Lizzie
‘How’s Jaddi coping?’ Ben asked Lizzie.
‘She seems to have shrugged the whole thing off. She washed her face and went down to the lobby to look for Suk. I think they had a fight earlier. Knowing Jaddi, she’ll say she’s fine for the next few days, then she’ll get drunk and cry it out. What about you, are you all right?’
‘I think so. My hands are shaking a bit from the adrenaline, but I didn’t really do much.’
‘Don’t say that. If it wasn’t for you …’ Lizzie’s voice trailed off. It was happening again – the magnetic field. The unstoppable force. The desire to stand up and move closer to him. Lizzie swallowed hard and dropped her gaze to her hands. She traced her fingers over the outline of the petals on the floral bedspread, then stopped as a growing awareness of the bed filtered through her. She was alone, in a bedroom, with a man she had a sudden desire to be close to.
Lizzie pushed her hands under her thighs and focused her gaze on her feet. The dregs of adrenaline in her system were mixing up her signals, that was all. This was Ben. Ben, who’d pulled her out of her seizure, and whose voice she still heard in her sleep. Ben, who she’d woken at 3am and dragged halfway across Cambodia, just to watch a sunrise. Ben, who’d guided her in from the water when she’d lost her sight, made her laugh after the whole Harrison thing, and who’d sat through a lunch listening to her mum and dad tell stories from her childhood.
‘Are you sure you’re all right, Lizzie?’ His voice reverberated through her.
She drew in a deep breath and stood up. ‘I’ve been trying to figure out how you knew something was wrong earlier,’ she said, taking a step towards him. ‘At first I wondered if there were cameras in the suite and you’d seen something, but then I thought, you’d have called security straight away. So now I’m wondering if you’re psychic?’
Ben smirked and rubbed his hand against the stubble on his face. He shook his head. ‘I’m not psychic. I just had a feeling that something wasn’t right. Call it cameraman intuition.’
His eyes stared into her – deep brown with flecks of green, enlarged by the lenses in his glasses. It felt like a dozen ping-pong balls had been unleashed inside of her and were bouncing against the walls of her stomach. Her feet moved another step towards him as if they’d been commanded to do so by an outside force.
‘Just an everyday superhero then,’ she said, her heartbeat drumming against her chest.
‘Something like that.’
‘So what’s your instinct telling you right now?’ Lizzie stepped forward until she could feel the warmth of his body.
Ben continued to stare into her eyes for another moment then drew in a sudden breath as if he’d been underwater for a minute and just resurfaced. ‘That maybe I should kiss you right now.’ His arms reached around her and pulled her the last few inches into his embrace.
Lizzie pressed her body against him as their lips touched and she felt it again, just like before – the firecrackers inside her, the dipping of a rollercoaster, losing her stomach.
Ben stood up, craning Lizzie’s neck back as they continued to kiss. In one fluid movement, he scooped her from the floor and stepped two paces to the bed.