The Kiss

Chapter 8

Once the hotel door shut behind them, Taehyung toed off his shoes and ambled to the windows. He opened the drapes and was presented with a fine view of the medical building next door, the St. Mary's Hospital. It reminded him of his mom, bills, responsibilities, and escorting commissions. Not really what he wanted to think about right now.

He yanked the drapes shut and turned around, locating Lisa standing at the foot of the bed. She looked away from him and fiddled with the folded sheets of paper in her hands. Her lesson plans.

He imagined himself shredding them into confetti. He couldn't explain it, but he detested those lists. Instead of acting on the fantasy, he approached her, took the papers, and set them carefully on the nightstand. He found a narrow silver pen in the nightstand's drawer and put it on top of Lesson One. If she was clearheaded enough to check boxes tonight, he needed to analyze his technique. He dimmed the bedside lights.

"How should I—what should I—maybe I—" She gripped the collar of her shirt. "Should I undress?"

"I don't know. It's not in the lesson plan." Once the words were out, he wanted to take them back. Her lists annoyed the hell out of him, but he didn't need to belittle her. "I'm sor—"

"You're right. I didn't think to include that." She hurried past him to the nightstand. After she considered the list for a moment, she bent down and picked up the pen, demonstrating the only reason why a woman should wear a pencil skirt: to show off the perfectly rounded curves of her fine ass.

That had to be why it took so long for her cluelessness to register. She hadn't caught his rudeness or his sarcasm. Maybe she was one of those book smart people who didn't know how to socialize, and he was being too hard on her. "If I told you your lesson plans are insulting, what would you do?" he asked quietly.

She looked at him over her shoulder with alarmed eyes. "Are there parts I should reword? I'd be happy to change things." She turned back to the lesson plan and skimmed her fingers over the lines at a thoughtful pace.

The ball of irritation in his chest loosened. He couldn't be annoyed with her when she didn't understand.

She worried the inside of her lip and tapped her fingers on the table with increasing speed before sending him an anxious look. "Should I have written something other than Performance Review? I hope you know when I wrote that, I meant my performance. There's nothing wrong with your performance. Even if there were, I wouldn't know. I'm not qualified in any way to judge—"

Before she could work herself into another panic attack, he said, "It was just a hypothetical question. Forget about it."

She seemed confused for a second, but she blinked the look away and released a relieved breath. "Oh, okay." After adjusting her glasses, she turned back to her papers and neatly wrote Lisa's in front of each iteration of Performance Review.

That was a good reminder. This was about helping with Lisa's performance. That was it. So what if she wasn't viewing this as the fulfilment of secret fantasies like his other clients did? He needed to take his own advice and stop thinking.

When she flipped to the second page in the pile, he shrugged out of his jacket, draped it over the arm of a chair, and unbuttoned his shirt. Tugging the tails free, he sat on the bed next to Lisa. She snuck a quick glance at him, and her gaze dropped to the portion of skin revealed by his open shirt. The pen paused in midscrawl, clattered to the tabletop.

He smiled with satisfaction. Not so clinical now.

She squared her shoulders before she lifted her hands to her collar. Buttons came undone at a painstaking pace, and white fabric fluttered to the floor, followed by her grey skirt. The set of her jaw was determined as she let him look at her. And look he did.