Page 30 of Savage Blooms
Adam resolved to learn the layout of the house as quickly as he could, so he wouldn’t have to rely on Eileen for directions – or worse, on Finley. He only got turned around once before he found Nicola’s room, which she had marked with a silk scrunchie wrapped around the doorknob. She always thought of everything.
“Nikki,” Adam said, rapping on the door. “You in there?”
There was a rustling of fabric through the door, then a high, startled: “Uh, yeah! Just a second.”
Adam heard what sounded like bedsheets being tossed back and something small, like a tube of lipstick, clattering to the floor. A moment later, Nicola threw open the door. She looked even more windswept than after coming back from her walk with Finley.
Underneath the scent of old furniture and Nicola’s Daisy perfume, Adam caught an undeniable whiff of sex.
“Were you jilling off?” Adam said, laughter bubbling up to disguise just how turned on he was by that thought: Nicola touching herself in broad daylight under those expensive sheets, her inner thighs glistening, her toes curling as she reached for that sweet spot inside herself. “Come on, you couldn’t even wait for it to get dark?”
“I can do whatever I want in my own room,” Nicola said with a scowl. Adam wasn’t surprised she had owned up to it. Nicola was frank to the point of oversharing when it came to her sex life, which sometimes complicated being friends with her. “It’s all that adrenaline from the cave. I needed to flush it out of my system.”
“Looks like you were giving yourself a very thorough flushing,” Adam said, nodding to a purple travel-sized vibrator lying on the floor behind her. “Since when do near-death experiences turn you on?”
“Since when do you care what turns me on?” Nicola shot back, tossing the door open wider to welcome him into her room. With her usual complete lack of self-consciousness,Nicola retrieved her vibrator, washed it off along with her hands in the ensuite bathroom, and then tucked it away in a little satin bag in her duffel.
“I don’t care,” he said, bristling. “But I’m allowed to think it’s weird.”
“I once saw you get hard because a shot girl in New Orleans asked you to hold her drinks while she took a piss. You don’t get an opinion on what’s weird.”
“Fair,” he said, tossing himself down onto her bed. Not too close to the rumpled sheets, but close enough that he felt a small guilty thrill at soaking up the last whisper of her body heat from the mattress. Nicola continued the chores she had apparently left half-finished to attend to her own pressing needs, like lining up her skincare and toothbrush on the sink, and hanging up sweaters in the wardrobe.
She glanced over her shoulder at him, arching that eyebrow that told him he was about to be cross-examined.
“Are you going to tell me why coming out here was so important to you?”
Adam shrugged. “I told you. It’s one of the big things me and Grandad shared before he died. I feel like I owe it to him to come, you know?”
“Yes, but there’s something else, isn’t there?”
Adam let his gaze drift out the window, watching a cluster of sheep meander over the grazing green below. Somehow, it was always easier to unburden his heart to Nicola if he wasn’t looking right at her.
“It’s going to sound crazy,” he muttered.
“I’ve told you before, Adam, nothing is crazy. Not to me, anyway.”
“I felt suffocated in Grand Rapids. Like my life was going to be the same every single day if I didn’t change something. It was all work, sleep, the same bar every weekend, repeat. I tried to think of the last time my life really felt, I don’t know, full? And I realized it was when I was listening to my grandad tell me those stories. I guess I’m just trying to get that feeling back. Does that sound stupid?”
“No,” Nicola said. “But it does sound exactly like something you would say.”
“So it does sound stupid,” Adam said, a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth.
Nicola picked up a throw pillow and swatted at him, resulting in a burst of laughter from Adam.
But then Nicola gnawed on her lip, a surefire sign that she had something to tell him.
“What is it?” Adam asked, snatching the pillow away and rearing back as though he might hit her with it if she didn’t answer. “No lying, Nikki. We’ve got to put up a unified front out here.”
“It’s just…” Nicola kept gnawing, so long that Adam thought he might go crazy waiting for her to spit it out. “I’m worried you don’t really believe me. About what I saw out there in the woods. It was real, Adam. It was like something out of a nightmare, but I know I was awake.”
“After that freaky-as-hell weather and getting my hand nearly bitten off by a badger or whatever, I’m not writing anything off,” Adam said.
“It wasn’t a badger, Adam. You know that.”
“A wolf, then. Do they have wolves here?”
“It wasn’t that either,” Nicola said, slamming the wardrobe shut. She took two sharp breaths through her nose in that exercise her therapist had taught her. Adam didn’t understand the finer points of Nicola’s emotional regulation troubles, but he knew she was working on managing the outbursts.
