Page 72 of Stags

She chewed and swallowed. She licked her lips again and he made a noise in the back of his throat, and that hot, not-entirely-unpleasant feeling went through her again. “I trust you.”

He raised his eyebrows in surprise.

“I mean, I trust you not to take an actual bite out of me,” she said.

He just gazed at her.

She ate more of her burger. “You could reassure me.”

“I could,” he agreed. “Here’s the thing about that. I’ve always heard about how people go off with that kind of thing, like something gets triggered in the back of your brain, some switch that turns you half-feral. But it had never really happened to me before, so I guess I wasn’t sure if that was real. Then… you. And I think itisreal.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t hurt me,” she said. “You even waited until you had what I would term enthusiastic consent.”

“Good for me.” He furrowed his brow. “It did not feel like that to me. I did not feel like I was waiting or that I was even in control of myself. So, I don’t know what I’d do. I don’t know why I’m here.”

“I thought you were here to have sex with me again.”

“Is that what you want?”

“Right now I want to eat.”

He smiled again. “I like you. You’re funny.”

She didn’t think she was. Sometimes, she tried making jokes in her creative work, and her clients almost always shot it down. In her spare time, she drew strange and complicated, intricate pictures. She had a following of exactly twenty-eight people on Instagram who liked these weird digital drawings she did.

Once, when she was in her twenties, she’d done an exhibition, with actual paintings, ones she’d done in acrylics on canvas, ones that she’d priced too high, like other “real” artists. She hadn’t sold a single piece, not even towards the end when she’d marked them all down to fifteen dollars.

But that was the way it was, of course. There were the things in life that you wanted, and then there were the things that people wanted from you. They didn’t overlap much.

“I do want you,” he said. “But not if you’re afraid of me.”

She looked him up and down and her stomach did that hot rush of unpleasantness again. “I think I am afraid of you.”

“Okay, yeah, maybe I can smell that,” he said, chagrined.

“I like it, though,” she said, also chagrined.

“Good,” he said. “I won’t hurt you.” A long pause. “Much.”

She snickered.

“I’ll stop if you say,” he said, but he said this to her cleavage, not her face. “I promise.”

“I trust you,” she said, sighing. “But I don’t know how smart I am in that way.”

“So, you’ll let me,” he said.

She gave him a knowing smile. “I’m thinking about it.”

RORA PROBABLY SHOULDhave argued more with Stockton about buying her things, but he was so insistent that it wasn’t anything, that they were just friends, that she decided to let it go.

She made a mental note to pay for something else to make up for the price of the books. At some point, she’d buy his dinner or something. Then everything would be fair and equal between them, the way it should be between friends.

They started back to the Center together, but they were waylaid when they came to a little street fair, probably set up precisely to be a tourist trap for the deerkin who were staying at the Center this weekend.

There were pavilions with cookies and cupcakes, a bakery stall, and a few little stalls with jewelry.

She and Stockton got separated. He was looking at some knives with handcarved wooden handles, and she was examining strings of glass beads.

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