“I’ll help you clean up.” His voice and touch were suddenly gentle, and that was somehow making things worse. I had been ready to start hating him, and now he was going to be all nice to me? No way. I was done. I needed desperately to be alone so I could cry and truly have a good pity party.
“Thanks, but I’ll handle it.” I pulled away quickly and made for the stairs, trying to wipe the tears from my face. Again, I didn’t get far.
“Don’t be a baby.” His gruff voice in my ear gave me shivers. I was suddenly airborne as he lifted me in his strong arms, gym bag and all, like I didn’t weigh much.
“I don’t need you to carry me!” I struggled in his grasp, trying to stretch my legs down.
“You’re going to hurt your leg.”
“Not if I walk.”
“I’m going to help you,” he said sternly.
“You don’t even like me! Why are you trying to help me? I don’t get you!” And the tears continued to trail down my cheeks, so I did my best to hide my face over his shoulder.
He didn’t respond, and I quickly grabbed on to his thick shoulder muscles as he jogged up the stairs to the second floor. I absolutely refused to acknowledge that I enjoyed feeling feminine and fragile in his arms. Refused! And I absolutely remembered that he’d just been mean to me! No, really, I did. But I still didn’t know how to resolve the situation I found myself in.
The door was locked, and he had to put me down so I could fish out my keys. Of course, they were way at the bottom of my bag, but it gave me a moment to breathe and figure out how I wanted to handle this, even with his large, hulking form waiting right in front of me.
Let him in or send him away. What was the best thing to do?
I located my keys and looked up into his jade eyes, ready to politely dismiss him, and saw they were frowning down at me with a hint of self-reproach, like he was doing something he didn’t agree with. If I could read into his expression a bit, he even seemed somewhat unsure, like he didn’t quite know what to do with me.
“Taylor,” he started, but he paused, disarming me with a gentle swipe of a tear from my face, and glared at the floor a moment. His face set in hard lines, he looked at me briefly, and in that moment I could see his expression seemed tortured. There was an internal struggle going on, like he was debating what he was going to say. “I don’t think you’re inviting sexual harassment, and I didn’t think you were asking for anything to happen to you...any more than my sister was.”
“Oh.” The soft exclamation deflated my upset.
I saw from his closed-off expression that that was all he planned to say, leaving me to wonder with horror about what had happened to his sister. Had men sexually abused her? Was she okay? It had to have been bad, if he was unwilling to talk about it. Was this his way of apologizing or trying to make peace? If something terrible had happened to his sister in a sexual way, I could understand his having strong feelings about protecting a female from unwelcome sexual attention.
“You’re going to need someone with tweezers to pull out all the little pieces of glass,” he said in a businesslike manner. “Let me help you.”
“Okay.” And there I was, feeling all gooey about him once again.
It felt very intimate being in Cynthia’s tiny bathroom with him. There wasn’t much room, and I couldn’t help but feel self-conscious as I bumped him with every move I made.