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I sigh. “What’s the point in setting sail on a life raft with no hope of reaching the mainland? I like you. And I know you have the potential to break my heart.”
He looks up then and meets my eyes. There’s surprise in them, and something else. A kind of steely determination.
“You shouldn’t have said that,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
He shakes his head and checks the time on his phone. “We should get going. I’ll fly us back to Waiheke and then drive you to the commune. You want to have a shower with me?” His eyes gleam.
“Um, no thank you,” I say, panicking. For a start, Gina is here. What will she think? “I’ll have one when I get home.”
“Okay. I won’t be long.”
I watch him get up and walk away, puzzled by his comment,You shouldn’t have said that. What did he mean? Which bit was he referring to?
Well, I can’t force him to talk to me, so I put it to the back of my mind.
I sit there and chew my bottom lip for about five minutes.
Then eventually I get up and walk through to the bedroom.
The door to the en suite bathroom is open. I wander over to it and lean against the door jamb.
He has already had a shower—wow, that was quick—and he’s standing in front of the mirror with a towel around his waist, running a basin of hot water. He glances in the mirror, sees me, and smiles.
“Sorry,” I say awkwardly.
He gestures with his head for me to come into the room, so I walk in. He wets his face. “Just gonna have a quick shave.” He squirts some foam onto his hand, then spreads it across his cheeks and chin.
My dad had a beard, so I’ve never seen a guy do this in real life. Fascinated, I lean a hip on the unit and watch him.
He wets the razor, then starts drawing it up his throat. I can feel my face growing warm. This is such a masculine act, and there’s something incredibly sexy about it. Everything in this bathroom is masculine, in fact. Ana and I have homemade rose petal bath salts, avocado face masks, kawakawa soap, makeup made from coconut oil and natural ingredients, tampons, and other girly items, and all the jars and tins are bright orange and pink and yellow.
Everything on Orson’s shelf is black: his tin of male antiperspirant, his razors, his electric toothbrush. The only thing that isn’t is the bottle of cologne—Penhaligon’s The Tragedy Of Lord George is a dark yellow with a stag’s head on the top. I take it down, remove the top, and sniff it. I love the sweet brandy smell.
“I Googled this,” I tell him, putting it back. “It says it’s ‘for the gentleman of distinction,’ and ‘the perfume notes inspire aristocratic manners.’”
He gives a short laugh as he draws the razor up his cheek. “Sounds like me.”
It does, a bit. I don’t say it out loud, but I let my gaze drift over him while he rinses his razor in the water, then draws it up his cheek again, accompanied by the scrape of stubble being removed. His biceps are mouthwatering. His chest has just the right amount of hair. Even his back is attractive, not too hairy, and well-muscled. I study the short hair at the nape of his neck and trail my gaze down his spine to the dip just above the towel.
When I look back at him in the mirror, he’s watching me.
“Just turning myself on, sorry,” I say.
His lips curve up, but he doesn’t say anything. He rinses his razor, then washes around the sink.
“What did you mean?” I ask. “When you said ‘You shouldn’t have said that’?”
He dries his face on a towel. Oh man, the smoothness of that jaw…
“You said I had the potential to break your heart,” he says.
“Yeah… I would have thought that was obvious.”
“No, it wasn’t.” He hangs the towel over the rail. Then he walks back to me. He turns me so my butt is against the cabinet, moves even closer, and cups my face. “And now I know that’s how you feel, I’m not going to let you go.”
My eyes widen. “That’s very arrogant.”