Page 23 of Distortion
Grabbing his laptop, I key in his password. We all know each other’s, so it’s not a problem getting in. I pull up the cameras the way Blake showed me, hoping he got them working after some technical glitch that thwarted us earlier.
The picture appears and I see her. She’s moving around her room, taking the boxes we were storing in there and stacking them in the closet. Afterward, she takes the hot little skirt suit she was wearing before and drapes it over the chair by the desk. She empties her duffle bag out on the bare bed and takes out shampoo and conditioner.
She pauses, looking around the room and then her shoulders seem to sink and she sits on the edge of the bed, staring out at nothing. Her arms hug herself and she stays like that.
I wonder where she’s been over the past couple of hours. After a few minutes of watching her, I pull up the other cameras for the past hour. What did Marcus and the other juniors do or say to her? Regardless of what she said, she was clearly upset.
I pull up the feeds from the other rooms and find her in the games room. The guys are close to her and my lip curls when I hear the things they say. I smirk when I hear herresponse. This girl’s no shrinking violet. Eyes trained on the screen, I rewind, following her moving backwards out of the room. I switch to the camera in the kitchen and my eyes widen as I see her fall in through the window on the edge of the screen near the back door.
What the fuck?
On my phone, I pull the doorbell app and go through the history. I watch as she arrives in the pouring rain and knocks. No one lets her in. I turn up the sound and hear what’s said to her over the intercom, the laughing. I don’t recognize the voices, so they’re likely pledges.
I see as she leaves the front door, shivering with cold and obviously going to try and find another way inside. I go back to the house feeds and find her in the games room again. I watch Pete, Rob, and Marcus approach her.
Her face stays blank, but I notice from her posture that she doesn’t like it when they get close. I see when her body language changes and Pete brings her to me a minute later.
I look back at the live cam in her room. She’s still sitting on the bed. She looks exhausted and she’s still in her wet clothes.
As if she senses me watching, she stands and grabs the small bottles she got out of her bag. I hear her leave the room and go into the bathroom down the hall.
The bed isn’t even made. I frown. If I had a sister, I wouldn’t want her to be wet, cold, and tired, and not have anywhere to sleep. I’ll bet she has no idea where the sheets are, either.
I close the laptop and put it back on Blake’s desk. Then, I go downstairs to the linen closet and find a set of hotel-grade white bedding, a comforter, and a couple of pillows.
Making sure she’s still in the shower, I take everything into her room and I make the bed up for her. While I’m in there, I take a look around, but she hardly has anything. Iguess the rest of her stuff is coming later. Shade did say she’s been in the UK, so maybe she couldn’t bring everything with her all at once.
I leave the room, and, unable to help myself, I return to Blake’s and go back into the cams.
I hear her get out of the shower and, a few minutes later, she comes running into the room and shutting the door quickly. My eyes widen. Is that a tinyhandtowel she has wrapped around her?
I should look away. But I can’t. My eyes are riveted on the expanse of creamy skin that she’s displaying. Her legs are long and shapely. Her body is a decent mix of athletic and curvy as if she likes exercise but also vegging on the couch with a bucket of popcorn.
But then I realize she’s just standing by the bed and has been for several minutes while I’ve been gawking. She’s clutching the towel to her and staring at nothing again. I watch as she slowly backs up to the bed and sinks down on it. She doesn’t even seem to have noticed that there are sheets on it now.
She stays where she is, her long wet hair dripping water down her body. Her blinks are slow and she’s brushing her thumbnail over her lip again and again. The other hand by her side rubs at her lower left calf, but I can’t see anything there. It’s as if her mind is no longer in the room, it’s elsewhere.
My phone vibrates and I see a message from my brother, Dom, asking me to meet him at the club sometime this week to help train a new guy on the bar. I tap out a quick reply telling him I can be there tomorrow, and then I put it on silent so I can watch her uninterrupted.
But she doesn’t do anything new, just sits there with a vacant expression. Is she broken?
After a while, I go grab some dinner for myself. Theothers aren’t back yet, and I guess I should fill them in on her activities as well as the problems that have already started withsomeof the other guys in the house because I’m sure that, despite my threats, not everyone is going to get the ‘no touchy touchy’ memo when it comes to a girl as pretty as her.
When I get back with my sandwich, she’s still in the same spot. It’s dark outside now, and she hasn’t turned on a light. The cam is in night mode so I can see everything she’s doing ... and everything she’s not.
Maybe I should have got her something to eat. I berate myself silently. She might not even know that there’s food in the fridge she can help herself to.
The other side of me who’s callously asking why I give a fuck is quickly silenced. Shade isn’t here to look after her, so the job falls to me until he’s back and I can talk to him. That’s it. That’s all that’s going on here.
‘Fuck this,’ I mutter, finishing one half of my sandwich.
I go across the hall and knock on the door.
At first, I hear nothing and I knock again a little louder. There’s a scuffling noise, and she opens the door a crack a moment later.
I swallow hard. She’s still in just that skimpy little towel. I didn’t think this through.
‘I ... uh ...’
