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“Thanks to your manager.”
“So you keep saying.”
Iris made a disdainful sound in the back of her throat.
“I’m ready to be escorted back to my prison cell now,” she informed him, with a haughty toss of her damp hair. God, she really wasn’t—the thought of returning to that room made her skin crawl. Her bravado was a total bluff.
“Your Medusa-like curls seem to have multiplied.” The observation was almost wrenched from him, and Iris raised a self-conscious hand to her hair. Usually she had highly controllable, gentle waves, but her hair became a different creature when it got wet and was allowed to dry without any kind of intervention. The waves morphed into crazy spiral curls that sprouted in all directions, without any care or concern for structure and organization.
“It’s not very polite to comment on my physical appearance.”
He lifted an incredulous brow at her criticism. “You literally just commented on mine. Why are you allowed these licenses but not me?”
Iris blinked and then nodded slowly, acknowledging his point.
“You’re right… I’m sorry. I think sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that public figures deserve the same consideration as the rest of the population. I was being a hypocrite.”
He stared at her, his probing gaze alit with a healthy dose of skepticism.
“I mean it,” she insisted, not appreciating his blatant disbelief. Iris took pride in her honesty and rarely said what she didn’t mean. That candor didn’t always work in her favor but she was incapable of dissembling. And this man had accused her of being a liar from the get-go, which was infuriating.
“So, you don’t think the beard is —what’d you call it?— overkill?”
“What?” That was his takeaway from her apology? Seriously, talking to him was like trying to communicate with an alien species. “No, I meant that. I just . . . shouldn’t have said it. My brain-to-mouth filter sometimes malfunctions. I shouldn’t have commented on your appearance. It was rude. I allowed myself to be provoked into saying something that was better left unsaid.”
“So, you’re blaming me for provoking you into speaking your mind? I did no such thing. I have to say, this is an extremely bizarre apology.”
“It’s an honest apology,” she corrected him. “I’m sorry I said what I did about your beard. And that crazy hermit comment I made last night was uncalled for as well. And hurtful.”
“I don’t care enough about your opinions to be hurt by them,” he told her stiffly.
Iris worried her plump lower lip with her teeth before lifting her shoulders in a minute shrug—hating that she cared enough about his opinion to actually be wounded by that stupid comment.
“Fair enough. I apologize regardless.”
She swallowed painfully, while he stared at her again, a long, scraping regard that made her skin prickle and her nerve endings feel raw. Eventually he nodded—an acceptance of her apology perhaps?—and grasped her elbow in a firm, but loose grip. His hand so cold she could feel it through the thick fabric of the bathrobe.
Iris had to be getting used to his unsolicited touches because she barely reacted to it this time. In fact, she almost liked the proprietary hold. Ugh, maybe she was developing Stockholm syndrome or something.
He marched her back to her room without a word, and once there, he stood in the doorway and watched her for a moment before saying, “I’ll bring you some lunch after I’ve had a shower.”
“Thank you.”
Another long stare and then he stepped back and slammed the door in her face. She held her breath for a few seconds, hoping… until she heard the key turn in the lock. Her breath escaped on a slow, dejected sigh and her shoulders dropped. Deep breaths… she could do this. She’d done it before.
She turned back to stare at her cell. It looked cozy. Spacious. Not prison-like at all, but it was fast becoming the equivalent of a dungeon to Iris. She hated it. Hated not being able to just open the door and leave anytime she wanted to.
She pushed down the panic that threatened to claw its way out of her throat in the form of a scream, and headed straight for the window. She shoved it up and inhaled deeply. So much for that warm bath… the frigid air immediately chilled her again. But she didn’t care. She stood there for a long moment, staring at the ground just a meter below the windowsill. And after a few more deep breaths, stepped back and shut the window again, shivering but better.
She walked to the sofa and picked up her laptop. Maybe she could distract herself from obsessing over that locked door by writing. She also needed to update her journal. When she was a teenager and starting to exhibit her anxiety issues her school counsellor, Mrs. Crowley, had encouraged her to start a journal to keep track of her events—as the woman called them. The idea was to be as detailed as possible in her entries so that they could attempt to identify what specific interactions or incidents triggered her panic attacks.
Iris had found it to be therapeutic and had kept a journal ever since.
TDH still hadn’t given her the Wi-Fi password as promised, but she didn’t need Wi-Fi to write.
“Hey.”
The deep, intrusive voice didn’t register at first as Iris continued to tap industriously away at her keyboard.
