The bathroom tile is cold under her bare feet—that specific February cold that seeps through the soles and climbs toward the ankles. Lena presses her toes down, grounding herself, as the water pipes groan somewhere inside the walls.
Marcus's footsteps. Three of them. Heavy and deliberate from the direction of the living room, and she doesn't have to turn to know he's there. Can't turn, actually. Because she's standing in the bathroom doorway in her scrub top and underwear and nothing else, and turning would mean facing him without the towel she forgot to grab from her duffel.
The footsteps stop.
She hears fabric—a towel lifted from her bag, the zipper's metallic whisper—and then he's close. Closer than the hallway's narrow dimensions require. The cedar from his gray t-shirt reaches her before his voice does, and her chest tightens with the recognition of it. That smell. His smell. She's catalogued it without meaning to.
"Here."
His hand appears in her peripheral vision, towel extended. Dark brown fingers wrapped around pale cotton. She reaches back without looking, and her fingers close over the fabric.
His knuckles brush her palm.
Deliberate. It has to be deliberate. The back of his hand drags across her open palm the way her shoulder dragged across his chest an hour ago, and the symmetry of it—the reversal—makes her breath catch somewhere between her ribs and her throat. He doesn't pull away. His knuckles rest against the soft center of her hand, and she can feel the fine bones beneath his skin, the warmth radiating from them, the slight callus on his index finger from the stress ball he's been strangling since she arrived.
Lena's fingers curl around the towel, knuckles whitening, but she doesn't pull it toward herself. She can't. His hand is still there. Still touching her.
She turns her head. Slowly. His dark brown eyes are already tracking down—watching the place where their hands meet like it's a structural failure he's trying to diagnose. The fluorescent light above them buzzes, a thin electric whine that fills the silence while his gaze travels up: her bare legs, the scrub top's hem cutting across her thighs, the curve of her hip where her underwear sits, and then her face.
His jaw tightens. That jaw that could cut glass, and right now it's doing exactly that to the space between them. His eyes are darker than she's ever seen them—not brown anymore, but something closer to black, pupils blown wide in the harsh bathroom light. He still hasn't let go of the towel.
"Marcus." Her voice comes out thin. Like she forgot how lungs work. Like this word is the only one she has left.
He releases the towel. His fingers uncurl one at a time, slow, reluctant, and the absence of his knuckles against her palm is a loss she feels in her teeth. He steps back—one step, two—and the hallway breathes again. The fluorescent light steadies. Lena pulls the towel against her chest and can't tell if the trembling in her hands is exhaustion or the aftershock of his skin against hers.
His shoulders roll back. That tell. The one that means something's bothering him, something he won't name.
"Door locks," he says. His voice is rough. Lower than it was this morning. "Use it."
Lena doesn't move. Three words from Marcus, and the command hangs in the air between them like something she could reach out and touch. Use it. Like she needs permission to put a barrier between them. Like he needs permission to stop watching her with those eyes that have gone almost black.
Her hand finds the lock. The mechanism clicks into place, a small sound that shouldn't feel this heavy. Through the door, she hears him exhale—a long breath that's not quite a sigh, not quite a growl. Something in between. Something that makes her press her forehead against the painted wood.
The water's still running. She should get in. She should stop standing here in her underwear with his towel crushed against her chest and her palm still tingling where his knuckles dragged across it. She should do a lot of things.
Instead, she turns around. Faces the door. Lifts her free hand and presses her palm flat against the wood exactly where his chest would be if he were still standing on the other side. The paint is cool, but beneath it she can feel the residual warmth from his body—he was that close, standing there that long—and the knowledge of it makes her stomach drop like she's missed the last step on a staircase.
She can still smell cedar. It's on the towel. It's in her hair from when she brushed past him in the hallway. It's in the air of this apartment like the walls themselves have absorbed him, and she's breathing him in with every shaky inhale.
Her palm presses harder. The door doesn't give, obviously—it's a door, and it locks, and she locked it—but the pressure feels like a question she doesn't know how to ask. Her fingers spread against the wood. The warmth is fading now, leaching away into the February chill that lives in the walls, and she wants to chase it. Wants to press both hands flat and lean her whole weight into the memory of him standing right there.
She doesn't. Instead, she traces a slow circle against the door with her index finger—the same movement she made on her spine after his forearm touched her, the movement he caught her doing and asked about. Cramp again? His voice in her memory makes her jaw clench.
The water pipes groan. Steam curls under the bathroom door, and she realizes she's been standing here long enough that the mirror's probably fogged over. Long enough that Marcus has definitely heard the shower running without her in it. Long enough that she needs to move.
But her palm stays flat against the wood. Her other hand still clutches the towel, and her bare legs are breaking out in goosebumps, and somewhere in the living room she can hear the creak of the leather couch as Marcus sits down. The sound travels through the floor, through the tiles, up through the soles of her feet.
