“That doesn’t negate your part.”
I stared down at my plate, suddenly very interested in a potato. This was the problem. He was so kind and thoughtful. Maybe it was just how he was with everyone. Maybe I was assigning meaning where there was none.
Maybe I needed to chill the fuck out.
I took another sip of wine and focused on the fact that I was eating one of the best meals of my life in a cottage in Edinburgh with a dragon who had very clearly set boundaries and was still being decent.
That counted for something.
When we were done eating, Arthur cleared the dishes off the bed.
I took a sip of my wine, then said, “We should play a game.”
He looked surprised. “A game?”
“Yes.”
“What kind?”
I thought that over. “We each get thirty seconds to tell the other an obscure fact. Something random.”
“And if one cannot think of anything in the allotted amount of time?”
“Then you have to answer a personal question.”
He thought about it seriously, becausethat’s what he did.
He nodded. “All right.”
I smiled despite myself.
“Your turn first,” I said and set a thirty-second timer on my phone.
Arthur considered the rules with the seriousness of someone deciding whether a treaty would hold.
“Timer starts now,” I told him, because if I didn’t keep this structured, my brain would start freefalling into something unhelpful and possibly romantic.
He tilted his head slightly, like he was opening a familiar drawer in his mind and checking what was inside.
“Frankensteinwas first published anonymously,” he said. “Most early reviewers assumed Percy Shelley wrote it. When Mary Shelley’s name appeared on later editions, several critics revised their praise downward.”
I gaped at him. I had known that factoid since grad school. I had lectured about it. I had argued about it with undergraduates who wanted to believe progress was linear and fairness inevitable. Most men I knew, especially the ones I’d gone to grad school with, would have expected me to be impressed by their feminist knowledge, but Arthur simply stated the fact. In fact, he seemed a little incensed at the injustice of it all.
“Early reviews were brutal after that,” I said slowly. “They called it unfeminine, overwrought, and dangerous.”
“Yes,” he said. “They preferred it when they could pretend a man had written it.”
Warmth surged through me.
“You chose that on purpose,” I said.
His mouth curved into a pleased smile. “I thought you would recognize it.”
“I did,” I said. “Immediately.”
“And?”
“And it explains an unreasonable amount of literary history. That was your thirty seconds,” I said, because I needed to anchor myself in rules before I floated off entirely. “You passed. Unfortunately.”
