Weird, Alyssa thought, turning on the shower again only give a muffled curse. She'd apparently used up all the hot water. "Damn it," she said, angling her body away from the cold stream of water.
She rinsed her hair out as fast as she could while her tired brain woke up and began to snap some pieces together. She'd been in the shower. She'd left Karl out there with the porn... and porn tended to have a certain effect on men. Maybe that's what he needed the bathroom for, to take care of himself?
Shutting off the water, her lips twisted into a smirk. At least he wouldn't mind the lack of hot water if he did need to take a shower. Alyssa wrapped herself up in the hotel's woefully thin towel and eyed the clothes she had on the sink.
Really, she should slip them on and go out and invite him to use the shower if he wanted. She'd even do it politely, like the idea that he was having a problem had never occurred to her. Or...
Or, the part of her that was still annoyed that he'd horned in on her chance to prove herself whispered, or she could walk out there in nothing more than her towel, tell him quite truthfully that she didn't want to change into dirty clothes, and make it just that much harder for him until he had to bolt to the bathroom out of embarrassment. Alyssa knew that she was beautiful, it was something about her that she honed, and something that she used as part of her job - she didn't have any problem using glistening skin and a hint of suggestion as part of a slightly nasty but ultimately harmless practical joke.
Besides. She didn't like the way he kissed her. She didn't find him attractive. Karl was her partner - nothing more. It was easy to get confused on these things because Grace found Matt helplessly, addictively, hopelessly attractive, and she would go back to him again and again because of it. So it was only naturally if her breath caught sometimes, or if she'd been thinking about him too much lately, or found herself wondering... wondering what he thought of all this, what he thought of her like this, doing what she had to and...
...if she was coming to the uncomfortable realization that her partner's opinion of her mattered more than she thought. Alyssa swiped a hand across the mirror and stared at herself for a moment. It wouldn't matter. It couldn't matter. It meant nothing.
She nodded to her reflection and straightened her shoulders. Leaving her clothes on the sink, Alyssa opened the door with a cloud of steam rolling out after her. She shivered in the relative coldness of the room, but forced herself to take controlled strides over to the dresser across from the bed. "All yours if you want it," she said, not quite looking at him.