I could not fight it anymore. I wanted the freedom to simply like him, to be a woman pleased with the attentions of a big, strong man who some might have considered good-looking. For he was, in his own way, his nose rather large and broken, his eyes perhaps too small for his face. His lower teeth were crooked, and one of his ears was somewhat misshapen. But all of those things together, with histowering figure and cocky manner, made him truly fine. He was a fine man, and Ididwant him. I surprised myself with this. I had always thought I liked a leaner man with a tapered waist, someone whose musculature was more defined. I had always thought I liked men like Thane.
But I liked this man. And so I looked up at him and said, “One.”
“Thank the gods,” he breathed, eyes not having left me.
I rolled my lips together to hide any satisfaction at his overtness while he paid Gertie not only for my jug but for a tin of cider.
“You ordered for me without asking what I wanted,” I griped when I should have thanked him.
He shrugged. “Barrels are all kicked except the cider. You once told me you only buy the whiskey for your patients, that you don’t like the taste.”
He was stealing my heart day by day, and all I did was mistreat him. “Thank you,” I relented.
“Thankyou,” he answered.
“For what?”
“For standing here next to me. I am the envy of every man here.”
“Surely not every man.”
Avery leaned even closer. “Every man with sight.”
Fighting a smile, I sipped. “I see you have already had some whiskey or cider tonight.”
He nodded. “I am rather drunk actually.”
The chuckle escaped my lips before I realized it did. “Drink some water tonight before bed. You will have a sore head in the morning.”
“I won’t remember,” he replied. “I will fall into my bed preoccupied by the vision of you standing there with your pretty pink mouth on that cup.”
I swallowed. His words were innocent enough, but his stare was bold.
“Is that too close to the boundary line you have drawn?” he asked.
“The boundary line?”
He drank from his own cup. “You once said, ‘refrain from discussing the shape of me.’ Is that too close to your rule? I would hate to break it.”
“I must ask a question,” I replied instead of answering him.
“Please,” he said, taking on that solemn tone he sometimes used that terrified me, that voice that held so much promise in it.
“You court me. You seek me as a wife.”
“I do.”
“Won’t you have to cross that boundary at some point should we marry?”
“You mean, as your husband I will want to—nay, I will need to—discuss the shape of you?”
The space between us was fraught with something, the way the air crackles after a lightning storm.
“Are you saying I may now, after some time has passed,” he went on when I did not speak, “discuss the shape of you again?”
“Perhaps not as vivid a description as the day we met.”
He set his cup down and ran the tip of his forefinger around the shell of my ear. “Oh yes. I was an animal that day. I won’t even blame those godsdamn trousers of yours. The fault is entirely mine. I was without decency. Just at the sight of you.”
