Lower.
The blouse I wore tonight has a cleavage my work shirts don't, and I watched myself button it in my bathroom mirror and thought,this is fine, this is a normal amount of collarbone, and now his gaze drags across it like a struck match and I realize I miscalculated by about three buttons.
He catches himself. Looks at the wall. His jaw works.
“Sorry,” he mutters.
“It's okay.”
“It's not—” He exhales through his nose. “I'm not used to having anyone in here.”
“Anyone?”
“Logan. Sometimes.” He picks at the label on his own bottle, mirroring me perhaps subconsciously. “You're the second person to sit on that bench in six years.”
His voice has gone gravelly and itdoes thingsto me. I press my knees together and shift on the cushion, and his eyes flick to the movement and away. I look him over in response, and that’s when I notice how tight the front of his jeans is.
I look at my beer like it contains the secrets of the universe.
He's hard. He's sitting four feet from me, keeping hiscareful distance, apologizing for looking at my cleavage, and he'shard, and my whole body goes hot and liquid so fast it makes me dizzy.
“Can I ask you something?” My voice comes out lower than I planned.
“Yeah.”
“You can tell me to shove it,” I assure him.
“Ask.”
I turn the bottle in my hands. Once. Twice.
“How do you—” I stop. Start over. “The touching thing. If you can't—if people can't touch you. How do you do…” I gesture vaguely with the bottle, at him, at the trailer, at the concept. “Relationships. Any of it.”
The lamp hums. Outside, not far off, someone laughs.
“You don't have to—” I start.
“I've never had one,” he says. “A relationship.”
“Oh.”
“Not the way you mean.” His thumb moves along the bottle's neck, slowly, and I watch it because I can't watch his face right now. “It's not that I don't—” He stops and seems to hunt for words. “The want is there. It's always been there. My skin just doesn't cooperate.”
“So you…” I prompt.
“So I found other ways.”
Is it me or is the trailer suddenly even smaller?
“My brothers,” he says, and his voice is careful now, measured. “They know. About the touch thing. When one of them finds a woman who's, ah, open to it, they invite me. To watch.”
My brain whites out for a second.
“To watch,” I repeat dumbly.
“I sit to the side. In the dark, usually. They—” His jaw tightens. “They don't perform for me. They just don't shutme out. And I take care of myself. No one touches me. Everyone gets what they need.”
I have a sudden, vivid, unstoppable image of it: Rowe in a chair in a dim corner, that beautiful face half in shadow, watching. His hand moving. Those sorrowful eyes dark and hungry.