luck for the night - rl.

26. an engagement ring!?

A single knock on the door made me sit up straight in bed. Where was I?

Oh, yeah. Everything came back to me in a split second. Hotel, London, Remington, nap.

I got up, not bothering to look in any of the mirrors that I walked past, and opened the door.

Remington stepped into the room, his body mere inches from mine, reaching for my face, but he stopped the moment the mechanical whirring of the elevator doors opening resounded through the hallway.

In a swift move, he pushed the both of us into the room, one hand around my waist, the other closing the door behind him.

The feeling of his body close to mine again was enchanting, so enchanting that I almost did not feel the sting that got pushed into my guts. I was just another girl, no matter how badly I wanted to be more. Another girl that no one could know about.

The sting reached my eyes, and a frown appeared on Remington's face. "You okay?"

"Yeah," I lied, "You just woke me up, that's all." I forced a smile.

"Okay." He took a breath. "Hey."

"Hi." I suddenly felt out of breath, head slightly lifted to look into his eyes.

"What have you been doing?" He asked, not stepping away from me. We were chest to chest, and I was sure he could feel my heart beating louder and louder with every second.

"I was taking a nap," I repeated, not able to say another sentence. Not with him this close to me.

"A nap, huh? That sounds like a great idea." His arms were still around my waist, he lifted me up from the floor and carried me the few steps it took to reach the bed. Nerves shot through my body, and if he hadn't noticed my heartbeat before, he definitely did now.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. In the second it took him to lay me down on the bed, all of the feelings that came up yesterday, in the darkness of the garden, rushed over me. The fire, the desire, the wonder. The softness, the warmth that bloomed in my chest when I saw his face, his smile.

"You stay here," he smiled, "I'm going to take a shower, and we'll nap after. Okay?"

I nodded, breathless, and he turned around to the bathroom, backpack still on his back. It was only now that I noticed what he was wearing: the green and black checkered skirt, a black hoodie thrown over it instead of the body harness he had been wearing in the picture he had sent me earlier. Did that mean he came back to the hotel as soon as he could, not even taking the time to wear something else?

"Hey!" I exclaimed as I started to hear water running, "you better not use the tiny bottles of shower gel! I wanna take those home!"

A laugh from the other side of the wall. "Okay, I've got some more in my hotel room if you want!"

I sat up, nerves taking over. So I did what every normal human, well, a normal human with a dependency on nicotine, did. I grabbed Remington's checkered blazer, which I had taken off when I went to bed, opened the small window and popped a cigarette into my mouth.

A few minutes later, I heard the dark-haired man enter the room again. "Smoking again?" He came to stand next to me, hair wet and slicked back, a bit of dark makeup still smudged around his eyes. He was pale, and the bags under his eyes were big. "I guess I do have a bad influence on you."

"Only a bit," I assured him, pushing the cigarette butt against the outside of the window pane.

"You wanna go to bed?" He asked, and I know what he meant, of course, but my mind jumped in a different direction for a split second. How his eyes had bored into mine, yesterday night. And in Oslo and London before that. Fuck.