lpffa Chapter 220: Fun Site
Chapter 220: Fun Site
Elena moved off the bed.
Liam watched her cross the room, bare naked, moving with the particular unbothered quality she brought to everything, like the interruption had been a minor administrative matter and she had already processed it and moved on.
She opened the wardrobe on the far wall.
"Where are you going?" Liam said.
She didn’t answer immediately.
She was looking through the wardrobe with the focused attention of someone who had already decided what they wanted and was locating it.
She pulled out a pair of black panties and stepped into them, pulling them up over her hips, the towel falling away as she did it. .
Then a bra, fastened at the back without looking, adjusted at the front with two fingers.
Liam sat on the bed and watched all of this.
She pulled out a dress next.
Long and black, the fabric substantial and well cut, falling from a structured neckline all the way to the floor.
At the shoulder of one sleeve was a small gold insignia, a symbol he didn’t recognize, subtle enough that you wouldn’t notice it unless you were looking.
She stepped into it and pulled it up over herself and turned around.
"Zip me," she said.
Liam looked at the back of the dress.
Then at her.
Then he got off the bed and crossed the room and found the zip at the base of her spine and drew it upward slowly, the dress pulling together behind her as it went, fitting itself to the line of her back.
He finished and she turned around.
He looked at her. "You still haven’t answered my question."
She reached past him for her clutch on the dresser. "I have somewhere to be." She opened it and checked the contents. "Wait here. I’ll be back in the morning."
Liam looked at her.
Then he looked down.
Then he looked back up at her and pointed at himself below the waist. "What about this."
Elena looked at where he was pointing with the expression of someone making a note of something to return to. "That’s for later," she said. "Wait for me and I’ll make it worth it."
Liam looked at her for a long moment.
Then he took some number from above her head, pressing it into himself, refreshing what the fight had taken out of him.
He felt it move through him, settling back into place, restoring what had been used.
Elena watched him as he was quietly looking above her head and didn’t bother asking any questions before she stepped forward and kissed him.
Not brief.
Her hand came up to his jaw and she kissed him properly, her tongue finding his, unhurried about it, like she had all the time in the world and had decided to spend a portion of it right here.
He kissed her back and his hands found her waist and he was very aware of the dress and how recently it had gone on and how straightforward it would be to reverse that process.
She pulled back.
She looked at him once more, her lipstick barely affected, her composure entirely intact, and then she walked out of the bedroom.
He stood there.
He heard her footsteps through the passage.
Then the sound of the front door of the lake house opening and closing.
Then after a moment the deep quiet sound of the Phantom’s engine turning over, idling briefly, and then moving, the sound of it growing distant through the trees until there was nothing.
Liam sat back down on the bed.
He looked at the ceiling.
The house had gone very quiet.
Not the kind of quiet that felt peaceful.
The kind that felt like the house was waiting for something to happen inside it and had been waiting for a while and was in no particular rush.
The lake outside was part of it. The trees were part of it.
The whole property had a stillness to it that worked when Elena was in it and became something else entirely when she wasn’t.
He lay back properly and looked at the ceiling for a minute with his arms at his sides like a man in a coffin who hadn’t quite committed to it yet.
’What am I supposed to do in this house by myself,’ he thought. ’It’s enormous. It’s just me and the lake and whatever is living in those trees.’
He stayed like that a little longer.
Then he sat up.
He got off the bed and walked out of the bedroom and through the passage and into the main room and looked around it.
High ceilings.
Wide windows facing the lake.
Furniture that was tasteful and expensive and arranged with the kind of care that suggested someone had thought about it for longer than was strictly necessary.
A fireplace that wasn’t lit. Art on the walls that he had looked at before without looking at properly.
He stood in the middle of the room.
Then he walked to the kitchen and looked around that too.
It was the kind of kitchen that took itself seriously.
Marble counters.
Good knives in a block near the stove.
A double oven that he had never seen opened. He opened a cabinet and looked at what was in it and closed it again.
He was not cooking anything.
He had not cooked anything in this house and he was not going to start now at whatever hour this was.
He walked back through the main room to the window and looked at the lake, dark and still outside, the moon sitting on the surface of it in one long broken line. A bird made a sound somewhere in the trees.
Then nothing again.
He stood there for a while.
Then he went and looked at the other rooms.
He had stayed in this house enough times that he should have known the layout properly by now and he mostly did but he had never actually walked it like this, room to room, at this hour, with no particular destination.
A second bedroom, made up and untouched.
A small study with a desk and bookshelves, the books arranged by color which he found irritating in the specific way that things you couldn’t complain about were irritating.
A bathroom he hadn’t been in yet, a deep soaking tub, a window above it looking out at the dark water.
He came to the room at the end of the passage and stopped.
He had assumed it was the same purposeless room he had noticed before, the one with just a chair and a lamp.
