This trip was supposed to be a chance to get away from everything, but he had to follow me here.
I don’t have a good relationship with my Professor. How could I have a good relationship with that man who is never satisfied with me? He is constantly pushing my buttons and demanding more and more from me, so when I needed to get away I needed to get all the way away.
That’s why I became her. I took a job at this Resort and I turned myself into a beautiful young snow bunny and I flirted and laughed and danced my way through my holiday, right up until the moment where my job took me to his door.
It has to be a nightmare. What are the chances that the one person I hate more than anything in this world could have wound up here as well? What are the chances that I have to wait on him, hand and foot, when I’m supposed to have got away? What are the chances?
But he’s not himself here, and that is something I quickly register. He is calmer, far kinder. He is so saccharine that it’s almost sweet and when he smiles at me I feel a bit of the cold outside start to melt.
It’s warm in here with him, in his little cabin on the side of this mountain. So warm and so inviting, that it makes me think that maybe there is another way forward. And I know when he looks at me like that, he’s thinking the very same thing.
It’s so cold outside. It’s so warm in here with him. Maybe I’ll linger a little longer…
Excerpt
“You have to be cold,” he went on, still ignoring me.
“For the last time I don’t feel the cold like that,” I reassured him, “It just doesn’t affect me like that. I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe I’m a freak of nature. Maybe I’m abnormal.”
“Well then I am exceedingly normal,” Mike replied, “So I’m going back inside to get away from this wind and you are more than welcome to join me.”
He was right about that. The wind was kicking up a violent thrust as it roared and whipped at the snow. I stepped quick to follow him, slipping into the door as he pushed it shut against the winter outside.
“I brought you something,” I went on again, following him deeper into the wood-cut warmth of the chalet and the roaring fire in the hearth, “I hope it’ll help.”
“You have to be freezing,” he said, rubbing at his arms, “Come on. Warm up.”
“Don’t you want to-” I started, but seeing he wasn’t going to drop it I finally lost my patience, “For fucks sake.”
My hand snapped out and grasped his wrist. I drew it out from him and pressed it into the soft gentle skin of my neck, slipping it up so that his thumb played against my chin.
“Do I feel cold to you?”
That’s what I intended to say, and I intended it to come with the full force of my personality. But my breath caught and I barely managed to squeak it out and when I did it came out all wrong.
“How do I feel to you?” I asked him instead, blushing as I realized how close we were and just how much I wanted him to feel so much more.
It was, I realized, the first time he’d ever touched me. Me as Malin or me the person he knew back at school. It was the first time our two bodies had ever been in contact and so the first time I realized what it was that I was missing.
Because the touch, it was electric.
Even if I had been cold before, I was burning hot now. A potent fire suffused beneath my skin and bubbling away, spreading out from that place of first contact. I felt his touch on my neck linger, my lips trembling a little as my mind ran wild, imagining closing those lips of mine around his thumb and sucking on it for him.
“Do I feel cold?” I asked him, fighting and failing to keep the quiver out of my voice.
“No,” he shook his head, “No you don’t feel cold at all.”