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I swear my mouth starts to water. Where the fuck did he get a body like that? Doesn’t he spend all his time doing nerd shit like watching birds through binoculars? Why does he have the abs of a Calvin Klein model?
“What are you doing?” I snap, and he stops moving. I have to force myself to look at his face, rather than at his crotch.
“I need to dry my clothes out,” he says simply. He continues tugging the last of his layers off, pulling it up over his head from behind his neck, giving me a full frontal view of his stomach and chest.
He did not have those abs or that chest hair when we were twenty.
“So? Change in the bathroom,” I say.
“That bathroom is too small to change in. And I don’t have anything to change into. I’ll be hanging out in my boxers for the next few hours regardless.” He shrugs, as if to emphasize how much of not a big deal this is.
“It’s different!” I say, because damn it, it is. Watching someone take their clothes off is intimate, especially if they are someone you yourself once undressed.
“How?” he asks.
He starts to undo his belt buckle, pulling the leather free, and for some reason, a vision of my wrists bound by that same belt fills my mind. My heart all but stops when he flicks open the top button in his pants.
“Carter,” I croak.
“How is it different, Angela?”
He pulls his pants down, pushing them just past his crotch, and I see that the “boxers” he was referring to are in fact tight, navy blue boxer briefs. I’m positive that if he turned around, I’d get a glimpse of a tight, muscular ass.
It’s been too damn long since I got laid, clearly.
As if he can hear my thoughts, he turns around, giving me a look at his glorious butt.
“You don’t have to watch, you know,” he says over his shoulder.
I whirl around, my cheeks burning red. “Sorry,” I mumble.
“It’s alright. I’m more than happy to give you a little show,” he says, emphasizing the word you, as if I’m theonlyperson he’s interested in giving a strip tease to. Somehow, this doesn’t make the fact that he caught me blatantly staring any better.
“Sure,” I say, for lack of something else more interesting. It’s probably going to take me the rest of the evening to recover from this.
Not only has it been a long time since I got laid, but it’s been a long time since I even flirted. And Carter is objectively extremely attractive. I chalk my embarrassment up to those two facts, and nothing more.
“So you agree? You’d like a little show?”
“What?” I ask. “No!”
But it’s too late, Carter is already whipping one of his shirts around his head and thrusting his hips. He looks so ridiculous I can’t help but laugh. All of the embarrassment drains out of me as he embarrasses himself just as much, shaking his ass in time to some imaginary song.
We both dissolve into peals of laughter. Carter is laughing so hard he has to stop dancing, doubling over instead.
“When,” I try to say, still laughing. “When did you get so funny?”
“I’ve always been funny. You just stopped letting yourself see it,” he says lightly.
“Oh,” is all I say.
His words sting, but I can’t be angry. Because he’s right—I’ve spent the last seven years trying my best not to notice anything about this man. I’ve done such a good job that I missed out on all of the good qualities he has. He might be a smug, know-it-all bastard, but he’s also funny, apparently. And he has the confidence to pull off such stunts with aplomb.
After all, there are no chinks in Carter Steel’s armor. No holes where someone could worm their way in, knock him back a few steps, make him question himself. Or figure out what he’s really thinking or feeling. Even in high school, when we were friends, I was never quite sure. Mysterious doesn’t begin to cover it.
I suddenly realize that I’m still standing there in his coat, water dripping off of it and onto the floor. I take it off and hang it on a hook by the door. Carter meticulously lays out all of his clothes over the backs of the chairs, and puts his socks on the windowsill to dry.
“Your shirt is damp,” he says, raising his eyebrows at me.