He pushed the door open and reached for the light switch and found it and the room came on.
It was not that room.
He stood in the doorway and looked at it properly.
There was a pool table in the center, the felt a deep green, the balls racked and ready like someone had set it up recently and then walked out.
Along the far wall was a setup he recognized, a large screen mounted at eye level, a proper racing chair positioned in front of it, a wheel and pedal system attached to a frame in front of the chair, a shelf on one side holding a row of game cases.
Two controllers hung on hooks beside the screen.
Underneath the shelf, a console, the power light off.
’Elena must have done all this for me’ Liam thought to himself.
He walked in.
He stood next to the pool table and looked at the gaming setup and then looked at the pool table and then back at the setup.
"Okay," he said to the room.
He went to the console and turned it on.
The screen came to life, the dashboard lighting up, and he stood in front of it for a moment scrolling through what was available.
Racing games.
A couple of shooters.
Something that looked like it might be football. He selected something and sat down in the chair and picked up the controller and started.
He played for about twenty minutes.
It was fine. It was genuinely fine. The chair was good and the screen was large and the sound system built into the walls was better than it had any right to be for a room nobody used. He completed two races and won one and lost one and started a third and got halfway through it and set the controller down on his knee.
He looked at the screen.
He looked at the room.
He looked at the pool table.
He turned the console off.
"This place is too big, i wish Kelvin was here to enjoy it me, should i call him? No" he said. The room absorbed his voice without comment. "I’m bored and I’m going home."
He said it the same way a person says something they’ve been thinking for a while and are only now giving themselves permission to say out loud.
Final. Not dramatic.
Just a man deciding something.
He stood up.
He went back through the passage to the bedroom and found his shirt on the bathroom floor where he had left it and pulled it on.
His trousers were in the passage.
He stepped into them and fastened them and found his shoes near the front door and put those on too.
He stood at the front door.
He thought briefly about leaving a note and then thought about what the note would say and decided against it.
Then he thought about how he was going to get home.
’I should have brought my own car,’ he thought.
He exhaled slowly through his nose.
’Good thing I took those points earlier.’
He opened the door.
The night air came in immediately, cold and clean, carrying pine and water.
He stood in the doorway for a second looking at the dark between the trees where the path ran back through the forest.
The lake made a small sound behind the house. Something in the canopy shifted.
Then he activated Silent Stride.
And ran.
---
His key found the lock on the first try which was more than he expected given the state of him, and he pushed the door open and stepped inside.
His apartment was exactly how he had left it.
Clean in the way it was clean when he actually kept up with it, which was the specific clean of someone who didn’t own many things and kept the things they owned in their places.
The only thing out of place were the clothes that he had been wearing before he left were still on the floor near the couch where he had stepped out of them.
He set the grocery bag down on the coffee table and dropped onto the couch beside it.
He looked at the bag.
He had stopped at the convenience store on the corner two blocks over on the way back.
That was not a want, it was a need.
He had put his body through something today and he could feel the deficit of it, the flatness behind his eyes, the particular quality in his legs that wasn’t quite tired but was getting there.
Which brought him to the other thing.
He looked at the ceiling.
’I’m starving,’ he thought, ’but I can barely move and all I want to do is sleep. Makes me wonder if I would have passed out mid-stroke if Elena and I had actually gone through with it.’
He looked at the bag.
’I have to cook something.’
He sat there for another moment, before standing up.
Then he turned toward the bathroom instead of the kitchen.
"I need to wash my face first," he said to no one. "Wash the sleep off before I start."
He pushed the bathroom door open and ran the tap cold and put his face in it. He straightened up and reached for the towel.
He looked down.
Then back up at the mirror.
"Still," he said.
He dried his face and went back out into the apartment.
He stood next to the couch and thought about Elena and the dress and the zip and the way she had held his jaw when she kissed him.
’Great, now I’m thinking about Elena and I’m hard again. I can’t cook like this. I need to fix this first.’
He went to the nightstand and opened the drawer and found his body cream.
Then he pulled his phone from his pocket and brought up and climbed onto the bed and settled back against the pillows.
He looked at the phone.
"Hello, old friend," he said.
He meant it as a joke. It came out more sincere than he intended.
He almost said something else and then decided against it and got on with the thing.
He scrolled through his usual site looking for something that would work, going past one after another, and after a while he stopped and just looked at the screen.
’My standards have gone up,’ he thought. ’This is thier fault.’
As he almost put the phone down.
*Knock*
*Knock*
*Knock*
He lifted his head.
He sat completely still for a second, the apartment quiet around him, and listened.
Silence.
He put his feet on the floor.
*Knock*
*Knock*
*Knock*
There it was again. Clear. Three knocks, deliberate, unhurried, from his front door.
He stood up and crossed the apartment and put his hand on the door handle and opened it.
Liam looked at who was standing right in front of him and a smile tugged at his lips.