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She waited.
He ducked his head back down. “Nothing to talk about,” he echoed. Then he loped over to his own desk. Did he look sort of dejected?
She tilted her head to one side. Shit. Wait, he had thought that they didn’t mesh, right?
No, there was that look in his eyes, that look of hope, so he had.
She let out a breath.
It would be fine.
It would definitely be fine.
DECKER STARED AT Essence from across the room, leaning back in his desk chair, running a pencil through his fingers and back again.
So, the sex had been bad.
Really bad.
Like, he-hadn’t-had-an-orgasm bad. He’d sort of faked one, which… he’d never done that in his life. It was just… he couldn’t… she seemed to hate it so much, and she hated everything he tried, and then he felt guilty about coming but the sex was still happening and the only way it ended is if he did come, so, he pretended.
Then he went into the bathroom and threw away the condom, and when he came back to the bedroom, she was getting dressed and saying she’d sleep better in her own bed.
They hadn’t even slept together. Like, they’d had sex, but they’d slept separately.
He hadn’t slept at all really. His bed sort of smelled like her—smelled like sex—and he still had a hard-on, which he’d felt guilty about, you know, seeing to, even after she was gone. So, he’d tossed and turned, waiting for it to recede on its own. When it never did, he finally jerked off.
Then he’d laid awake for several more hours feeling like shit about all of it.
He liked her, that was the thing.
He’d been sort of low-key obsessed with Essence Quill for a long time. He guessed you couldn’t really be low-key obsessed, though. So, he was really full-on obsessed, and he supposed this should cure that.
Eventually.
Tangles and briars.
She was an elf. She was short and cute and hourglass-shaped. She thought she was chubby. Once they’d gotten in a conversation about it.
She’d been like, “Oh, don’t watch me rearranging my jeans, here. It’s not my fault that suddenly we all have to wear waistlines all the way up to here, which are not even flattering if your stomach isn’t insanely flat.”
He’d been like, “Who wants women to have flat stomachs?”
She’d been like, “Everyone in western civilization.”
He’d been like, “I think all men want women to look exactly like you.” Because she had this heart-shaped ass that was perfection and she used to wear skinny jeans that would hug her thighs in a way that made his own pants feel tight, and her waist was small. Well, maybe smallish? In proportion to the perfection of her ass, it was small, anyway. Which was all that mattered to men. Or, anyway, to him.
He was a fucking gargoyle. His kind tended to the broad and huge, and he didn’t want a woman he was going to break.
He remembered, after he’d said that, she’d given him a funny look, a sort of deer-in-the-headlights look.
He’d been like, trying to take the pressure off, “I’m just saying, women say this shit because they want men to compliment them, so, look, you’re fucking hot, okay? Happy?”
“That is not why women say things like that!”
“No?”
“No, it’s because we actually feel very insecure because there’s an insane amount of pressure on us to look a certain way, and it becomes attached to our feelings of worth as a person or whatever. It’s not just fishing for compliments, you asshole. And it doesn’t even mean anything if you say that you’re just complimenting me to mollify me.”
