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This was not how Chloe envisioned the first day of her honeymoon going.
Right now, she should have been relaxing in first class with a martini in one hand and her fiancé’s—husband’s hand in the other. But no. No, fucking KLM Airlines and their fucking mechanical problems. What should have been an overnight layover in Los Angeles at a Grand Paris affiliate luxury suite had turned into an emergency stop-over in Dubois, Wyoming.
“Welcome to Dubois,” Luka read the sign at the tiny airport that looked more like a refurbished farmhouse than a government-sanctioned air facility.
“That’s Dew-boys,” said the obnoxiously chipper gate agent. She was smiling so hard Chloe was sure her face would split in two. “Y’all can get your hotel vouchers here! Welcome to Wyoming!”
“Oh my fucking god,” Chloe said, horrified at this latest butchering of the French language by these American cretins. “Just kill me now.”
But no, she was not put out of her misery and instead found herself at some moldy motor inn that looked like it hadn’t been renovated in a hundred years. There was a corral in the back where someone thought it was a great idea to keep horses. The smell hit her like a slap to the face—a slap of shit.
“It’s not that bad,” Luka tried to mollify her when they checked in to their small room for the night. “Look, it’s got a view.”
Yeah, a view of the poop sacks on four legs running around in their corral. Chloe shot him a scathing glare, but Luka just smiled and took her by the arms. He pressed a kiss to her forehead.
“It’s just for one night,” he said gently.
Chloe took one look at the alarmingly intricate metal cowboy kitsch decorating the room and grimaced.“One night’s all it takes to contract Tetanus.”
He ran his fingers under her jaw. “Just close your eyes and think of Tahiti.”
“I’m thinking of murdering the next person who dares to tell me how to correctly pronounce ‘Dubois’.”
“There you go, happy thoughts.”
He kissed her, softly at first, but leaned in to it when she opened her mouth to respond. He caught her lip between his teeth, and Chloe whimpered against him. Before she knew it, her back was to the wall and Luka’s hand was trailing up her thigh under her skirt. The gold of his wedding band was cold against her bare skin, but she pulsed with heat. She dragged her nails down his chest and began tugging at his belt, and he smiled against her.
“Someone’s eager,” he teased her.
Chloe pulled his hips against hers. “Eager to shut you up.” She kissed him before he could belabor the point.
He laughed and grasped her thighs. In one fluid movement, he hoisted her up over his waist with every intention of moving them to the bed. Which would have been a fine progression in their attempt to devour each other whole, except that Chloe’s head bumped a twisted, metal monstrosity that looked like a possessed cactus hanging on the wall. She hissed in pain and swore colorfully. Luka immediately put her down.
“Shit, I’m sorry,” he said, all traces of their passion gone as he ran his hands over her head, searching for any damage. “Are you okay?”
Chloe was so fucking done with this place. “Do I look okay to you?”
He wisely chose not to answer that, instead gently pulling her ponytail out and threading his fingers over her scalp to ease the pain.
“Goddamnit,” she said, leaning in to his chest. “I hate this.”
“It’s okay, Chloe. It’s just for one night, and then it’ll be you and me in a villa over the water for two weeks.”
“If we ever get there before I catch a fucking venereal disease in this place.”
He sighed. “You’ll be fine. Just use a condom before you take a nap in that bed, okay?”
She shoved him, and he laughed. “That’s not funny. Ugh, look at that comforter! The only reason anybody buys a brown comforter is to hide stains.”
“Or maybe it fits with the metal and leather cowboy theme a little?”
“Oh, Luka. You sweet cinnamon roll too pure for this dark, cruel world. You’re lucky I’m looking out for you.”
“Well, this cinnamon roll is going to take a shower.”
“Don’t drink the water!”
He rolled his eyes. “Yes, ma’am.”
He closed the door to the connecting bathroom and ran the shower, and Chloe was alone in the bedroom, if it could even be called that. It was more like an old west gift shop someone happened to stick a bed in as an afterthought. She poked at the bed experimentally—springy, surprisingly not sticky, and nothing moved under the covers. Grimacing, she leaned over and gave the sheets a sniff. They didn’t smell much like anything.
And then she realized she was so used to the smell of horse manure from the corral next door that somehow it had become the negligible baseline. She imagined what it would be like to die here.
“Here lies Chloe Bourgeois, hotel heiress and all-around fabulous person, found dead in a Silent Hill murder motel surrounded by people who can’t pronounce the name of their own goddamned town. Cause of death…” She looked around the room at the garish decorations. An enormous painting of John Wayne holding a large pistol in one hand and a woman’s tiny waist in the other as she all but clung to him to remain standing hung over the bed. “…Toxic masculinity.”
No one could ever know she had spent a night in this godforsaken town, mechanical failure or not.
