Summer Attractions (22 page)

If she’d asked him that two minutes ago, his response would have been a brusque yes, followed by a very long lecture with sparks of temper about how stupid she had been. Now he just felt hollow, with nothing much to say.

He finally managed to find his voice, his mouth feeling strange and foreign to him, the words thick and graceless on his tongue. “Let’s go back to the hotel,” he said, like this was a normal day and everything was fine and he hadn’t almost just lost her over
footie tickets
.

Jemma looked at him carefully, like she was aware of the bizarreness of his behavior, like she was searching for an explanation. But he wasn’t going to give her one because he still didn’t know what to say. It was too much to process, much too fast.

“Okay,” she finally said softly. “Let’s go back to the hotel. I have a story to write, after all.”

As soon as they reached their rooms, Jemma announced her intention to take a long, hot shower.

Gabe followed her into her room, even though most days he typically showered in his room. Before, it had seemed like a prudent exercise, though possibly a meaningless one, as he still ended up in her bed every night. But now, he regretted it because to follow his normal pattern, he’d have to leave Jemma and return to his own room, possibly for the rest of the afternoon, since after her shower she’d almost certainly begin working on the article.

He hovered awkwardly near the bed, pretending to be smoothing the hastily thrown together covers, as she headed straight to the bathroom.

At first he thought he might have escaped her notice, as she seemed so uber-focused on the concept of hot water, but then after flipping the water on, she turned back and registered that he was still there.

He flushed as she raised an eyebrow.

“Not going to take a shower?” she asked.

He knew she didn’t know; knew she couldn’t possibly understand what it had felt like to watch her be knocked over and know he was too far away to get to her. He wasn’t sure he’d ever felt such icy fear as he had in that moment, and the truth was, he still felt frozen, like he was perpetually stuck in that split second.

She didn’t know that he couldn’t leave her alone now.

“I’ll just shower after you,” he said, trying for casual and failing.

He might not have gotten away with it, but she still had a flush of victory on her cheeks after finding those tickets on the ground and the absent look in her eyes that meant she was already mentally writing.

“Sure, whatever you want,” she said, moving out of sight and shedding her clothes, stepping into the shower.

His own clothes felt gross with a night of dancing and then sleeping in them, but mostly he needed to get the dampness of the panic sweat off his skin, so he shed them. He had no interest in TV, but he couldn’t very well just sit here and not do anything, so he flipped it on. Even if it hadn’t been turned down low, he would’ve ignored it, because he was still felt lost in that moment, like he’d been paralyzed there.

It took him fighting every instinct he had not to go into the bathroom and stand there, watching her shower, not because of how good she looked wet
,
but because he needed a constant loop of verification that she wasn’t lying still and bloody on the Copacabana sand.

It was messing him up, and even making an effort to focus on the television screen didn’t help. It wasn’t like him to give in to his baser needs, but finally he couldn’t take the itching under his skin anymore, so he approached the bathroom as casually as he could. The water turned off right as he reached the doorway, and when he saw her, she was wrapping a big white towel around her body.

Jemma shot him a scrutinizing look. “Are you okay?” she asked.

During the horrifying buildup and then that one, paralyzing moment when she’d fallen, he’d been so
sure that this was the question that he was going to have ask her. That she would be the one terrified and a little scarred from her first encounter with a mob scene. But when he’d asked on their walk back to the hotel, she’d brushed it off, with something about how her college campus was a wellspring of badly organized protests.

Gabe grabbed the doorframe so she wouldn’t see the way his hands trembled still. “I’m fine,” he lied. “Just gonna grab a shower.”

She didn’t press further, though it was clear she thought he was lying. Her face was an open book, and he read the emotions flitting across it. Mostly confusion though, and no anger or annoyance, and for that he would’ve been grateful if he had the emotional capital to care about anything else except her being safe.

As he took his shower, Gabe realized that while he’d been upset and thrown by Nick’s attack, he’d not been nearly this upset. When he’d put Nick on that flight, right before he met Jemma’s plane, there’d been an understandable worry, despite the fact that his status had stabilized. But there hadn’t been this agonizing, clawing need to make sure Nick didn’t leave his sight; not like Jemma.

But then, he reasoned with himself as he toweled off, he didn’t have the same sort of feelings for Nick that he did for Jemma.

He hadn’t spent a lot of time cataloging the differences in his feelings, besides their obvious physical relationship. But the truth was, even during the week he and Nick had been in Rio before he’d gotten hurt, they’d spent some time apart. Whereas he didn’t want to do anything without Jemma. Even the thought of finding something to do while Jemma worked on her article wasn’t an appealing one.

When he exited the bathroom, Jemma was already deep in her work, tapping away on her laptop as she transcribed the recordings she’d made of Kimber.