She presses her palm one last time—hard enough to feel the door's resistance push back—and then she steps away. The shower is still running. The mirror is definitely fogged. And the spot on the door where her hand rested is already cooling, already forgetting her, already returning to being just a door.
The shower curtain rings screech across the rod when she yanks it open. A sound like a question she didn't mean to ask. The water's been running for minutes now—long enough that the bathroom has filled with steam, long enough that her scrub top is damp from the air alone—and stepping into the spray feels like walking into a wall of heat.
She doesn't turn it cold. The direction says cold, but her body says no, her body says she's been cold since February started, cold since she lost her apartment, cold since she stood barefoot on tile while Marcus Chen's knuckles dragged across her palm and left a burn she can still feel. So she keeps the water hot. Scalding. The kind of hot that turns skin pink in seconds and makes the old pipes sing.
The water hits her shoulders first. Then her spine. Then the backs of her thighs, and she presses both palms flat against the tile—both of them, the one that touched him and the one that didn't—and lets her head drop forward. The spray pounds between her shoulder blades. Her scrub top is still on. She forgot to take it off. Or didn't forget. Didn't want to be naked yet, not when naked means vulnerable, not when the door is locked but he's still out there on the leather couch, probably rolling his shoulders back, probably squeezing that stress ball until his knuckles go white.
The cotton sticks to her skin. Through the wet fabric, she can feel every ridge of her spine, every rib, the sharp architecture of a body that's been running on caffeine and adrenaline for three years. Medical school does that. Residency does worse. She presses harder into the tile and the cold from the wall seeps through the steam, and the contrast—hot water on her back, cold tile on her palms—makes her jaw unclench for the first time since she walked through his door.
The scrub top has to come off. She knows this. The practical part of her brain—the part that memorized the Krebs cycle and can start an IV in the dark—is screaming at her to undress, to shower properly, to stop standing here fully clothed like a woman who's lost her mind. But the practical part of her brain isn't driving right now. The part that's driving is the part that keeps replaying his knuckles against her palm. The deliberate drag. The way his eyes tracked up her body. The way he said use it like the lock was the only thing keeping him on his side of the door.
She peels the scrub top over her head. The wet fabric fights her—clings to her arms, her neck, her hair—and she has to wrestle it free. It lands on the shower floor with a slap, and then she's standing in just her underwear, and the water hits her bare chest and she gasps. Not from the heat. From the suddenness of it. From the way sensation floods back into a body she's been ignoring for sixteen hours.
Her nipples harden. Of course they do. The water's not that hot anymore—the boiler in this building is ancient, and Marcus has probably been running it cold all week to save money—but it's not the temperature making her skin tighten. It's the memory of his eyes. Dark brown going black. The way his pupils had blown wide. The way his jaw had tightened when he looked at her bare legs.
She reaches for the soap. His soap. Cedar and something sharper underneath—bergamot, maybe, or sandalwood. She's been cataloguing his scents without meaning to, the same way she catalogues symptoms, the same way she catalogues the exact pitch of his footsteps in the hallway. The soap lathers between her palms and the smell of him fills the shower, fills her lungs, fills the steam until she's breathing him in with every inhale.
Her hands move over her body. Shoulders. Arms. The hollow of her throat where her pulse is still too fast. The curve of her stomach. The jut of her hipbones. She's washing herself, but the motion feels different now—deliberate where it should be automatic, slow where it should be efficient. Her fingers pause at the waistband of her underwear and she doesn't pull them down. Not yet. The cotton is soaked through, translucent, and beneath it she can feel the heat building. The ache. The wetness that has nothing to do with the shower.
She braces one hand against the tile again. Lets the other hand drift lower. Not touching—not yet—just hovering over the wet cotton, feeling the heat radiating from her own body like a fever. Her breathing has gone shallow. The water pounds against her back, her shoulders, the base of her skull, and she presses her forehead to the cold tile and closes her eyes. Behind her eyelids, Marcus is still watching her. His knuckles are still resting against her palm. His voice is still rough and low, saying use it like he needed her to put something between them. Like he didn't trust himself not to close the distance.
The shower curtain ripples. Just a draft—the bathroom door is closed, the lock is still engaged—but the movement makes her eyes snap open. She's alone. Obviously she's alone. But the steam has thickened until she can't see the door, and the cedar smell is so strong it might as well be him standing behind her, and her hand is still hovering over the ache between her legs like a question she's afraid to answer.
She drops her hand. Turns off the water. The silence that follows is heavier than the spray ever was—just the drip of the showerhead and her own breathing and, somewhere beyond the bathroom door, the creak of the leather couch as Marcus shifts his weight. She can hear him. Can map him by sound alone: the couch groaning under his shoulders, the soft thud of the stress ball hitting his palm, the exhale that's not quite a sigh. He's still out there. Still thinking. Still rolling his shoulders back every time his mind drifts toward this door.