Luka finished his shower and came out in nothing but a towel around his waist. Which would have been a welcome sight if not for the fact that he was walking around barefoot.
“Hey, shower’s all yours,” he said.
“What are you doing?! You can’t walk around barefoot in here! You have no idea what’s been on this floor!” Chloe rummaged around his suitcase and threw the first pair of shoes she could find. “Put those on.”
“Chloe, these’re my wetsuit booties for diving. I’m not putting these on,” he said, amused.
“Luka.” She took his wrists and looked up at him, desperate. “I just married you. I’m not going to lose you to a fucking staph infection, which is exactly what’s going to happen if you keep walking around here barefoot.”
He sighed and pulled her in for a wet hug—he was still damp from the shower. “One of us has to be brave, Chloe. I’m willing to make the sacrifice for you.”
She struggled. “Hey! You’re getting me all wet!”
“I’ve been known to have that effect on you,” he teased her.
“Luka, I’m serious! This floor is a health hazard.”
He let her go. His eyes sparkled with mirth as he took her face in his hands. “Then remember me fondly when I’m gone.”
“Ugh! Just forget it! I’m taking a shower.”
“Hey, don’t forget these.” He dangled his wetsuit booties at her. “I think I saw some fungus growing in the tub.”
She flipped him off, and he just laughed as she slammed the door to the bathroom. Mercifully, it was not as disgusting as she’d thought it would be. White tile floors and walls, a porcelain tub, and a clear plastic curtain that, surprisingly, had no traces of mildew growing at the ends. There was even a tiny bottle of shampoo.
“Gross, two-in-one,” she groaned. Her hair would not be thanking her for this later, but at least it was better than nothing. It was barely enough for the sheer amount of long, blonde hair she had. Luka must have used no more than a few drops, knowing how she went through the stuff.
Chloe quickly showered and, feeling marginally more human after this truly traumatic start to her honeymoon (her goddamned honeymoon, for crying out loud—this was supposed to be the best two weeks of her newly married life and she was stranded in a fucking poor man’s Westworld), she headed back out to the bedroom to find Luka.
“So, are you still wet?” he asked.
He was lying in the bed, naked with only the thin, white sheet barely covering him up to his hip bones. He pulled his headphones and tossed them and his phone on the nightstand. Chloe stared, her hand knotted in the towel around her midsection, her long hair damp and dripping on her yellow, Gudetama flip flops and the brownish carpet.
“I’m…” she said, her throat dry. No matter how many times she had seen him like this, it never failed to ruin her a little bit each time knowing he was hers. And since they’d officially tied the knot at a lavish ceremony at Le Grand Paris back home surrounded by friends and family, they had not had a chance to be intimate. Too many glasses of champagne at the wedding reception, an early morning flight out of Charles de Gualle, and now a truly devastating detour had ruined all of Chloe’s plans to fuck her amazing new husband in style. They were supposed to be in Tahiti watching the sunset over the ocean, warm and soft in a four poster bed over a glass floor with a view of the coral below. She was supposed to be sultry in that lacy, black lingerie she’d secretly bought just for this occasion, and he was supposed to be speechless and at her mercy, this divine goddess who’d consented to choose him above all other mortal men.
But she was dripping on a grimy floor in a threadbare, grey towel that wasn’t supposed to be grey, while Luka lounged on a mattress flattened to the springs, and John Wayne leered down at them over his near-unconscious damsel in serious, patriarchal distress. It was wrong, all so wrong.
“Come here,” Luka said, soft but commanding.
And there was such an unabashed heat in his dark eyes that she almost forgot all about the wrongness of this place, of the whole situation. Chloe dropped her sad excuse for a towel on the floor and crawled over the foot of the bed to him. And he had some kind of inhuman self-control, because he let her without so much as reaching for her until she was right on top of him, inches apart, daring him to order her around again.
“Chloe,” he said, dragging his clever fingers up her belly.
“Yes?” she said, though it came out sounding a little more like a whine than actual words.
“I need to ask you something.”
“Mm?” It was very hard to focus on his words while his fingers were so distracting.
He leaned in close, and she could feel his breath on the shell of her ear. “Did you want me to fuck you with your flip flops on or off?”
Chloe froze, realized that yes, she still had her flip flops on in the bed and looked ridiculous on her hands and knees like that, and he was enjoying her shame. “Son of a—”
She violently kicked them off, and Luka burst out laughing. Furious, Chloe tried to push him away, but he grabbed her around the waist and flipped her under him, twisting the sheets and pinning her before she could squirm away.
“Asshole,” she said. “You just officially killed the mood. I hope your hand’s ready for a workout, because you’re going to need it when I’m gone.”
She tried to push him off again, but he held tight and buried his face in the crook of her neck, trying hard to calm down.
