Page 32 of Property of Thrasher
The door from the back stairwell thumped open.
I knew instantly it wasn’t one of the housekeepers. Their footsteps were quick, light, always in a half-jog because rooms didn’t clean themselves. These steps were heavier. Intentional. The kind that made old concrete pay attention.
I kept folding another towel like I could ignore the shift in air pressure, that small change you felt when weather rolled in over the mountains. Fold. Flip. Stack.
“Tiny down here?”
I turned.
It was him.
He filled the doorway with shoulders and shadow, the leather cut sitting like it had been stitched onto him, patches I had learned enough to read without pretending I wanted to be part of any of it.
Thrasher.
I hadn’t asked anyone, but the name had found me anyway in the clubhouse noise that trickled it’s way to the hotel. Up close, in fluorescent light instead of neon, the pale scar through the stubble at his jaw looked new and old at the same time, like this was his every day appearance.
I don’t know if I said his name out loud or only thought it. My mouth felt dry either way.
“He’s not here,” I said, and I hated that it came out softer than I meant it to. “I haven’t seen him since this morning.”
The door eased shut behind him on the hydraulic arm, the latch clicking like a period at the end of a sentence. He took two steps in, slow enough to be polite, close enough to erase the space I’d declared my own.
“You work down here?” he asked.
Not a real question. His eyes had already mapped the room, memorized my little island: the two stacks of folded towels, the open jug of detergent, and the battered radio that didn’t work unless I twisted the dial just so.
“Laundry,” I said. My hands had curled into the towel I was folding, knuckles white under fluorescents. “Sometimes.”
He nodded once like that answer satisfied something I couldn’t see. He didn’t smile. He didn’t look away. He just… looked, and I felt my pulse jump against my wrist like it wanted a way out.
He crossed the last two steps between us. The dryers hummed at my back and blew warm air up my spine, and even in that heat, a shiver skittered over my skin.
“Tiny’s not here,” I repeated, because saying anything kept me from drowning in the quiet he brought with him. “You can try the office.”
He didn’t even glance toward the door. “I’ll find him when I’m done with you.”
He stopped so close I could see where the stubble didn’t quite catch the hollow under his cheek, where the curve of his mouth could tip mean or soft and he’d get away with both. Something sparked in his eyes—recognition, I realized with a snap of embarrassment. He knew me from last night. From the moment I’d bumped into him like an idiot and he’d growled at me just to hear my fear.
I should have bridged that with a joke, with something easy, but my mouth forgot every word except the ones that would betray me, so I said nothing. The silence wasn’t empty. It carried the thud of the washer, the scald of bleach in my throat, the steady knock of my heart against my ribs.
“Thought so,” he murmured, like he’d followed a thread from the party to this room and pulled it tight as if to reel me in like a fish on a line. The way he watched didn’t feel like he was checking a box. It felt like I was the only thing he’d come down here to see.
Then he kissed me.
No warning. No ask. His mouth found mine like he’d known exactly where to land. Warm, sure, tasting faintly of smoke and wintergreen like a mouthwash from this morning. The rough scrape of stubble shocked me enough to gasp, and he used it to angle deeper, to slide one palm up along my jaw and cup my cheek.
Everything in me went electric and liquid at the same time.
I didn’t think. My hands were already in his cut, fingers fisting leather like I had to hang on. The towel slid off the table and fell to the floor in a soft collapse. A dryer behind me thudded—zipper, belt buckle, or maybe it was my life roaring inside my head. I pressed into him as if he were the only cool thing in the heat or the only heat in my cold. I couldn’t tell which. The room narrowed. It was hard to breathe. A subtle break in our kiss allowed the soft sound I hated hearing myself make when his thumb skimmed the hinge of my jaw escape.
He angled to deepen the kiss, careful in a way that didn’t match the size of him, the violence people attached to his name. His other hand found the small of my back and anchored there, not pulling, just holding. He had just enough pressure to let me know I wasn’t getting away until he decided to let me. He was in control and somehow, that didn’t bother me a single bit. My knees relaxed. I arched without meaning to, lost every rule I’d ever written about who I could be around men like him.
When he lifted his mouth just enough to speak, his breath stroked my lip. “New bunny, huh?”
He said it lazy and sure, like it was the shape I’d arrived in, the box I belonged to. The words snapped like a rubber band in my chest.
“I’m not—” The rest tripped over my tongue. Not a bunny. Not a anything. Not for him. I didn’t know how to finish the sentence without sounding like a girl who wore turtlenecks to biker parties and trembled in laundry rooms.
