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Her arm is damp and warm and sticky against Sam’s and her eyes are wide and glowing.
“Does Khun Sam really not know,” Mon whispers into the space between them, and Sam can’t look away from the trembling confidence, “Or does Khun Sam just want Mon to be the one to say it? Like coming to the house?”
Mon steps into her space again, like they’re not already pressed against each other, so it’s all Sam can do to stay upright, let herself be pushed a step backwards; it’s like they’re dancing, but that was never this warm or wet or- eye-contact-y.
She swallows, says in the blank voice that’s all she can speak in, “What do you mean?”
Mon smiles the way she always does before mounting some kind of challenge, and Sam grips tighter without meaning to.
“I mean… you wanted me to come here, to work together, and to keep you company and scare off the ghosts. But you didn’t invite me until I asked. Do you really not know why your heart beats faster when I’m here?”
The tone is quiet, but she’s nowhere near as deferential as she was when she first arrived at the company. Sam knows; she’s been paying attention. She’s paying attention now – paying attention to Mon’s face, her tiny neck, the wrists that look like they’ll break if Sam grabs them like she did earlier, and the growing but pressed-together smile on her face.
Sam knows.
“You invited yourself,” Sam tells her.
Agreeable, Mon nods, and then she turns her hands to Sam’s forearms – the touch of her fingers on the damp skin burns – and removes them from herself, steps back.
She doesn’t follow but she wants to, the step between them gaping.
Mon bites her lip and ducks her head, but when they’re in the office that looks submissive and here it looks like some kind of promise, and she looks up with darker eyes than she had before and says, “I did. Do you have other clothes I could borrow? These are all wet.”
Why would she change the subject like that?
Sam hates the feeling of missing a step – it’s her biggest weakness, and she’s never been able to get over it, the way that people can be speaking Thai to her and she’ll be speaking Thai to them but there’s no shared language, not really. At least in other languages there’s an excuse for missing it, whatever it is, but Sam not knowing what it is, that’s the point.
Turning away, leaving Sam confused and irritated and warm wherever her skin had been touching, Mon takes careful-elegant steps back into the house.
The nightgown already looked the way it did on her even before Sam followed that loud, loud impulse, the one to grab Mon’s waist and then the other one to throw her down, down into the pool but the desire was there before the pool was and Sam does know what it means but she wishes she didn’t because that’s not a place where she can go-
But the nightgown. It already looked like that on Mon, but from behind, as she walks away, it clings even closer and she knows, now, exactly what it felt like to touch, to catch her, and Sam’s throat is suddenly dry.
Then Mon pauses, turns only her head, so she’s looking over her own shoulder at Sam as she says, “Aren’t we going upstairs?”
Sam nods.
She doesn’t mean to nod, but she does, and Mon’s right – the last thing she said was a request for clothes, and Sam should meet that request, and that means going back up to the room. But she feels like the nodding was a misstep.
It was out of her control, anyway, like all her expressions seem to be around Mon.
Mon’s still standing there, eyebrows raised in that little expecting-expression that always seems like a hint, like a you’re supposed to do something here, reminding Sam to act, but what-
Oh, she’s waiting for Sam to lead her up.
She nods again and does.
It’s a relief to have Mon behind her – she doesn’t have to look at the wet nightgown if Mon’s behind her. But she didn’t mean to grab Mon’s wrist, and now there’s the heat and the damp and worst of all, the feeling of Mon’s delicate bird-boned wrist in the circle of her fingers.
Getting into her room is a relief.
Clothes.
She owns some of those. Nightclothes, even, and she knows where they are, so Sam should get those – she shakes her head to clear it.
The nightgown she picks out looks like the one Mon’s already wearing, but this one isn’t wet and also it’s a little older, hopefully meaning it won’t cling to her as closely, because Sam’s pretty sure clothes can lose their shape over time. That’s why they get rid of old ones, isn’t it?
She holds it out in Mon’s direction while trying to avoid looking at her so she doesn’t humiliate herself any further.