“I’m so sorry,” he said in between gasping breaths. “You just looked so sexy there, but those Gudetama flip flops are so…”
Chloe cast a glance at the traitorous footwear emblazoned with the lazy egg character Juleka had turned her on to when she’d first brought back themed souvenirs from Japan a couple years ago. It was a joke now, just a goofy pastime, and Chloe had accumulated a number of the character’s paraphernalia as a gag, including these flip flops.
“Yeah, okay, I get it,” she said, initial embarrassment fading to frustration. “There’s nothing even remotely hot about this place. Look, it’s not like I wanted it to be this way, okay?”
Luka pulled back and looked at her, all traces of his teasing gone. “Hey, don’t say that. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh at you. It was really cute, that’s all.”
Chloe turned her head away and glared at the hideous bedside lamp welded in the shape of a bucking bronco (Christ). “There’s nothing cute about me or this place. We’re supposed to be in Tahiti having amazing honeymoon sex, and we’re not.”
“Hey, look at me.” He ran his hand over her cheek and guided her back to face him. “I don’t care about any of that.”
“Well, I do. I wanted this to be perfect!” She’d been planning this trip for months down to every detail. Everything had to be perfect, magical—that was what honeymoons were supposed to be, a reminder that tying himself to one woman for the rest of his life was not a horrible idea, that there could be plenty of amazing times ahead, that she wouldn’t suddenly morph into a caricature of herself now that they were locked down and ‘comfortable’. That it didn’t matter that they came from very different worlds, because they could make it work as long as they were together. That it wasn’t a mistake to ask her to marry him in the first place.
Luka must have seen something of her insecurity, because he smiled gently and pressed a slow kiss to her temple. “It is perfect,” he said.
“Luka. Look at this place. It’s fucking Bates Motel. Someone was probably literally disemboweled in this bed.”
“Chloe, stop talking.”
She set her jaw at that tone, the one he rarely used unless it was important. He held her gaze a moment, making sure she was really listening.
“You’re my wife,” he said.
And despite herself, her heart began to pound. It was not the first time he’d called her that out loud, but every time it was like a dream, hard to believe.
“This place isn’t perfect, and neither are you. Neither am I. That’s why we’re here.”
“What? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Yes, it does. You’re not flawless, and I love you, anyway. I’ve been working on my ten year plan for twenty years, but you love me, anyway. And this place isn’t Tahiti, but I’ve never wanted to make love to my beautiful wife more than I do right now.”
Chloe flushed. Luka had a supernatural way of being so honest and vulnerable that made him almost painfully attractive to her. He was one of the few people in the world who made her want to be vulnerable, too.
“Then what’re you waiting for?” she asked, breathless.
He grinned and kissed her deeply. Chloe gasped, swept away in the moment, in the affection he poured into the kiss. If she ever doubted he loved her, one kiss like this could incinerate those thoughts in a heartbeat. She ran her fingers through his damp hair and breathed him in. He smelled like…like…
Chloe jerked and pulled away. “Why the hell do you smell like lye?”
He looked at her strangely. “Because I used soap in the shower?”
She was instantly suspicious, and a little afraid. “You mean the shitty two-in-one shampoo.”
“No, I figured you’d need all of it, so I just used the bar of soap.”
“In your hair?!”
“Yeah,” he said, like it was the most natural thing in the world. “They’re basically the same thing, anyway.”
At which point, two things became crystal clear to Chloe. One, Luka was indeed a cinnamon roll personified because he’d put her hair care before himself, and that was #TrueLove in its purest form. And two, he'd used a goddamned bar of soap to wash his hair, the stupid duck.
“Chloe? Are you okay?”
She had closed her eyes and was breathing through her nose in an attempt not to lose her fucking shit. “Give me a minute, I’m trying to convince myself that your unconditional love for me is more important than my deep concern for your heinous personal hygiene choices.”
He laughed. “It’s just hair.”
She looked up at him as if he’d just suggested they light themselves on fire. “Don’t ever say such a blasphemous thing to me ever again.”
His dark eyes glinted with mischief. “I’d shave it all off for you.”
Chloe looked horrified. “Don’t even joke about that.”
“I’d dye it blond so we can match.”
“Luka, I swear to god.”
“I’ll grow it out so we can braid each other’s hair.”
“I want a divorce.”
He laughed and collapsed on top of her, nuzzling her neck. “But we haven’t even had our perfect honeymoon sex yet.”
“And we never will if all your hair falls out!”
His grip on her tightened, and she gasped. “Then shut up and let me have you before it’s too late.”
It wasn’t perfect, not by a long shot. They were not perfect. But when he held her close and bared his true soul, and made her believe it was safe for her, too, they didn’t have to be. It was enough.