Page 55 of The Woman with the Handcuffs

And my body went right ahead and forgot everything I’d just spent the last hour convincing it of.

I exhaled hard and made my way to my bed, grabbing my book, and curling up to read.

And it was just… nice.

I’d never really been around other readers before. Certainly never shared a room with one.

My most recent ex was a video game addict, and as much as I tried to engage in parallel play—where I sat next to him while he played and I read a book—the constant yelling and cursing used to make it impossible for me to focus.

At some point, Gav snapped his book shut and set it on the nightstand. “Mind if I turn the light off? You’ve been staring at the same page for twenty minutes.”

“Hm? Yeah. Yeah, I can’t focus tonight,” I said, putting my book down and sliding down on the bed as he turned off the light.

The room blanketed in darkness broken only by the glow of the under-sink light in the bathroom.

“Gav?”

“Mm?”

“What’s your book about?”

“The unyielding pressure of middle-class existence and the soul-sucking grief that comes with knowing if you’d made just one different decision, your life would be completely different. It’s a comedy.”

A snort escaped me at that.

“What’s your book about?”

There was no stopping the groan that escaped me at that.

“Looks like one of those books with a shadow fae who has a heart of stone, but he melts for the heroine who had no idea she had any kind of powers until, magically, one day, they showed up exactly when she needed them, allowing her to defeat a bad guy, but not before she got critically injured, so the shadow fae could find her and vow to burn the whole world down to get vengeance for her.”

Another groan slipped out.

“Are you embarrassed?”

“You’re reading high-brow lit fic. And sixty percent of this book so far is steam.”

“So what? You like what you like. I’m not judging. I’ve got a weakness for locked-door thrillers, even though I can guess the killer from the first chapter. Not everything you read has to be some literary masterpiece. We can just enjoy the shit we like. Was it good?”

“What?”

“The steam?”

My stomach flipped.

“Yeah.” God, I sounded so breathy.

“Maybe I’ll read it.”

“No, you won’t. But thanks for making me not feel weird about it.”

“I think you’re going to make yourself feel weird about it anyway.”

“You’re not wrong.”

“Sounds exhausting.”

“It is. And before you say something like, ‘no one is thinking about you,’ I’ve heard that a million times. But the problem with that argument is… I am. I think about people. All the time.”