Strangers in the Sauna. Caitlin Crews
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how could that be? She’d checked Daniel’s text no less than twenty-five times on the way over because she’d been terrified of exactly this, and there was no mistake. 507. She was frozen in shock and humiliation, but she managed to jerk her gaze away from the blonde and confirm that, yes, this was room 507.
Had Daniel switched rooms? He wasn’t expecting her for several days yet, so perhaps he had. He quite reasonably wouldn’t have thought to update her until Tuesday, she assured herself, when she was on her way—
‘Is that the food?’ came the voice from within.
A voice that Jenny knew very well. Scottish and sexy. A little bit rough around the edges, much like its owner.
She tried to deny it. She told herself she was imagining things. She and Daniel had fallen for each other when they’d met upon moving into their shared house back in September. They’d been together ever since. She’d told all her friends that yes, in fact, she’d moved to England and found her Mr. Darcy as she’d secretly hoped while pursuing her masters degree in English literature—he just happened to be a redheaded Scotsman from Aberdeen who was studying Economics.
It couldn’t possibly be Daniel, she told herself now. Of course it couldn’t.
But then he swung out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist and Jenny simply… went blank.
She didn’t know how long she stood there. She watched Daniel’s jaw drop. She heard nothing but a deafening white noise inside her head. She felt her heart thud hard and sickeningly against her chest and wasn’t sure she didn’t faint, after all.
Except she was still standing when she could breathe again.
‘Daniel?’
Later, she supposed she’d hate herself for the fact that was a question. Like she wasn’t certain when she was standing right there in front of him. Or like she was waiting for some explanation that would make it okay that he was in a hotel room with a blonde woman and neither one of them was wearing regular clothes. Like there was any reasonable sequence of events that could make such a thing all right.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he demanded.
‘I’d ask what you’re doing here but I think I can work that out on my own,’ Jenny retorted. She didn’t even know where that came from. The person using her mouth sounded cool and regal and not at all like a woman who’d just discovered her boyfriend in a hotel with a clearly post-coital blonde.
‘You’re not supposed to be here!’ he threw at her, like this was all Jenny’s fault.
Perhaps sensing that things could escalate at any moment, the blonde wisely retreated back into the room as Daniel moved towards the door. Jenny wanted to shout at her too, but caught herself. It wasn’t the blonde she was angry with. It wasn’t the blonde who had spent six months cuddling with her and spooning her at night and talking with such fervor about their shared future.
‘If you wanted to break up with me,’ Jenny hurled at him, her voice almost cracking from all the things that churned inside her then, that she was terribly afraid were written all over the acres of skin she was exposing, ‘why not say so?’
And Daniel sighed.
Very much as if he thought Jenny was being unreasonable in some way. Hysterical and overwrought. It was not a good sigh. Or a guilty one.
‘Who said I wanted to break up?’ He shook his head at her, as if she was some sort of child who needed slow, careful explanations to obvious things and he was reluctantly obliging. ‘I like sex, Jen. A lot of it. And with you it always has to be a bloody big production.’ When she stared at him in disbelief, he sighed again, and it was even more offensive the second time. ‘The talking, the cuddling. All of that malarkey. Sometimes I just want a shag. This has nothing to do with you.’
And suddenly, so many things made sense. His ‘visits home’ that he took so often, yet that one time she’d heard him taking a call from his mother he’d spent it apologizing for being out of touch for so long. The way some of his friends looked at her like she was a bit dim, which she’d thought was simply the usual response to Being American Abroad. His ex-girlfriend who came up a shade or two too often, who was a wealthy banker who liked to throw her money around and who was also, now that Jenny thought about it, blonde.
How could she have been such an idiot?
But she’d have ample time to think that through. Right now she had to get away from Daniel before she broke down and sobbed, which, she understood on a deep level that was practically animal, would be a humiliation too far.
Jenny waved her hand up and down, drawing his attention to her state of near-nudity. She watched his expression go a bit slack as he took it all in. The deep pink bra framing her breasts, the little scrap of lace and silk below. He actually licked his lips, the pig.
‘Just as this has nothing to do with you,’ she told him, because while their entire relationship had obviously been a complete lie, the pleasure Daniel had taken in her body had never been feigned. She knew that much. ‘Ever again.’
She was pleased that she sounded so cold as she said it. So in control. So powerful, just as she’d imagined before.
Careful what you wish for, her mother back in South Dakota would have told her.
‘Come on, Jenny,’ Daniel said with a sigh. ‘Don’t be such a child.’
‘Go to hell,’ she suggested, almost pleasantly, were it not for the chilly edge to her voice. ‘And by all means, sleep with whoever you want. But don’t ever speak to me again, Daniel. I mean it.’
And then she turned and started off down the hall, her head held high—only to realise, when she’d taken a few too many long, confident strides to emphasise how powerful she wished she felt, that she’d left her trench coat on the floor outside his room.
As she would rather die than turn around, slink back, and grab it when she knew he was standing there watching her and probably waiting for her to do exactly that, Jenny was forced to keep right on walking like she had all the confidence in the world—down the elegant and storied halls of the Chatsfield London in nothing but a thong and a push-up bra.
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