Page 15 of Hide And Seek

My middle finger moved slowly against my clit while more dark, dangerous thoughts crowded in.

In my imagination, Rhys had followed me into the shower.

He’d shoved the curtain aside without warning and backed me up against the tiled wall, one black-gloved hand wrapped tightly around my throat while steam curled around us both. The knife from earlier rested in his other hand, the silver blade gleaming beneath the fluorescent lights as he dragged the tip lightly against my skin.

Not enough to hurt. Just enough to remind me it could.

My breathing turned uneven as the fantasy sharpened in my head, vivid enough to make my stomach twist. Rhys forcing me to face the wall. One hand planted against the tiles above my head while the knife hovered beneath my jaw.

“You like this, don’t you?” he’d murmur against my ear, voice low and rough enough to send heat flooding through me. “You like knowing exactly what I could do to you.”

My fingers moved faster, and I bit down hard on my lower lip, trying desperately to stay quiet while pressure coiled tighter and tighter low in my stomach.

When the orgasm finally hit, it tore through my body intensely enough to make my knees almost buckle beneath me. Itried to keep my mouth firmly clamped shut so I wouldn’t make a sound, but a tiny whimper managed to eke its way out anyway.

“You okay in there?” Jasmine called out.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I called back in an embarrassingly-strained voice, heart still pounding like crazy. “I just… I almost cut myself shaving.”

“Ugh, I hate when that happens! These tiles are so slippery.”

There was a beat of silence from Jasmine's stall, followed by the sound of her shower shutting off. I turned mine off too and stood there with my forehead resting against the tile, catching my breath.

It’s out of your system now,I told myself.So you can go back to being normal.

A few minutes later, Jasmine and I emerged from the bathroom block into the cool night air. As we passed by the men's section, the door opened.

Rhys stepped out, and my plans for normalcy died a quick, unceremonious death.

He had a towel slung around his neck, and he was wearing low-slung grey sweats and absolutely nothing else above the waist, which my nervous system registered with the primal efficiency of an animal in heat.

He was built in a way that made it almost impossible to maintain a neutral expression, with a mouth-wateringly muscular chest and stomach that tapered into a perfect V-cut. A line of dark hair lay there, disappearing below the waistband of the sweats.

“Hey.” His voice was low, roughened slightly from the late hour, and he was looking at me with the beginning of a smirk pulling at one corner of his mouth.

I gulped. “Hi,” I managed.

“Hey,” Jasmine muttered in a sullen tone.

Rhys’s eyes moved over my face for a long, assessing moment. His smirk didn't grow exactly, but it deepened somehow, became more certain of itself, like he'd just had a suspicion confirmed.

And suddenly, I had a horrible, skin-prickling sense that he knew exactly what I’d been doing in the shower… and that I’d been thinking about him the whole time.

4

Despite Jasmine’swarning about the camp food, I’d just discovered that the breakfasts here were surprisingly good. My scrambled eggs were perfect, piled onto thick sourdough with avocado that had been seasoned with some sort of chili crisp, and the coffee was top-tier as well.

The dining hall was a massive room with long wooden tables and exposed rafters strung with the kind of camp pennants that had clearly been accumulating for years. The walls were covered in painted murals of lake scenes and pine forests, and somewhere along the back, a row of cubbies held labeled water bottles belonging to kids who were still at various stages of waking up.

I was mid-conversation with Jasmine and the others at our table when Sutton approached us, long blonde hair swinging in a glossy ponytail. A silver label that read ‘Senior Counselor’ was pinned to her forest-green polo above her nametag, and she held a clipboard in one hand.

“Morning, guys,” she said, smiling brightly. “Hope you all slept well after last night’s drama.”

Jasmine eyed the label on her shirt. “You’rea senior counselor now?”

“Uh-huh.” Sutton nodded proudly. “Someone needed to replace Gen after… well, you know. So they asked me to do it.”

“They couldn’t have asked someone who could actually use the pay rise?” Jesse muttered.