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 isfine 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, itcanterrify 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 ofLord 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 seemedextensive. 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.
It reminded her of movies about aliens that made themselves human, and learned human things, but didn’t actually know how tobehuman. Being human was baffling to them, full of bizarre, unspoken rules and hidden things everybody took for granted. They didn’t understand someone running a red light didn’t mean that red lights should always be run. They just hit the gas when they got to one.
Like in the movieStarman, she thought. That kind of thing.
