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 sayinghumanin 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 soundshorrible.”
“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. Andthe spines had beencracked. 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.
