Page 56 of One More Chapter
The click of the shampoo cap, and the squirt of the thick liquid into his palms. The deep exhale of his breath, and the sharp inhale that precedes his fingers on my scalp. If I wasn’t paying such close attention, I might have missed the moan caught in his throat, begging to escape. He covers it with a grunt, the sharp clearing of his throat, and I have to suppress my own caged noises.
His touch could lull me into another dimension. I shouldn’t have expected any less, after he made my body hum beneath the stars, but I had once upon a time convinced myself it was just circumstantial. Somehow, Anthony Ellis washing my hair is even more sensual. All ten digits cradling my head like fine China, each individual fingerprint writing sonnets in the circular motions. I want to tip my head back and hum, but settle for relaxing my shoulders so that my head falls perfectly into the palms of his hands.
He takes his sweet, sweet time, even dipping his thumbs to knead the base of my neck. And you know what? I let him. His penance for breaking my heart can be untying the knots in mymuscles. He chuckles, this low, dangerous sound, and I lift my head from his sweet ministrations.
“What?”
“You enjoying yourself?” he asks, his tone wrapped in whiskey and molasses.
“What do you mean?”
He dips his head right beside my ear. “I don’t mean to be crass, Penelope Jayne, but the last time I heard those sweet little moans from you, it was when I had my fingers inside you.”
I groan, loud and over-exaggeratedly. Partly because he ruined my vibe. Mostly to cover the way that one phrase lit up my insides into begging him to do it again.
“You just can’t help yourself, can you?” I ask, tilting my head all the way back and peeling my eyes open.
It was the exact wrong thing to do, because not only am I staring up at Anthony Ellis through his spread legs, but I can see the outline of his stiff, swollen cock still trapped in his work slacks. What’s even worse is what comes out of his mouth next.
“Not when it comes to you.”
The blue in his eyes cuts like ice, and then he stands and disappears. I close my eyes again, doing my best to overanalyze every single moment of the past two minutes until I hear him return. Something scoops into the water beside me, and he asks me to tilt my head back again. Warm water cascades through my hair, and after he rinses the shampoo several times, I smell the telltale scent of my coconut conditioner.
“So uh… Since we’re on the topic…” he starts, weaving his hands through my waist-length hair, massaging in the conditioner like he’s practiced in it. A bowling ball shoots up my chest and captures itself in my throat. “Can we talk about what happened?”
I sigh. Deep down to the marrow of my bones.
I’ve practiced this conversation in my head a million times. Some of those times, I berated him. Some, I begged for understanding. Sometimes he cried and begged for a second chance. None of my little head fantasies involved Anthony Ellis washing my hair in the bathtub simply because he’s apparently that kind of man beneath the one week of flaws I was exposed to.
“Sure. Go ahead.”
He clears his throat, fidgeting with my hair.
“I was actually wondering if you wanted to start. I’ve never heard things from your perspective, and I uh…” He shifts behind me. I would give anything to see the look of anguish on his face right now, to see if it matches the one I just stopped seeing in the mirror. “I need to know how badly I hurt you, Pen. So I can make it right.”
It’s funny. No amount of rehearsing this speech in my head could have ever prepared me for the actual opportunity. Stage fright swallows all of my words whole. I am a blank slate, with my head in his hands and my heart trying to join it.
“You said all the right things, Anthony.Allthe right things. And my heart believed every one of them to be true. But then your actions didn’t match.
“When you didn’t show up to dinner, didn’t answer any of my texts or calls, I felt like the carpet was pulled out from under me. I felt hurt. Betrayed. My heart was broken, but I think I was mostlyembarrassed. That I could tell you all of the ways that I’ve been hurt in the past, that youknewwhat it took to break me, and I let it happen to me all over again.”
I can feel his deep, heavy breaths, both falling in hot waves against my bare skin, and by the thighs that are caged against the edge of the tub. His hands in my hair froze the moment I started talking, and haven’t yet picked up again. When he finally speaks, his words are wrapped in barbed wire.
“I can’t justify what I did. It was wrong. I know that. I knew it in the moment, and I still went ahead and left you out to dry anyway. I cannot begin to apologize because the wordsorrydoesn’t seem significant enough for what I did to you.”
His words rattle my bones, but the grip that pulls my hair into a ponytail, the one he subconsciously holds a little too tightly, brings me back to Earth.
“I won’t ask for another chance, not when I don’t deserve it. But Penelope, I need you to know that, despite my lack of follow through, everything I said to you that night was the truth.”
As he speaks the words again, ones I thought onlyIhad cemented into a brick in my memories, I fall right back to that beach, with my head on his chest, and the infinite sky above us.
“This is not what I expected would happen when I came on this trip,” he said, afterward, our legs like pretzels, his grip on my hand a vice.
“Me neither,” I said, quiet as a bashful mouse, to his chest. I kissed him there, and his lips on my temple lingered.
“You have been the best part of this trip, Penny Layne.”
“Don’t say that.”