Page 65 of Stags

She had expected him to be the kind of guy who was extremely confident, who portrayed himself as very effective at everything. She had not expected this. It wasn’t exactly humility, admittedly, but it was something less than the kind of arrogance she’d expected. “Just adequate?”

He shrugged. “I do what I can, but I’m not in a position in the firm where I’m the guy calling the shots, really. Other people are doing that.”

“Do you want to be the guy calling the shots?”

“Not really,” he said. “I like to have a certain amount of freedom, I guess, but I don’t necessarily need to be in charge. I just don’t appreciate being micromanaged. What about you? I guess you like calling the shots?”

She considered. “I guess I don’t mind it when other people are in charge of me as long as they’re competent. But when they aren’t, it annoys me, because I know I’d be doing a better job.”

“How often are the people in charge competent, though?”

She ducked down her head, laughing. “Okay, okay, you’re not wrong. I hold people to high standards. But it’s not because I want to be, like, in charge of things or calling the shots. I just want things done right.”

“I can respect that,” he said. “I get what you’re saying.”

“Really?” She smiled at him. “I get the feeling that if we hadn’t done whatever we did out there, you wouldn’t be so understanding of me and my positions.”

He shook his head. “I said it before, though, you were the one who was aggressively insulting.”

“You said that thing about being incompetent!”

“I mean…” He looked up at the ceiling, smirking. “That was a dick thing to say, maybe, but I was just dishing it back out at you.”

“You’ve said other things,” she said. “That thing about gatekeeping?”

“Well, that’s just true,” he said. “Or at least, it should be. Whenever male attention gets to the point where it’s overriding female choice, things are out of balance. Women are the ones who have to invest more in their offspring, and they should get to choose who invades their body and tries to use it to make the next generation.”

She set down her fork. What to even say to that? Women invested more in their offspring? Seriously? He wouldn’t evenconsiderthat men could invest in their offspring?

“What?” he said. “This is basic science, okay? You take any creature, whether it’s a sentient one or not, any creature that engages in sexual reproduction, and the female has to work harder than the male to make the baby. It’s her body that grows it. It’s just obvious that she has more at stake than the male. Maybe it’s a little different with birds, but you have a lot of paternal investment there, and you also have more pair bonding and—”

“You’re making this weird,” she said. “I’m not a gatekeeper.”

“Instinctively, you want the best for your offspring, you want to mate with a man who will create the strongest offspring.”

“You’re feeling really good about yourself right now and you’re trying to—”

“No, no, I’m not sayingI’myour best choice or something. No, you wanted me to be a way so I pretended to be that way to get laid. This is also science.”

“You have an odd idea of what science is.” She picked her fork back up and speared a penne noodle, because she had ordered a whole big mess of pasta because she was actually pretty hungry after whatever they’d even done out there. “You’re not talking about science, you’re talking about the way people make decisions, and you’re acting like they can’t, like some force is controlling them.”

“I think it kind of is,” he said with a shrug.

She chewed and swallowed the penne. “No, you’re just using that an excuse for being a dick.”

“Okay,” he said, laughing softly. “Don’t hold back there.”

“I never do,” she said firmly.

He regarded her. “Got it,” he said softly.

“What’s that look?” she said.

He ate another fry. “I don’t mean to make excuses for myself, but maybe you’re right. Maybe it could come across as if I’m not holding people to accountability. I don’t mean it that way, though. I mean to be descriptive. This is the way thingsare. You might wish they were a different way, but when you start seeing the world the way it actually is, it’s… accurate.”

She snorted. “And the accuracy seems to always fall in ways that mean that women have to work harder than men.”

“No, just womendo,” he said.

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