back and fumble his jacket off his shoulders. “You need to get out of your clothes. They’re soaking wet.”

He smiles at me as I pull his T-shirt up and over his head. It’s nowhere near as wet as his jeans and jacket, but still, he can’t stay in it. Not when he’s halfway to frostbite already.

“It seems I spend half my time getting you out of your clothes,” I tell him, tossing the shirt onto a nearby chair before starting on his belt buckle. He tries to fumble it off himself, but his fingers are so cold that they aren’t cooperating. “If you’re so anxious to be naked around me, you should just ask. It’ll save you a hell of a lot of wear and tear on your body.”

He grins, and it’s the same here-let-me-help-you-out-of-your-panties grin that he first leveled at me. It works way better now than it did the night we met.

“Where’s the fun in that?” he asks around his chattering teeth.

I raise a brow at him. “I thought you had plenty of fun the last two nights.”

He strips off his jeans with a little help from me, then pulls me flush against him. “I did. Want to go for three?”

“What I want,” I tell him as I shove him toward the bathroom clad only in his boxer shorts, “is for you to take a hot shower. Get warmed up and then we’ll talk.”

“I’d get warmer faster if you took a shower with me.”

“Maybe you would,” I tell him, “but I’m going to take the time to once again throw your clothes in the dryer.”

“I’ve already seen you naked, you know.”

“I know. But whether or not you see me naked again is totally up to my discretion, and at this point I haven’t made up my mind.”

“Come closer,” he tells me with a wicked look that even his chattering teeth can’t dilute. “I bet I could convince you.”

I bet he could, too, which is exactly why I’m staying on this side of the apartment.

I reach into the laundry basket and toss him a warm, fresh towel. He catches it gratefully and holds it against his chest as he shivers. Poor baby.

“Go take that shower,” I order him. “We’ll talk more when you get out.”

While Z is dousing himself with the hottest water the human body can take, I run down and—for the second time this week—throw his clothes in the dryer. Then I go back upstairs and try to figure out what I can feed the guy. After that kind of exposure, he needs calories and lots of them. Unfortunately, my very limited pantry doesn’t have much. And what it does have is pretty much chick food—some apples, half a box of cereal, some peanut butter. Nothing, I’m sure, that would appeal to a twenty-one-year-old male athlete.

I do have some leftovers from dinner the night before last—Chinese food—so I dump it on a couple of plates and heat it up in the microwave.

By the time it’s ready, Z is out of the shower and lounging on my bed, dressed in nothing but the fluffy hot-pink robe I picked up on clearance last year. I’m not sure what it says about either one of us that it looks better on him than it ever did on me.

He sits up when he sees me, but stays on the bed. I don’t know if that’s because he wants to give me space and that’s pretty much the farthest he can get away from me and still be in the room or if it’s just because he’s a shit and he wants to remind me of everything we’ve done on that bed in the last two days.

If that’s his goal, it’s working. Because, pink fluffy robe or not, all I see is Z kneeling between my legs, his eyes dark and intense as he goes down on me. The memory has me blushing, and I can tell he notices because he straightens up, his eyes going sharp with purpose.

Plus there’s an awareness in the room, an electricity that seems to permeate the air whenever we’re in the same place. I’ve felt it every time we’re together, and this morning is no different. In fact, right now the pull is so powerful that it’s all I can do not to climb on and take him inside me.

But what happened yesterday hasn’t been resolved—I’m not sure it can be resolved—and I decide that until it is, I’m staying safely on my side of the room.

That’s when Z—fucking gorgeous, sexy, irresistible Z—holds out a hand to me and says, “Come here.”

I start to do just that, my body so enthralled by him that it responds without conscious instruction from my brain. I take three full steps before I manage to stop myself. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“I do.”

I roll my eyes at him. “Of course you do. But that’s not exactly the point, is it?”

“I guess not.” He sits up then. “Why were you doing laundry at four in the morning?”

“I couldn’t sleep. Why were you wandering the halls here at four in the morning?”

“I couldn’t get you out of my mind, so I went for a walk.” He tries to say it like it doesn’t matter, but I can see the vulnerability in his eyes, and it gets to me even though I shouldn’t let it. “I ended up here.”

“A walk?” I eye him skeptically. “A walk doesn’t end up with you soaking wet like that.”

He shrugs. “Maybe it was more of a hike.”

“You think so?” My sarcasm is out in full form today, but after those videos I’ve seen of him, all I can picture is him scaling the side of a mountain in the middle of the night. The thought terrifies me.

“That’s not important.”

“I beg to differ.”

“Why?” he asks, and for the first time he looks totally exasperated. “Why does it matter how I got here as long as I got here? Can we at least talk about what’s got you so upset?”

“Somehow you’ve never struck me as the talking type.”

“I’m not the talking type. Which should tell you everything you need to know about me being here. I l—” My heart drops to my toes at the first sound of that l. He regroups though, and says, “I like you, Ophelia. I really like you, and that’s not something I say very often, either. So can we please just talk?”

I don’t want to.

I really, really don’t want to.

I’ve only just started to truly heal from everything that happened in New Orleans, from everything that happened to Remi and me, and the last thing I want to do is rip the scab off it now. But at the same time, I know that Z’s right. That I owe him as much. Because he likes me and is good to me and, most important, because I really like him, too.

“I heated up some food from the other night,” I tell him, trying to buy some time while I get my thoughts in order. “Why don’t you come get a plate?”

“Seriously?” He climbs off the bed and stalks toward me. It’s a total testament to his masculinity that not only can he pull off the stalk while wearing a hot-pink bathrobe, but he can actually look threatening doing it. “I pour my heart out to you and you offer me Chinese food?”

“In my defense, it’s really good Chinese food.”

He doesn’t so much as crack a smile at my joke. He just looks at me, and it’s like those crazy beautiful eyes of his can see inside me. More, it’s like they’re letting me see inside him for the first time. And I realize, suddenly, that I hurt him. Not with the Chinese food, but by shutting him out earlier when I had my little freak-out.

And while I can handle him being annoyed with me or angry at me or even indifferent to me, I can’t stand the idea that he might be hurt by me. By something I’ve done. So I forget about trying to get the words right and settle for just getting the words out.

“You were right, earlier. You know, when you said you were paying for things that Remi had done. I don’t think I realized it, but I’ve totally been measuring you against him.”

“Let me guess.” His mouth twists in a sardonic little smile that might have hurt me if I hadn’t had my flash of insight a minute ago and realized that all he’s doing is trying to keep me from hurting him any more than I already have. “I didn’t measure up.”

“I didn’t mean it like that—”

“You don’t have to lie, Ophelia. I’ll always prefer that you tell me the truth rather than what you think I want to hear.”

“Then you need to listen to what the truth is instead of always jumping to the worst conclusions about yourself.”

“I don’t—”

“Yes, you do. I’ve known you a week and I’ve heard you do it seven or eight times already. I bet if I ask Ash or Cam they’d be able to point out a million other times when you think the worst of yourself and try to get other people to as well.”

He shifts a little, looks to the side of me instead of into my eyes, and I realize that I’ve really hit a nerve, which ends up freaking me out. What kind of a life has Z led that it’s so much easier for him to believe, really believe, the bad stuff instead of the good?

God. I sigh heavily and decide to go back to picking my words with care. This is going to be a lot harder than I thought it would be, and it’s not like I ever thought it’d be easy.

“Come here,” I tell him, walking back toward the bed and holding a hand out for him to join me.