Chapter 12: A Change of Clothes
I climbed the stairs with my bare feet on the worn treads, feeling the cool wood against my soles. The hallway was dim, the morning light only reaching partway down. I could hear him moving below me, the clink of dishes, the tap running. I stepped into the bedroom and pulled open the dresser drawer where I'd left my work clothes the day before.
The white cropped tank top was stiff with dried grease, smudged dark across the hem and along one shoulder. The denim shorts were no better, stained at the knees and down one thigh. I hesitated with them in my hands, thinking about how they'd felt against my skin yesterday, the tightness of the fabric across my hips, the way the tank top rode up when I bent over the engine block. But they were the only things I had that were already marked up, already ruined. No sense wasting something clean on engine work.
I stripped off the tank top I'd slept in and the shorts, letting them fall into a heap by the dresser. The morning air raised goosebumps along my arms. I stood there for a moment in just the thin cotton of a fresh thong I'd pulled from the drawer, looking down at myself, still struck by the sheer unfamiliarity of the landscape of my own body. The curve of my hips, the weight of my chest, the way my waist pinched in before flaring out again. I'd spent thirty-six years in a body I could ignore. This one demanded attention every time I moved.
I stepped into the denim shorts and worked them up over my hips, the fabric hugging tight. The tank top followed, the cropped hem landing just above my navel, the stretchy cotton straining against my chest. I looked at myself in the dresser mirror, at the grease stains and the faded white fabric and the way my skin gleamed where the morning light caught it. I looked like a work-in-progress. I supposed that's what I was.
Then I heard the creak of a floorboard in the room next door.
Allan was in the guest room, the one across the hall. The door was open, and the sound carried through the wall clearly. A drawer sliding shut. The soft thump of something heavy, his boots maybe, landing on the floor. And then a rustle of fabric, and I knew without seeing it that he was pulling his shirt off over his head.
I froze with my hands at the hem of my tank top, adjusting it, and my mind did something I didn't ask it to do. It painted a picture. The sweep of his back, the line of his shoulders, the way the muscles would move under his skin as he reached for the fresh t-shirt. I'd glimpsed him in the barn yesterday when his shirt rode up, a flash of stomach, the trail of hair below his navel, and my body had responded before my brain could catch up. Same thing now.
Heat crept up my neck. I caught my own eyes in the mirror, wide and startled, and I looked away quickly, pressing my hands flat against my own thighs to steady them.
This was ridiculous. I was a grown man. I had been a grown man. I didn't stand in bedrooms blushing at the thought of a deputy's bare chest.
Except I wasn't a man anymore. That was the whole point. I was this now, this woman with her racing heart and her borrowed curves, and I couldn't seem to make my own body stop noticing him.
I turned from the mirror and pulled my hair up, but I didn't have a tie, so I let it fall back down around my shoulders. The rustling in the next room had stopped. I heard his footsteps cross the floor, and I pictured him in a clean shirt now, tucking it in, running a hand through his hair. My chest tightened.
I took a breath. Then another. Then I opened the bedroom door and stepped out into the hallway, and Allan stepped out of the guest room at the same moment, his eyes meeting mine.
He'd changed into a faded gray t-shirt, but the collar was caught on his neck, not quite settled, and he reached up to fix it. The motion drew my eye to his shoulders, the breadth of them under the thin cotton. I dragged my gaze away.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Ready," I said, and I followed him down the stairs, my heart still beating a little too fast in my borrowed chest, my skin still warm with something I couldn't name.