“Good news,” Jemma said, not even looking up from her keyboard, “I got the go ahead from Duncan. He’s really excited I got her on the record. He’s going to work his US Olympic Team contacts and try to get a statement from someone.”

“You’re going to change her life,” Gabe said because all he could think was,
you’ve changed my life.

“For the better,” Jemma said firmly.

Gabe leaned against the door jamb. “She won’t be able to go to the store without being recognized.”

Jemma glanced up. “Kimber did
that
part herself,” she said. “Gold medals will do that.” She went to duck her head back down, but then it snapped back up. “Are you going to your room like that?” she asked, gesturing to the towel wrapped precariously around his hips.

He’d
just
been regretting the lack of a connecting door between their rooms. “It’s five feet,” Gabe said, even though he knew it was stupid. If he’d showered in his own room, it wouldn’t have even been an issue. He’d have gotten dressed and stayed out of Jemma’s hair so she could write her article. The problem was he didn’t really
want
to leave, and he also didn’t want her to realize that.

So he was stuck, stupidly leaning against the door frame, trying to play it cool like waltzing around the corridors of the Belmond Copacabana in only a towel was something he did every day.

He knew he hadn’t been very convincing because at his words, she shut off the recorder decisively and stood up, her hair hanging wetly around her shoulders. She hadn’t even waited to dry her hair to start working, but here he was, delaying her. Gabe felt a pulse of guilt rocket through him. If only he could bear the thought of leaving her presence.

If only he could stop seeing her still and bloody, trampled to death.

He didn’t know what she was going to do until she took his hand and gently led him to the bed. His towel pooled around his hips when they sat down at the edge. She didn’t let go of his hand and didn’t look down, wouldn’t look anywhere but straight into his eyes.

“You’re not okay,” she stated, like it wasn’t even a question.

He pressed his lips together. He didn’t get what was wrong with himself so he could hardly explain it to her.

“You had . . . you had sort of an episode back there,” she said softly. “I know you did, you don’t have to hide it. We can talk about it. Like we talked about my issues with Colin. It helps to get it out, at least it helped me.”

He clenched his hands together, because he desperately
wanted to tell her, and that wasn’t his normal MO. Something was different with her, and he didn’t know if he was ready to admit it, especially to her.

Jemma waited a long moment, and when he didn’t respond still, she gave a little nod of acceptance. “Okay, that’s fine. But I’m here if you want to talk.”

She stood, but before she went back to the desk, she fished around by the other side of the bed and emerged with a pair of his sweatpants he must have left in there a few days before. “To prevent you from shocking the maids,” she said wryly, and tossed them his direction.

Gabe slipped on the sweatpants and ducked next door, dressing quickly and gathering some of the reading for his upcoming courses. He let himself back into Jemma’s room, her head barely raising in acknowledgement as he settled on the bed, back against the headboard, and began to read.

The room grew dark as the day stretched on, and Gabe leaned over and flipped on a lamp. Another hour and his stomach growled, so he got up to dial room service. Jemma was lost to a document on her laptop, frantically typing away, then deleting half a paragraph, then starting again. When he asked her what she wanted to eat, she just waved a distracted hand, so he ordered her a club sandwich.

The food came and he ate, flipping on the TV with the sound on low, though Jemma’s concentration felt so total that it probably wouldn’t mattered if he’d turned it up.

She placed a handful of skype calls to different people—co-workers at the
Five Points
, it sounded like—for information and research that they seemed to agree to send to her electronically. She talked to Duncan for five minutes and it sounded like he wanted the article finished as soon as she could get it done, because with Kimber setting a world record for most gold medals won by woman at a single Olympics, she was hot news. Jemma assured him that it would be done, even as she made faces at her laptop screen.

There was lots more frantic typing and even more frantic deleting, followed by long minutes of muttering as she read through what she’d been sent.

Gabe flipped the TV off and lay down, his lack of sleep from the night before catching up. When he woke again and opened his eyes, it was still dark but Jemma wasn’t at the desk. The light in the bathroom was on, though, and he was just about to go check on her when it flipped off and she emerged into the low light of the room.

“You’re done?” he asked and she nodded, her smile bright enough to light up a whole city block.

She crawled into bed and mumbled into his chest, “I didn’t forget about you, you know.”

He opened and closed his mouth, trying to find a way to say what he felt, but then he heard the unmistakable rumbling of her falling into a sudden, deep sleep.

Reaching over to flip the last light off, he told himself that they had lots of time to talk about it. Less than a week left in Rio, but really an eternity of time in LA. As much time as he’d need to sort himself out.

Jemma slept six hours, then woke and Gabe ordered more room service she ignored as she went through the article and re-edited.