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He laughed, coming over with a box of teas—peppermint, gingerbread, sugarplum. He handed them to her and went over to put a saucepan of water on the stove. “Yeah, I guess I should have figured that about you.”
She sorted through the tea and selected sugarplum. “What can I say? I live to threaten men and make them realize how pointless they are to, well, everything.”
He snorted, coming back to her with a mug that said,If You Touch my Beard I will Touch your Butt. “Put your tea bag in here?”
She dropped it in.
He went and set her mug down next to his. He selected gingerbread and put it in his cup. “How pointless could I really be? I mean, you needed me to get knocked up, didn’t you?”
“This is going to be a long eighteen years,” she said.
He turned to look at her. “So, that’s how you want to do it? Like, uh, like we’re divorced and doing some kind of shared custody thing?”
“Is there another way?”
He fixed her with a look.
She had to admit it made her stomach turn over. All of the air whooshed out of her lungs.
“How not into me are you?” he said.
“What?” She was laughing.
“I mean, like, would you be willing to maybe entertain the idea of, uh, of…?”
“Of dating?” She was stunned. “You don’t mean that. Do you mean that?”
He put a hand on his chest. “I watched the Barbie movie.”
She let out a guffaw. “You did not.”
He nodded. “I did.”
“Because of me?”
He spread his hands.
“Tangles and briars,” she breathed.
“You swear like them,” he said, and went back to the stove. He gazed down into the saucepan.
“Oh, excuse me,” she said. “Ancestors preserve us. Better?”
He glanced at her over his shoulder. “I’m not signing up to be a villain, okay? I’m not accepting blame for anything at all, just because I happen to be male. And I’m not all about being whiny, either. But anyone who wants to keep perpetrating unfair power structures that serve to hurt innocent people… like… well, that’s not me either.” He turned back to the stove.
She wandered across the room. “Because of me?”
He shrugged again. “I don’t know. You know what they say about echo chambers. We all just talk to people who agree with us all the time and we get stuck. And I’m not… I’m not afeministor something now.”
“Of course not.” She chuckled softly. “What would this dating be like?”
The water was boiling. He took the saucepan off the stove and poured the water over the tea bags in the two mugs. “What kind of question is that? It would be like dating. Except, you know, we already know that we find each other attractive and that we have great sex and you’re, you know, already pregnant with my kid, which…” He looked up at her. “It’s a shock, but I like it.”
She raised her eyebrows. “You know, we don’t really know any of those things.”
“It feels like, uh, just getting something I wanted without having to do all this stupid work for it, kind of like a Christmas present—wait, what? What don’t we know? You don’t think I’m attractive?”
She let out a helpless laugh. She liked him, actually. He was… why did she want totouchhim?
