Chapter Eight
It felt like the best thing to do was just to focus on the practicalities. Like the fact that his closet was full of the weirdest and most wonderful stuff she could ever have imagined he might own. Hell, it was the weirdest and most wonderful stuff she could ever have imagined anyone would own.
Until he told her to stop.
“Leave it, leave it, focus on the other things,” he groused.
But the other things were just as intriguing.
There were hats, of all shapes and styles and sizes.
Fedoras, straw boaters, woolen ones with flaps, and baseball caps with teams emblazoned on them that she wasn’t sure existed.
F ERMERGERD , one of them read. She almost asked him if it was the name of a company he’d worked for.
It made her think of invented chemical plants from some Stephen King short story, about monsters trying to pass as human beings.
And it wasn’t even the strangest thing in there.
She found costumes, of the kind a little kid might wear.
Dusty cowboy boots and waistcoats and rusted tin stars, a fireman’s coat and helmet, a sheet with eyeholes in it—completely enormous, but obviously meant to make someone look like a ghost.
And then even weirder: a cloak, a frilly shirt, what looked like breeches.
“What can I say, I like Halloween,” he said, from somewhere behind her.
Half laughing in this nervous kind of way, as she dug through everything.
Though she didn’t think he had anything to be nervous about at all.
There was something wonderful about all his paraphernalia, all his costumes. Something that felt familiar, somehow.
Though it was probably just what he’d said.
“Yeah, Halloween is my favorite, too. I used to love racing around the neighborhood with the air all full of campfire smoke and strawberry bubble gum, night coming so fast, all the leaves crunching beneath my feet. Being able to hide behind some mask, some costume, be someone else for a second. Someone cooler, you know. Someone everybody liked,” she told him—just as a reassurance.
Though of course it didn’t sound like that.
It sounded too revealing, too raw. Not what she’d intended at all. And it didn’t even really help her plan to focus on practicalities, either, because when she tried to change the subject by snagging him a date sort of shirt, he did the only reasonable thing anyone would under those circumstances.
He hiked his Henley over his head.
And showed her pretty much everything he had.
Worse: he seemed to realize after he had that he shouldn’t have, that she could see his half-naked body again.
And he definitely still did not like the thought of that happening.
In fact, he used the shirt she’d handed him to hide.
Then had a bunch of stuff to say about it.
“Look, I know I don’t look great. But just hear me out,” he said.
So now she had to somehow correct his misapprehension.
While not sounding like a drooling, desperate lunatic.
“What do you mean hear you out? Your body isn’t a bad argument.”
“Well, no, but I know that most people like small bodies. Or at least bodies that are big in the right way. And my body is neither of those things, despite all my efforts at cramming things into the tidiest human shape I possibly could.”
He keeps saying human in a really weird way , her brain said.
But she shrugged it off. She had more important things to focus on.
“That seems to suggest that you think you’re sloppy somehow,” she said.
Much to his exasperation. “Because I am. I mean, just look at me,” he explained, then gestured at himself and spread his hands.
As if to say, Here, behold this evidence .
Even though the evidence was very hairy, and burly, and also he’d kind of started to perspire a little bit, and it was weirdly not a bad thing at all.
It made him look all glossy.
Like someone had just finished oiling him.
Hopefully me , her mind threw up. And then she had to somehow crush that idea down and reframe it into something that didn’t scream her attraction.
“You look like you’re about to crash onto some English shore and start beheading monks with a giant axe you made with your bare hands.
All you need are some, like, big furs over your shoulders and a huge metal belt,” she tried.
And immediately regretted every lusty-sounding word.
It was all right, though. He didn’t seem to get it at all.
“That sounds horrible .”
“But you should know it’s not. I mean, you read all my books.”
They were on his nightstand, she noticed. All six of them. And the spines had been cracked . She darted over to them and picked out the one she wanted— Her Viking Beloved —and it practically flopped open. Though even if it hadn’t, she would have known what part he’d read avidly.
The page she was looking at had underlines all over it.
And circles around various parts. And exclamation points in the margins.
