Chapter Six #2
And when she trapped her hand and let out a little sound, he just couldn’t seem to take it anymore. He broke. “For shit’s sake, kid, why have you got a sign that’s half as big as you are? And apparently busted to fuck? Here, lemme get it,” he said, as he stormed over and grabbed the thing.
One-handed, too.
He tossed it in the air and gave it a single snapping shake and it was open and ready to be set on the sidewalk.
God, he’s strong , she found herself thinking.
But she couldn’t let herself linger on that idea.
They were facing each other now. More words needed to be said.
And she didn’t want any of those words to sound breathless or awestruck.
She wanted to be cool. Collected. Sensible.
“Oh my gosh, thank you,” she somehow said instead.
He didn’t seem to care about the gushing, however.
“Don’t thank me. Just let me get you a new sign.”
“Honestly, I think the money you put in my cash register will cover that.”
“That was for the books. Just for the books. You gave me, like, five of them,” he said. In a scoffing, sure-of-himself sort of way, too. Like he’d never bought anything before in his life, or didn’t understand money, or something.
It made her feel as if she had to spell it out.
“Yeah, and five of them cost around sixty dollars.”
“Well, I left about that number.”
“Sure, give or take a grand.”
“It wasn’t that much. And if it was, that wasn’t me.”
“So this was the plan, then. Just pretend you didn’t do it?”
He rubbed a hand over the nape of his neck sheepishly.
Tried not to meet her gaze.
“Let’s just leave it at you did me a service, and I paid for it.”
“So what do I owe you for all the services you did?”
“I didn’t do any,” he protested. Almost desperate about it now—as if she’d accused him of a crime instead of a kindness.
“I didn’t do anything special for you. It was all just perfectly ordinary, platonic, normal things that any human person would do for any other human person.
And I need you to accept that and not suggest anything else out loud. ”
“Then I should say it in a greeting card instead.”
“Yes. No. No, just. Let’s forget all about it, please.”
He practically had his hands together in a kind of haphazard prayer now. She couldn’t give in to him, though. She’d just seen what sat about fifty feet from where he was standing. “It’s kind of hard to when I can see my car parked down the street,” she said. Much to his deep and unending despair.
“So I got it towed, so what. It was in my way. It was on my road. I had to.”
“Did you also have to somehow get all the crumpled dings out of it? It looks brand-new. It looks better than before I rolled it. Did you get it washed and waxed?” She peered around him as he did his best to obscure most of it from view.
In fact, at one point, he waved an arm in between her and the car.
But that just made it easier to grasp the full extent of this. “Oh my god, did you wash and wax it?”
“Of course not. Of course I didn’t. It must have been the towing company.”
“Well in that case, I’m very grateful to the towing company for everything.”
“There’s no need to be grateful to them. They’re fine with it.”
“Even if I gave them nothing in return?”
She frowned at him, incredulous. But it just seemed to make him madder.
He had to walk away for a second, hands on his hips.
And when he returned he took a calming breath before he started laying out his case.
“You gotta stop thinking you owe anything for simple favors. This isn’t some business where you’re racking up basic decency debt.
It’s okay to just accept the basic decency as something you should be getting as standard, on the regular, and that’s the end of it.
Done. No more discussion,” he said, one hand drawing a line under that last bit, as he did.
Not that it made anything more understandable. It just got her heart going, like it had the night before. As if all these almost angry words were as soft somehow as wound dressing. As soft, and as liable to make her insist on kindness in return. “But I’m pretty sure that would apply to you, too.”
“No. No, it would not. And I’m leaving now before you try anything.”
“Okay. Well, I’ll be right in here if you did want me to try something.
Like, say, explaining any book choices I might have made.
Choices you weren’t sure about. And had questions over,” she said, as he started to walk back to his truck.
Almost calling after him in a way that felt embarrassing.
Like in high school, grasping after people to talk to who didn’t want to talk to her.
But then she scurried back inside, and the first thing she saw once she was back behind the safety barrier of her counter was him, still not past her window. He was standing right where it ended, hand still hooked into his belt loops.
