He’d scared her. She’d come in to check on him, and he’d given her an eyeful.

She wanted one.

Maybe. And it killed him that he couldn’t make a move. That he couldn’t see if she wanted him as much as he thought she might.

He thought back to sitting with her at the table for dinner. It had been unexpectedly nice. All of it had. This was such a strange detour from the life he normally lived. Which was... Frankly, a little bit lonely. He went out to bars, and he hooked up with women. Off the circuit, he didn’t have friends around him, so even a night of drinking and light conversation didn’t happen all that often.

Obviously, he did not have a great relationship with his family.

That thought made him snort.

It had just been a long time since he’d really talked to someone else. And he wasn’t sure he’d ever talked to anybody the way that he had talked to Tala. It was just something different to anything else he’d experienced.

He tugged his jeans on, and put on nothing else, because his shirt was covered in dried blood and sweat, and honestly, he was going to sleep anyway. The clothing situation needed to be solved, or he was going to end up walking around naked, though now it wasn’t anything she hadn’t seen.

“I’m sorry,” she said, peering out of her room, her face bright red.

“You thought I fell?”

“Yes. I was worried. That you might’ve lost consciousness or something. Or that your stitches came open and... I don’t know.”

“It’s fine,” he said. He smiled. “I’m not shy.”

But the way the color in her face deepened, he knew that she was.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.

“Well, but I do worry about it.”

“Why is that?”

“Just... You know, if you had barged in on me, I probably would’ve been really angry.”

In spite of himself, his gaze drifted down to her mouth and then over her body.

She was curvy. Soft looking. Beautiful.

“Somehow, I don’t think you would’ve been all that mad at me.”

He hadn’t meant to do that. He wasn’t supposed to be doing that. He knew better than to do that.

“Here.” She reached out and thrust a stack of fresh clothes his direction.

“Thanks.”

“You can...you can change in there.”

He nodded and ducked back into the bathroom. The jeans she’d gotten were a touch loose, but were otherwise fine, and the shirt wasn’t covered in blood, so it would do just fine.

He came out and looked down the hall.

She was out in the kitchen area, watching TV on her tablet at the table again. She hadn’t sat on the couch since he’d come, and he knew she liked to because he remembered how she’d had all her grading supplies set up there.

“You can sit on the couch,” he said. “And watch your actual TV. I don’t want you feeling like I’ve claimed your couch.”