Page 113 of Hayden's Stalker

She ignores the bowl and grabs one of the coffee cups instead. “Oh god, I needed that.”

“Yeah, I figured since you were up in the middle of the night, you might be tired this morning,” I smirk at her.

She doesn’t acknowledge my comment, just takes the bowl from me and heads over to sit on the sofa. She puts the mug of coffee on the floor and begins to eat her cereal. I follow her lead, and we eat in silence for a few minutes.

“It’s good to be able to use the bus during the day,” I tell her, thinking about how we wouldn’t be able to do this if Jesse was still traveling on the bus with us.

“Yeah, it is. I started to feel claustrophobic in that tiny room sometimes,” she admits.

“You should’ve come to my room. I have plenty of space,” I grin at her.

“But with two people in there, it would probably feel more crowded,” she points out.

I’d really like to try and see if that would be the case, so I suggest, “Why don’t you come spend some time in there with me, and we can find out?”

Tatiana shakes her head and laughs, “That sounds dangerous.”

“Maybe. There’s only one way to find out…”

I’m not naïve enough to think she actually will, but fuck, I want her to. She doesn’t say anything, just continues to eat her granola.

We fall into silence, and I wonder if she’ll bring up last night or not. When she takes a sip of her coffee without saying anything, I figure she’s not going to.

“So, are we not going to talk about last night?”

“What about last night?” she asks in her coolly professional tone.

Despite the tone, her body gives her away because her cheeks are red, and she’s breathing a little faster than she was before. I watch her with interest, then wonder if I can provoke her into actually discussing it properly.

“Nothing, really. I was just wondering if I was your first live sex show on a contract or if you stand and watch all of your clients masturbate while they’re imagining themselves buried deep inside you.”

It’s the truth, and we both know it. The same way that I know she was imagining me when she went back to her room afterward.

I watch her take in my words and wait as she swallows heavily before setting aside her granola bowl. “Yes, I do want to apologize for that. I tried to call out, but you couldn’t hear me, obviously. I should have left at once, but I was caught off guard. I’m sorry.”

It’s obvious that she’s trying to distance herself from what happened and from me. Instead of it being one of the hottest experiences of my life, she’s talking about it as though she walked in on me taking a shit or something.

“Don’t be sorry. It was far more enjoyable to masturbate with you there in person than in my head,” I tell her, wanting to make it perfectly clear that I’ve used her as source material in the past.

“Nonetheless, it shouldn’t have happened, and I’m sorry.”

I loathe the coolly professional tone in her voice when she says it, and I look at her, with her red face and her lips slightly parted as she breathes heavily. On the surface of her words, with that tone, she’s saying all the right things, but when I look beneath the surface, the truth is easy to see.

After all this time and the insistence that we can’t be anything more, I finally understand what’s behind her pulling back from me.

“I see it now,” I tell her quietly.

She blinks at me. “See what?”

“The more turned on you are, the harder you try to convince me that you’re not.”

More to the point, she tries to convince herself, I think. I watch her closely as she gasps quietly as she stares at me. Her eyebrows form a frown, and she gets a strange look on her face. I watch as she shuts down and closes herself off from me, and I hate it.

I frown back at her and ask, “What are you thinking, Tati? Why do you have that look on your face?”

She doesn’t respond at all, just leans down and picks up her coffee cup, as well as the bowl of granola. “Thank you for making me breakfast. I appreciate it.”

My heart splinters in my chest, and I’m not sure why this is so incredibly painful. Maybe because, just for a moment, I thought she might be willing to give in to what we both want.

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