THIS CANNOT BE TRUE DO NOT EVEN ASK HER ABOUT IT , he had written next to one particular part.
A particular part that made everything he had just said make a lot more sense.
She marveled over his immense bulk, her eyes roaming where her hands wanted to go.
What would it be like to have him over her, she wondered, to have him spread her legs with his thick thighs and smother her with his barrel-like body , Nancy read.
Then had to smother her blush.
Only when she looked up, he was blushing, too. He was beet red, like he’d been caught doing something very bad. Even though she had no idea what. All this did was reveal to him how horny she was, and underscore the point she’d made about what women liked. What did he have to be embarrassed about?
She didn’t know.
Until he snatched it back.
“I read that part a lot purely for research purposes,” he snapped, and suddenly it all became clear. He had definitely not been reading that part a lot for research purposes. He’d been reading for enjoying it purposes. Sexy purposes. Maybe even using whatever he had in that drawer purposes.
Though she tried not to think about that too much. She focused on what it proved. “Yeah, and the research shows a lot of women like that. I mean, these books wouldn’t be popular if they didn’t.”
“Yeah, but is someone like you one of them?”
No , she internally screamed. Though she was getting better at dodging now.
“If you told me exactly who it is you want to impress I could say for sure,” she said. Only he seemed to stiffen when she did. His eyes slid down and to one side. Then he waved a hand at her, and made a sound like pfffffttt .
“You wouldn’t know her. She lives in another town. Far away. In Canada,” he said. As if he was on to her, somehow. He didn’t want to say too much, in case she used the information to torpedo his true love.
Even though she would never have done anything of the kind.
“Okay, you don’t want me to know. That’s cool. I’ll just keep going on my best estimations. And my estimation here is that yes, a woman like me would like a big Viking with lots of hair on his chest and those arms and that belly,” she said. But somehow it didn’t help.
“Okay, now I know you’re just being nice. The belly is the wrong shape.”
“Not to me it isn’t. And you have to believe me on that, because I like what I have, and mine is round, too.
In fact, if anything, it’s rounder, and softer.
All of me is rounder and softer. Do you think I look bad?
” She raised an eyebrow. Turned, so he could see the exact way her tummy bloomed under her soft little pleated skirt.
Every bit of her knowing that he’d be kind, in the way she wanted him to be kind to himself.
But none of her expecting the way his eyes dropped to the hand she had on her hip.
To that curve. To the way she cocked her little stocking-covered leg, in a way that came very close to sliding that skirt high enough to see the top of it.
And he kept staring at all of this as he answered.
“No, because all of that looks awesome on y—on a woman,” he said.
Then he seemed to shake himself. He straightened, looking sheepish.
And of course she knew what that meant. It made perfect sense, considering he’d picked her to help him compare and contrast and base all his best dating practices on. “So you like curvy girls, then.”
“That should be obvious.”
“Big, round butts and plump boobs.”
“Don’t talk about your round butt and plump boobs to me.
Never mention round butts and plump boobs again.
Just focus on less mortifying things, like picking a reasonable date outfit for me.
Because I gotta tell you, I’ve worn shirts nicer than this.
And nobody looked at me like I was a guy on a date. ”
“Okay, so which shirt did you wear last time you went on one?”
“I don’t even know what you mean by one , here. Like, as in—”
“As in the last time you went to dinner with somebody.”
She carried on rummaging after she spoke.
So it took her a while to realize he hadn’t replied.
That he was just silent, very silent, suddenly and in a way that didn’t suggest he was considering the last disastrous dinner he had.
He was considering something else, something she should have guessed, but somehow hadn’t.
It seemed impossible, preposterous.
But she said it anyway.
“You’ve never actually been to dinner with anyone, have you,” she said, without looking around the closet door. She spoke to the shirt in her hands—an inexplicable Hawaiian one with pink palm fronds all over it. Soft as butter, and so strangely sweet smelling she wanted to plunge her face into it.
Only him answering stopped her.
“Everybody in town senses how weird I am. Who would I go to dinner with?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. There must be somebody. There has to be.”