It’s no good; she can hear the amusement in Mon’s voice when she says, “Aren’t you going to change first? Yours are wet too.”
Shit, they are.
Sam didn’t notice.
Using her irritation at that lapse to colour her voice, Sam says, “Uh. You change out here, I’m going into the bathroom.”
She can’t see Mon get changed.
That would be even worse than this, the way avoiding eye contact means she can see the fabric clinging to Mon’s chest, proportionately small – she’s so tiny, her waist so grabbable that it’s making Sam insane – and with barely-visible peaks that Sam cannot keep staring at.
Abrupt, she turns away and walks to the bathroom, slamming the door behind herself.
“Khun Sam?” she hears through it.
Her fingers clenching and unclenching, Sam grits out, “What?”
“You forgot to take a change of clothes for yourself, Khun Sam, I’ll hand you some if you just open the door slightly.”
And she does, which would be considerate of her except for how their fingers brush, and surely Mon’s doing that on purpose. It makes Sam shudder.
Her fingers fumble as she tries to pull the shirt on.
Sam’s not thinking about it.
Mostly-dry and barely composed, Sam emerges, and she doesn’t even close her eyes as she does it. Perhaps she’s half-hoping that Mon will yelp and need to quickly cover up and-
She doesn’t, though, she’s wearing the nightgown and sitting by the pillow, legs on top of the blanket and fingers twisting together in her lap.
“I thought you didn’t sleep sitting up,” Sam says.
Her voice sounds odd to herself.
And Mon’s face looks… different, when she looks up and replies, “I don’t sleep sitting up. Do you want to sleep?”
Sam doesn’t know how to reply to that.
So, not replying, she circles to her own side of the bed – ignoring the voice that says to just climb over Mon, because even if she were to crawl over the bed like a kid there’s a lot of bed that Mon isn’t even on – and gets in, pulling the cover back to get under it.
Mon’s weight on the other side means it feels heavier and tighter on Sam than it normally does.
Even though Mon changed the subject by the pool, so she must not want – even though, something stops Sam from lying down and trying to sleep. Maybe it’s just that Mon isn’t lying down either.
Their faces aren’t as close as they were down there, or the other times that Sam’s been able to feel Mon’s breath on her lips and had to not wonder as hard as she could about what would happen. No, she can’t feel Mon’s breath this time, but she can still hear it.
There’s an inhale, the way Mon doesn’t seem to realise she does right before she says something brave, and then Mon says, “Under the covers?”
“Yes,” Sam says, because if that’s all Mon wants to know-
“Won’t they be in the way,” Mon whispers.
Her lips are as pink as most of her outfits.
Sam doesn’t understand her, and she asks, “Of what?”
The lips she can’t stop watching stretch into a smile that Sam could make herself believe is fond.
“I’ll be the one to say it,” and she’s not whispering anymore, she’s doing the light-and-teasing voice of her ghost stories as she says, “My lady, are you really not going to take advantage of me?”
That’s-
“What?” she asks, feeling her face scrunch up in confusion as she tilts her head.
Mon pouts.
“I thought you wanted to,” and then she gestures to herself in a way that Sam doesn’t need to know the precise meaning of, because she feels her face getting warm.
Her self-control is gone; Sam doesn’t have time to stop herself from saying, “Of course,” but she can at least make herself not finish the sentence.
It makes Mon smile, at least, all teeth and big nods and light shuffles towards her on the bed.
“Okay, then I will,” she tells her.
She’s about to ask what will you- but then thin, just-licked lips meet hers with a force Sam hadn’t been expecting of little, nervous-until-she-isn’t deferential Mon.
Sam missed when Mon changed her mind back, but clearly they’re going where they were in the pool, and that’s enough to let her do what she’s wanted to, been fixated on, since she first saw Mon in that awful, torturous perfect nightgown that showed just how small her waist is, and Sam grabs that waist with both hands.
Falling on top of her, Mon giggles, and Sam can feel that breath best of any of it.