Chapter 3: Naked Truth
The hallway floor was cold through her socks. Celeste had been aiming for the kitchen, for water, for a semblance of normalcy after the tennis match. But the floorplan of the King mansion was a labyrinth of wealth, and she’d taken a wrong turn.
Now, she was frozen outside Xander’s door, because it was opening.
Steam billowed out first, carrying the clean, sharp scent of bergamot and sandalwood from his shower. Then him. A towel slung low on his hips, dark hair dripping onto his shoulders, skin flushed pink from the heat.
“Lost, Vargas?” he asked, his voice a lazy rumble.
Her tongue felt like lead. “The kitchen.”
“Other end of the house.” He leaned against the doorframe, a droplet of water tracing a path down the center of his chest, over the defined plane of his stomach. He saw her eyes track it. His smirk returned, the one from the courts. “Find what you’re looking for?”
Heat flooded her face. She took a jerky step back. “I’m going.”
As she turned, the motion caught the edge of the towel. It snagged on the door handle. It was a stupid, comic twist of fate. The terrycloth slid, unanchored, and pooled on the polished oak floor.
Time didn’t slow. It fractured.
He was just… there. Entirely, unapologetically naked. The steam curled around him like a frame. Celeste’s brain short-circuited. The clinical part noted the athletic build, the proof of a life of effortless privilege. The rest of her was a screaming void of mortification. She scrambled backward, her socks slipping, her back hitting the opposite wall with a soft thud.
He didn’t move. Didn’t reach for the towel. He just leaned a little more heavily against the frame, completely at ease, while water continued to snake down his body.
“See something you like?” The question was quiet, devoid of its usual mocking lilt. It was curious.
She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe. Her cheeks were on fire.
Then, from down the hall, the distinct sound of her mother’s cheerful voice floated towards them. “Celeste? Honey, did you find the glasses?”
Panic, sharp and acrid, cut through the shock. Maria was coming. Maria would see this. Maria would see him, and the narrative would cement itself: the jealous, volatile scholarship student causing a scene, corrupting her fiancé’s son.
Xander saw the terror in her eyes. In one fluid motion, he stepped forward, not to cover himself, but to grab her wrist. His skin was damp and hot. He yanked her across the threshold and pulled the bathroom door shut just as Maria’s footsteps rounded the corner.
They were sealed in. The bathroom was enormous, all marble and chrome, still humid and fragrant from his shower. The mirror was fogged. And he was still gloriously, terrifyingly naked, standing inches from her in the confined space.
“Shhh,” he breathed, his head cocked, listening.
“Xander?” Maria’s voice was right outside his bedroom door. “Are you in there? Have you seen Celeste?”
Celeste squeezed her eyes shut. She could feel the heat radiating from his body. Every nerve ending was a live wire.
“Just got out of the shower, Maria!” Xander called back, his voice perfectly normal, even friendly. “Haven’t seen her. Maybe she went out to the patio?”
“Oh, alright. Don’t stay up too late!”
They listened to her footsteps retreat. The silence that followed was deafening, thick with steam and something else, something charged and volatile.
Celeste opened her eyes. She kept her gaze locked on the fogged mirror, on a vague patch of grey that was probably a light fixture. “You can put a towel on now,” she said, her voice strangled.
“Why?”
“Because this is insane!”
“It’s just a body, Celeste. You’ve seen one before.” He hadn’t moved. She could see the vague, water-smeared outline of him in the misted glass. “Or maybe you haven’t. Is that it?”
“Don’t be disgusting.”
“I’m not. I’m asking. You’re the one who looks like you’re about to spontaneously combust.” He shifted, leaning a hip against the marble vanity. “Relax. The worst that could happen already did. My towel fell. You saw. The world didn’t end.”
She finally, forcefully, turned her head to look at him. She kept her eyes strictly on his face. His expression was unnervingly calm, but his eyes were that hyper-focused blue, studying her reaction like a complex equation. “You could have picked it up,” she hissed. “You just… stood there.”
“I was assessing the situation.”
“By letting it all hang out?”
“By seeing what you’d do.” He pushed a hand through his wet hair. “You didn’t scream. You didn’t run when you had the chance. You just stared. Like you were solving for ‘x’.”
“There’s nothing to solve. You’re an exhibitionist with poor towel security.”
He laughed, a soft, genuine sound in the humid space. “And you’re a terrible liar. You’re curious. You have been since the club. Since I called you on your ‘traffic accident’ theory.” He gestured vaguely between them. “This just removed the middleman.”
Her heart was a frantic bird in her chest. He was wrong. He had to be wrong. This was just panic, adrenaline, the surreal horror of the situation. It wasn’t curiosity.
“Your girlfriend,” Celeste spat, the word a lifeline back to solid ground. “Sophia. Does she know you entertain guests like this?”
“She’s not my girlfriend.” He said it with a dismissive finality that was somehow more insulting than any confirmation would have been. “And this isn’t entertainment. This is a negotiation.”
“A what?”
“You think I’m a careless, lazy trust fund kid. A blunt instrument. I think you’re a tightly wound control freak who’s never stepped off her meticulously drawn map.” He took a small step closer. The scent of his soap, of him, intensified. “We have to play mixed doubles in front of everyone in forty-eight hours. One of us has to blink first. One of us has to admit this isn’t simple.”
She held her ground, refusing to let her back touch the door. “It is simple. I tolerate you for my mother’s sake. You torment me for your own amusement. We’ll play tennis. We’ll lose. And life will go on.”
“You don’t want to tolerate me.” His voice dropped. “You want to understand me. Because if you can understand me, you can beat me. In class, on the court, at this… game you think we’re playing. That’s your formula. But some things aren’t formulaic, Celeste.”
He was close enough now that the residual heat from his skin brushed against her. Her mind was screaming, a riot of conflicting impulses. The most startling one was the urge to reach out and see if his skin was as warm as it looked.
That thought, more than anything, terrified her.
She did the only thing she could. She retreated into the weapon she trusted: her words. “You know what I see?” she said, her voice steadier than she felt. “I see a guy who’s so used to being looked at that he doesn’t know what it means to be seen. You think this is power?” She finally let her gaze flicker down, a swift, deliberate act of dismissal, before locking back on his eyes. “It’s just another performance. And I’m not buying a ticket.”
For the first time, the amused certainty in his expression wavered. A flicker of something raw, something uncalculated, passed behind his eyes. It was there and gone in an instant, but she saw it. A crack in the facade.
He didn’t have a comeback.
Slowly, without breaking eye contact, he bent down and picked up the discarded towel from the floor. He wrapped it around his hips again, the movement casual, reclaiming the armor.
“Saturday, Vargas,” he said, his voice quiet. “Don’t be late.”
He reached past her, his arm brushing her shoulder, and opened the bathroom door. The cool air from the bedroom rushed in, a shock after the steam.
She didn’t wait. She slipped out, not looking back, walking on legs that felt like water through the impossibly long hallway. She could still feel the imprint of his heat in the air around her, the scent of his shower in her lungs.
When she finally reached the sanctuary of the guest wing, she closed the door and leaned against it, her breaths coming in shallow pulls. The image was burned onto the back of her eyelids. Not just his body, but the look on his face in that final second—the surprise, the brief, unguarded moment when she’d turned his own weapon against him.
He was right about one thing. This wasn’t simple anymore. The map was gone. She was in uncharted territory, and the only landmark was the faint, unsettling echo of his challenge in the dark.