Page 37 of Based on You

I looked up at him. "Can you love someone romantically without lusting after them?"

He swallowed hard. Then he turned away and picked up another empty box, keeping his back to me. "I mean, I get what you mean," he conceded. "But putting it so plainly on the page, isn't that like an instructional manual? Why not let your readers' imaginations carry it instead?"

I stopped folding. "What do you have against it?"

He shrugged, still not looking at me. "Women carry a lot of fantasies. A lot of complicated ideas. What happens when they meet a real man who doesn't share those same ones? Or a man who just isn't as—" He paused, choosing his words. "—equipped as the fictional characters she reads about?"

The pause before equipped ran longer than the sentence needed. He was either asking about skill or about something more anatomical, and either way, he wasn't asking it as a hypothetical.

"There's a huge difference between books and reality," I said, careful. "I can't speak for all women, but I know what I'm reading is fiction. Real life is a different thing."

He nodded, but his sharp jaw sat a little tighter than it had a moment ago.

"Still. It would make your partner self-conscious. He'd be constantly trying to outdo what he physically can't match."

I set the sweater down. "I'm not responsible for managing a grown man's fragile ego. If he feels insecure next to literal fictional characters, that's his problem to solve, not mine."

He stared at me, then laughed, a deep sound, his head dipping forward. "That's really something, Violet."

"Why do you ask?"

He shrugged. "Only curious." He picked up a thick stack of books and set them gently into the box. "Has any real man you've been with ever met your high expectations?"

My jaw nearly hit the floor. "I can't believe you're interrogating me about my sex life right now."

He looked unbothered. "Do you find the topic uncomfortable?"

"It makes a person assume you have an ulterior reason for asking."

"What do you think my reason is?"

I looked at him, holding my tongue.

The answer that sprang to mind, the one sitting heavy right behind my teeth, was that he was asking because he was interested. Because he wanted to know what I expected, and whether he could meet it. Because a man didn't interrogate a woman about her sexual expectations unless he was plotting to become relevant to the answer.

That was the confident answer my instincts fed me. It was also, very possibly, the delusional answer of a woman who'd been secretly writing a steamy slow-burn romance novel about her boss for months and had started dangerously confusing her own fiction with her reality.

I was not going to say any of that out loud.

"I don't know," I lied instead. "So, will you finally tell me why you're asking?"

He smiled, wicked. "Tell me, Violet, are you at all curious about mine?"

My heartbeat climbed into my throat.

"Our conversations are always crossing lines," I managed. "Why do we keep leaning into that instead of just being normal friends?"

He burst out laughing, a bright sound that wiped the grief from his face and made him look years younger for a second. "That's really good. All right. Let's talk about something else. Tell me about yourself."

I thought about the request a moment.

There wasn't much to say. The only real things I could point to were the secrets I never spoke out loud to anyone: my fractured relationship with my family, my unconditional friendship with Sloane, and the terrifying fact that I was standing in a messy room with the man I'd been writing a romance novel about for months, and he was casually asking me to tell him about myself. None of those were things I could confess.

"I really don't have anything interesting," I deflected.

He shook his head, refusing to let me hide. "I don't believe that." He looked at me steady, piercing. "I look at you and I think you're just like an onion."

I burst out laughing, the tension breaking. "What do you mean by that? I'm not an onion."