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Erik shrugged. “You been mated a long time, you get bored. You want to try things.”
“Not me,” said Gunnar, sitting back in his chair. “Because if I was mated to a woman, her body would be for my eyes only.”
Hiljd’s felt a strange flutter in her stomach. So, she said, “And yet, the patriarchy is dead,” just dripping sarcasm.
Gunnar’s grin widened. He was still looking at her in thatway, and she liked it. No, she hated it. It was awful.Hewas awful. He was, well, nothing even remotely like Valdemar. “Okay, so I’ll start. The patriarchy is, uh, like when men own everything and women can’t have property and they’re not allowed to vote or learn to read or whatever, and it’s bad. It’s totally bad. But it’s been over for, like, a hundred years.”
She let out a breath.
Lucy nudged her. “I think I’m going to the naked room.”
“What?” said Hiljd.
“I’m not going to take off my clothes, just… it seems like everyone’s there,” said Lucy with a shrug. “I’ll stay if you want. Or you can come with me.”
“You going to the naked room?” said Gunnar, still looking at her in that awful-good way of his.
“No, I mean, I think it’s my job now to drag Gunnar kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century,” said Hiljd.
Lucy winked at her. “Have fun.”
Shit, was it that obvious that she was attracted to the sexist caveman? Hiljd squared her shoulders. She should go, shouldn’t she, not stay here and engage in whatever kind of argument/flirting this was? It was probably the definition of toxic. She gave Lucy a wave. “You have fun, too.” Then she turned back to Gunnar as Lucy wandered off towards the naked room. “So, anyway, the patriarchy is, um, it’s hierarchy.”
“Hierarchy?” Gunnar squinted.
“That means, like—”
“I know what it means. I’m not stupid,” Gunnar growled. “I own my own construction business, and that actually requires a great deal of intelligence, contrary to popular belief.”
“Is it popular belief that business owners are stupid?” she challenged.
“Hierarchy,” he scoffed, not answering her question, which had been rhetorical, to be fair. “That would mean that everything, literally everything, is the patriarchy. The government, the justice system, the Miss America pageant.”
Hiljd shrugged.
“So how would you organize things without patriarchy, since it’s so bad and evil and everything else.”
“Did I say patriarchy was evil?”
“Patriarchy is aboutmenbeing in control of things, which you think is unnatural and—”
“I’m not saying it’s unnatural,” she said. “It’sprimitive. It’s the way primitive societies were structured. We are not primitive anymore, so we can modify those structures to eliminate elements that are bad for everyone.”
“Eliminate hierarchy?”
“Eliminate the elements of hierarchy that serve to keep the powerful powerful and the weak weak,” she said, lifting her chin. “Yeah, we denigrate people who work in construction. Why do you think that is?”
He dragged his hand over his beard. “Patriarchy?”
She shrugged.
He poked a finger into the arm of the couch where he was sitting. “But look, I’m not a bad guy.”
“Well, that’s debatable,” she said with a shrug.
He let out a disbelieving laugh. “Oh, man.” He clutched his chest. “Right here. You got meright here. You don’t even know me.”
“I know lots of things about you from this very brief conversation we’ve had,” she said.
