Untouched (Denazen #1.5)(24)
“I don’t need one,” he said, and returned to his surveillance. It was like he was searching for something. Picking apart each item in the room as if it might contain the clues to a mass murder—or maybe he was looking for a breath mint.
“How very Hollywood of you.” I hefted the laundry basket off the floor, set it on the couch, and rummaged through it till I found a pair of Dad’s sweatpants and an old T-shirt. “Here. The bathroom is upstairs—second door on the right. There should be clean towels in the closet on the first shelf if you want a shower. Take your time.” Please take your time.
This would be the perfect payback for the ass-chewing Dad gave me for sneaking out last week. That, and it didn’t hurt that Kale was a total hottie.
He made no move to take the clothes from me.
“Look, no worries, all right? Dad isn’t due home for awhile and you’re covered in mud and gunk.” I set the clothes down on the seat in front of him and took a step back to grab a pair of my jeans from the basket.
Without taking his eyes from me, he gathered the clothes in his arms and stared. His expression was so intense I had to remind myself to keep breathing. Something about the way he watched me caused my stomach to do little flips. The eyes. Had to be. Crystalline blue and unflinching. The kind of stare that could make a girl go gaga. The kind of stare that could make this girl go gaga—and that was saying a lot. I wasn’t easily impressed by a pretty face.
He seemed to accept this because he gave a quick nod and slowly backed out of the room and up the stairs. A few minutes later the shower hissed to life.
While I waited, I changed out of my muddy clothes and started a pot of coffee. Even if Dad didn’t find a strange guy in the house when he got home, he’d be pissed about the coffee. I couldn’t count the times he’d told me the El Injerto was strictly hands off. He even tried to hide it—as if that would have worked. If he wanted me to leave his coffee alone, he should go back to drinking the Kopi Luwak. No way—no matter how much I loved coffee—would I drink anything made from a bean some tree rat crapped out.
I’d almost finished folding the laundry when Kale came down the stairs.
“Much better. You look almost human.” The pants were a little baggy—Kale was a few inches shorter than Dad’s six three—and the shirt was a bit too big, but at least he was clean. He still had his feet crammed into my favorite red Vans. They were soaked. Had he worn them in the shower?
“Your name?” he asked once he’d reached the bottom, the sneakers sloshing and spitting with each step. He had worn them in the shower!
“Deznee, but everyone calls me Dez.” I pointed to the soggy Vans. “Um, you ever gonna take my sneakers off?”
“No,” he said. “I cut myself.”
Maybe something wasn’t screwed on right. There was a mental facility in the next town—it wasn’t unheard of for patients to get out once in a while. Leave it to me to find the hottest guy in existence and have him be a total whack job. “Oh. Well, that explains it all then, doesn’t it…?”
He nodded and began wandering the room again. Stopping in front of one of mom’s old vases—an ugly blue thing I kept only because it was one of the few things still in the house that belonged to her—he picked it up. “Where are the plants?”
“Plants?”
He looked underneath and inside, before turning it over and shaking it as though something might come tumbling out. “This should have plants in it, right?”
I stepped forward and rescued the vase. He jerked away. “Easy there.” I carefully placed the blue monstrosity back on the table and stepped back. He was staring again. “You didn’t think I was going to hit you or something, did you?”
In eighth grade I’d had a classmate who we later found out was being abused at home. I remembered him being skittish—always twitching and avoiding physical contact. His eyes were a lot like Kale’s, constantly darting and bobbing back and forth as though attack was imminent.
I expected him to avoid the question, or deny it—something evasive. That’s what abused kids did, right? Instead, he laughed. A sharp, frigid sound that made my stomach tighten and the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up.
It also made my blood pump faster.
He crossed his arms and stood straighter. “You couldn’t hit me.”
“You’d be surprised,” I countered, slightly offended. Three summers in a row at the local community center’s self-defense classes. No one was hitting this chick.
A slow, devastating smile spread across his lips. That smile had probably ruined a lot of girls. Dark, shaggy hair, tucked behind each ear, still dripped from the shower, ice blue eyes following every move I made.
“You couldn’t hit me,” he repeated. “Trust me.”
He turned away and wandered to the other side of the room, picking up things as he went. Everything received a quizzical, and almost critical, once-over. The trio of Popular Science magazines sitting on the coffee table, the vacuum I’d left leaning against one wall, even the TV remote sticking between two cushions on the couch. He stopped at a wall shelf full of DVDs, pulling one out and examining it. “Is this your family?” He brought the box closer and narrowed his eyes, turning it over in his hands several times.