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“Didn’t work out?”
“Do you care?”
“Yes,” he said. He said it very simply. Just “yes” as if what he wanted to say was “obviously I care.”
She shook her head, not at Ian but at her own stupidity for thinking she could have had something meaningful with this jerk she’d dated for a week.
“He was cute, he was smart, he was a good kisser, and he thought my art was awesome. But after a couple week he said he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t date a professional welder when he worked as a teller at a bank. His friends would never let him hear the end of it, he said. He just couldn’t date a woman, no matter how hot—his words, not mine—who came off as more of a man than he did. I said that was fine. I didn’t want to date a guy who was less of a man than I was, either. He called me a couple nice words after that and then he was gone. Good riddance to him and his poor little ego.”
“You have to stop dating beneath you.”
“I slept with you.”
“Exactly my point.”
She laughed. “You’re cute,” she said. “I wish you weren’t.”
“It’s a curse.” He grinned at her. “You know, you could have told that guy you weren’t going to be a professional welder anymore.”
“I could have, yeah. But it doesn’t matter. I can’t sleep with a guy I don’t respect. A man who can’t respect a woman doing a supposedly ‘man’s job’ isn’t going to respect a woman who does ‘women’s work,’ either. I’m glad it ended before it got serious.”
“You feel that way about us, too? Glad it ended before it got serious?”
“It was already serious before you kissed me, Ian.”
“I didn’t know. I had no idea you... It never occurred to me you had feelings for me,” he said. “Except attraction. That I’d noticed.”
“You look as good in your suits as out of them and that’s saying something.”
“Let me take you out tonight,” he said. “Dinner. Then you can come back to the house and help me with the fireplace. We’ll hang out. It’ll be fun. It’ll be normal. We can end things on a good note instead of feeling shitty about what happened.”
“Or didn’t happen.”
“Or didn’t happen, yeah.”
“Do you even like me?” she asked. “As a person, I mean. I insult you, I welded truck nuts to your car, I scare the newbies and I make eighteen dollars an hour while you make eighteen dollars a minute.”
“Dad makes eighteen dollars a minute. I make low six figures. I’m on salary, you know. I don’t own the company. I just run it. If I screw up, I get in trouble or get fired just like anyone else who works for my father.”
“Except the rest of us aren’t senator’s sons who are going to inherit the family business someday no matter how badly we screw up.”
“Dad’s only a state senator.”
“And your ski chalet is only a fixer-upper.”
They were silent a long moment. She knew he was waiting for her to bend a little, to say yes to dinner, to say yes to ending on a good note instead of on this...whatever this was...this awkward painful note.
“I’m going to miss you,” he said. “You keep me honest.”
“I insult you. Often.”
“Somebody has to, right?” he asked. “Everybody else sucks up to me.”
“That’s the damn truth,” she said.
“Please? Hang out with me tonight. Take a look at this thing in my house and see if you can fix it. Then we can go to the brewery. My treat. A thank-you for your help. We can pretend to be friends for one evening, right? Then maybe eventually we won’t have to pretend?”
“Why do you want to be my friend?”
