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God. How old is she? How old am I?
I just turned forty this year, but being called mister makes me feel sixty.
It was probably a bad idea to claim a wish from someone twenty years my junior. But I hadn’t glanced at her age until after I’d claimed the wish.
She rushes off to get our drinks and Marcus trains his blue eyes on me.
“So. The wish. Which one did you claim?”
I gasp, mock-scandalized. “You want to know my kinks, Marcus? I never knew you saw me that way.”
He socks me in the arm, gently enough, but it still kind of hurts.
I wince and rub at it.
“The woman,” Marcus asks. “Who’d you pick?”
“Why are you so interested?”
“Because I picked, too,” he admits with a flush.
“You claimed a wish?” Gabe asks, his voice going slightly high-pitched with surprise.
Marcus looks down at the table.
“Yeah. Well, I picked a woman. Didn’t care much about the wish.”
“What do you mean you didn’t care?” I ask, staring at him even though he won’t meet my eyes.
We’d all talked about it. Season’s Greedings. The wishes. The women. Or rather I’d talked about it. Gabe and Marcus had pretended to be uninterested.
“How do you just not care about the wish?” I ask, shaking my head. “That’s the whole brilliance of Season’s Greedings. It cuts right through the bullshit. On Tinder or whatever, you exchange three days of hollow small talk before anyone finally admits what they actually want.”
“Yeah, Tinder is mostly bots anyway,” Gabe mutters, staring at the table. “But this… I don’t know, it’s different. It forces you to be vulnerable right out of the gate.”
“Right. Exactly,” I press, leaning in a little. “She puts her absolute deepest fantasy on the line, and you get to decide if you’re the man to give it to her. It’s basically a massive green light.”
“Which is kind of the whole point of the service,” Gabe agrees with a shrug.
“Yeah, well, not for me,” Marcus mutters, shifting in his seat. “I don’t pick women based on their kinks.”
“So what, then? You pick them based on how they look?” I ask.
Never mind that I’d barely made it past her pictures myself. This isn’t about my shortcomings.
Marcus frowns. “No, not exactly. The profile has her likes and dislikes. Her personality.”
“You looking to get hitched or something, Marcus?” Gabe teases.
Marcus lets out a breath and raises his piercing blue eyes, glaring at Gabe.
Gabe holds up his hands.
“No,” Marcus says finally. “I’m just saying. I’m not as shallow as Cole.”
“A dagger through my heart!” I exclaim.
Marcus rolls his eyes but it earns a chuckle from Gabe, anyway. One out of two ain’t bad.