Only now his head was down.
He was looking at his boots with a kind of exasperated weariness.
Wrestling with himself, it looked like to her.
Though it still surprised her when he snapped his fingers and very obviously cursed, and started back toward her door.
It hadn’t seemed like her suggestion would win, and his good sense would lose.
But it obviously had.
If a little reluctantly. He shoved at her door like someone ripping off a Band-Aid. And he looked very much like he’d reopened a wound underneath it when he stepped up to the counter.
“All right, look, I did have a few follow-up things I wanted to ask about. But if what I’m asking sounds weird and uncomfortable to you, you gotta tell me so.
You understand? No pretending this is fine if it isn’t.
In fact, I’ll know if you pretend, and I’ll be real mad about it,” he said, with so much fierce earnestness and obvious desperation that she didn’t even think about it.
She just nodded. Crossed her heart and hoped to die.
Then watched with dawning horror as he fished a notepad out of his back pocket and started flicking through it, until he got to the questions that had obviously been brewing all night.
About sexy books. Sexy books that she had given him.
Sexy books that she had given him that probably said a ton of things about her.
Either that, or they’d repulsed him.
The woman I like is not sex mad like you are , she imagined him saying, and braced as he launched into his first question.
“All of the men in these books are very tall. Is tallness something a woman like you generally prefers, or is that just some kind of book thing? Because in my experience, I gotta tell you, it’s not really a point in my favor.
It’s more like a point that terrifies and bewilders,” he said.
After which she wasn’t so much bracing as mystified.
Then eager to reassure him.
“I mean, it can terrify and bewilder. But now that I know you, it doesn’t.”
“So the knowing part is the most important. I gotta share things about me.”
“Well, I think it can help. Because now that you have, I can see you’re nice.”
He frowned in a puzzled way. Flicked through the pages of his notepad again. Then nodded, as if sure he’d gotten something right. “None of the heroes in those books seem that nice, though,” he said—and, okay, he had a point.
“Because it’s a fantasy of someone being an ass, but they are still safe.”
“Safety is what matters, then. Making sure the lady understands I would never hurt them. Or do anything wrong to them. Or scare them in, say, some kind of really weird and unsettling way. Like even if I was the scariest thing you can imagine, as long as my personality is a reassuring one, that she likes, it’ll be okay. ”
“Totally, yeah,” she said, with some confidence.
But the look he gave her was a dubious one.
And she saw him put a question mark after scribbling something down, as if he needed to test this theory out a bit before he’d believe it.
“Okay, good. Great. Now, on page two hundred and eleven of Lord of Her Pleasure ,” he started, in a way that definitely suggested a sex discussion was coming.
Only somehow, he ended on something else entirely.
Something she would never have guessed at.
“He asks her father for her hand in marriage. Which I thought was maybe an archaic ritual, but then it happens in one of the modern-day ones. So my question is: What if she doesn’t want her hand to be given by her dad?
What if her dad is an asshole—do you still ask him?
How do you not punch him while you do it?
Or murder him? If you murder him, can you still ask?
I mean, I know necromancy isn’t a real thing, obviously it’s not, ha ha.
But you know, just as a for instance… like. What’s the situation here?”
At which point she realized two things:
He had some very odd blind spots.
And also, his knowledge of what was in these books seemed extensive .
Super extensive. Too extensive, if she was being honest. “Can I just stop you for a second and ask—have you actually read all of these? Have you read every single book I gave you? All four hundred pages of all six of them?” she went with.
Then she watched his expression shift from dubious to discomfited.
“I feel like by saying that you’re suggesting I shouldn’t have.”
“No, not at all. It’s just so many books for one night.”
“And that’s weird. That’s not normal for a normal guy.”
How does he not know , she thought. Though if she was being honest, that kind of seemed to apply to a lot of things he said and did.
He had this look of a world-weary man, cynical about every single thing.
And he acted that way, too, a lot of the time.
Yet somehow at the same time, it was as if he was missing a bunch of knowledge he should have.
Or didn’t process the knowledge in a straightforward way.