Vanilla Read online

  I wanted to face him again with my full face on, painted like a warrior, but instead I came out of the bathroom freshly scrubbed, my hair towel-dried and still damp. My pajamas were cute, a tank top and silky boxers, but I went without a word to my suitcase to pull out an oversize T-shirt to put on top. Niall hadn’t changed, but he’d pushed himself back onto the pillows, on top of the covers, to watch TV.

  Face impassive, he didn’t say anything when I took up my book, which, like my pajamas I hadn’t intended to need. I got into bed on the wrong side, but didn’t ask him if we could switch. I tried to concentrate on the book, but the words swam, blurring. After a few minutes, Niall got up and went into the bathroom. He was in there longer than I had been.

  The room had gone chilly from the air-conditioning, and I shivered from it. Anxious that my stomach was going to get upset enough to make me truly ill, I swallowed hard. Then again. I turned off the light, put my book on the bedside stand and curled into myself so I could count backward from a hundred. But my tried-and-true method of putting myself to sleep didn’t work. I was still awake when he came out.

  He turned off the light first. I heard shuffling near his suitcase. The bed dipped when he got into it. I waited for him to touch me...but he did not.

  “Are you upset?” Niall asked finally, his voice quiet as the shadows.

  I didn’t turn to face him. “Yes. I am.”

  “Why?”

  Blinking rapidly, I tried to find an answer that would come out calm and in control. What I managed, instead, was a low rasp. “Why? What do you mean, why?”

  “Just what I said. Why?”

  I was glad now that he hadn’t curled up behind me. I couldn’t have borne his touch now. I punched my pillow and eased to the edge of the bed, as far from him as possible. “That was pretty much the ultimate rejection, wasn’t it?”

  He laughed.

  The motherfucker laughed.

  It wasn’t an easy laugh, and it lacked humor, and I could tell he’d forced it, but even so it was not the response I wanted. Niall sat up. I could see his shadow and from the corner of my eye, the outline of him, but fortunately for him, he kept his hands to himself.

  “Don’t be like that,” he told me.

  The only thing that kept me from leaping from the bed in a white-hot rage at that point was that I was genuinely too stunned to move. I couldn’t even speak. Behind me, Niall lay back down, close enough that his shoulder would’ve brushed mine if I turned onto my back. I didn’t. I didn’t move, didn’t say a word, because to do anything in that moment would’ve made me lose it. All of it, everything, I’d have screamed and raged and possibly thrown things; I would’ve wept for sure, great gushing buckets of the tears trying to stab me in the throat and eyes even now. I would’ve lost control, and I refused to give him that.

  “Good night,” Niall said.

  I did not answer him.

  34

  I did not sleep.

  Beside me, the soft in-out huff of Niall’s breathing told me he did, or at least did a good job of pretending. Morning light started peeking around the blackout curtain in only a few hours, but I’d never been so glad for a reason to get out of bed. Though I’d showered so recently that my hair was still wet, I took another, this time forcing myself to endure a lukewarm spray to keep myself from dissolving into dismay.

  I blew my hair dry, not caring if it woke him. I did my makeup. And finally, I dressed in the clothes I’d brought along to travel in.

  He was up when I came back into the bedroom, the TV on but the volume so low there was no way he could really hear it. He’d propped himself on the pillows, an arm beneath his head. He looked rumpled and gorgeous, and I kind of hated him for making me want to slip back beneath the covers with him and be naked all day long.

  “You’re up early,” he said.

  I tucked my toiletries into my suitcase and made sure my dirty laundry was separated from the clothes I hadn’t yet worn. I slipped on a pair of flats and settled my fuck-me pumps alongside my cosmetics bag. When I turned to get my book from the bedside stand, Niall was watching me.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’m going to head home early.” My chin went up. I heard the steel in my voice. I knew the look on my face.

  Other men would’ve known better than to try and charm me in that moment, but I’d already figured out that Niall wasn’t other men. “Don’t be like that. C’mere.”

  He sat up and crooked a finger at me. Actually gestured to me like I was some woebegone, delicate little flower who needed to somehow be comforted. Or wooed. Fuck that. Fuck being soft. What had that gotten me but rejection, humiliation and pain?

  I didn’t move. I put my book away and closed my suitcase. I visually checked the room for anything I might have left behind then found my purse on the chair and put it over my shoulder.

  “Elise,” Niall said like a warning. “Don’t do this.”

  “I think it’s best if I leave.”

  Niall got out of bed to stand in front of me. I could’ve pushed past him, but that would’ve meant touching him. And frankly, I didn’t need to be that aggressive to get what I wanted. I knew that well enough. I didn’t move.

  “C’mon,” he said with another of those half laughs that sounded nothing like his usual good humor. “What’s going on? I thought we were going to have a great weekend together.”

  “So did I.”

  A shadow crossed his expression, but he was still pretending last night hadn’t happened. “We still could. I have dinner reservations for tonight. I thought we were going to the art museum...don’t let last night upset you so much.”

  “Don’t tell me how to feel, please.” My words were clipped, precise, but polite. Cold, though. Really fucking cold.

  He frowned. “Why don’t you go ahead and tell me how you feel, then. Since I can’t figure it out.”

  “I’m upset about what happened last night,” I said carefully. “About you choosing not to finish.”

  Niall’s gaze darkened. His mouth thinned. He was pissed off, now, but I didn’t care.

  “You told me to come for you,” Niall said flatly. “My orgasm is my decision.”

  I gaped, jaw dropping. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Look, I know you’ve had bunches of guys who get off being bossed around by you, but in case you haven’t figured it out, that’s not me. It’s never going to be me.”

  My fingers curled on the strap of my bag, but I wanted to make them a fist. “I wasn’t bossing you around. I was...we were both talking. I thought it was something we were both doing with each other, Niall.”

  “It felt like you were trying to get me to do what you wanted me to do,” he said. “Not what I wanted to do.”

  I reeled at this, not sure what to say or how to say it. All I could do was shake my head, helpless to find words even to defend myself. “I thought you’d want to!”

  “I don’t get off on being ordered around!”

  “I wasn’t ordering you,” I cried, resenting his accusation even as I tried replaying the night before in my head to see if I’d come on too strong. Too dominant.

  “It sounded like you were,” Niall snapped.

  I recoiled, physically and emotionally. I shook my head again, grasping for control and finding it only by biting my tongue hard enough to make a star or two dance across my vision. I rubbed the soreness against the back of my teeth.

  “I thought we were doing something together,” I told him in the same flat tone he’d used with me earlier. “You were telling me to do things, and I was telling you to do things...and you made me feel like I was less than...porn.”

  It was his turn to take a step back. “The fuck does that mean?”

  “It means that you made me feel like it was something you were orchestrating all for yourself, like you were watching porn or something. Except that I’m pretty sure when you do watch porn,” I added with a sneer, “you actually get off.”

  Niall