“No,” she says when she finally stops laughing. “You’re right, you two wouldn’t get along. My mom would hate you, too.”
“Why is that?”
“Too handsome,” she says without missing a beat.
“Excuse me?”
Jessa nods. “She doesn’t trust men who are too handsome. She says they’re the ones who’ll cheat on you and not feel guilty about it. She actually warned me about Dane when I first brought him home.”
“Dane?” I scoff. “That motherfucker looks like he fell out of the Ugly Tree and hit every branch on the way down.” She stops short and looks at me curiously. I just shrug. “I was curious about the man you agreed to marry. I did my research. He didn’t impress me.”
“Yeah, well, you’re smarter than I am then. He impressed me when we first met,” she says with a sigh. “And he was the best-looking guy I’d ever seen.”
“Present company not included, I’m sure.”
She shoots me an annoyed glance. “That first night I brought him to family dinner, Mom and I were doing the dishes after we finished eating and she asked me if I was sure about him. When I told her that I was, she told me to be careful because some men were ‘too pretty to be faithful.’”
“Is your father a good-looking man?” I ask.
She nods. “He was when he was young.”
“That explains her theory. He cheated on her, didn’t he?”
Jessa nods. “Yeah… You know, she might have a point.”
I roll my eyes. “Of course she doesn’t.”
“No?”
“There are men who cheat and men who don’t,” I say. “It depends on the man, not his bone structure.”
“What about you?” she asks. “Which category do you fall into?”
“A class all my own.”
“Jesus. Do you ever dial it down, your whole shtick?”
I smirk at her intensely annoyed face. I know I made the right decision by demanding she pay me “interest.” I'm not ready to throw this woman back into her boring world.
I’m not sure she’s ready to go back, either.
I leave the chair I’m sitting on and join her on the sofa. She tenses when I sit down next to her. Only a few inches separate us. Her heat mingles with mine.
Her phone lights up on the coffee table, but she completely ignores it.
“Want to get that?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “No.”
“Seeing someone?”
“The only relationship I’m in at the moment is a non-consensual one with a man I can’t seem to escape from.”
I smile. “‘Non-consensual’ is harsh.”
“But accurate.”
“You had the option of leaving and never seeing me again,” I remind her. “Then you decided to steal my phone, forcing me to follow you. I gave you the option of returning it and ending things there. Then you chose to keep it. In my view, that doesn’t sound like the actions of a woman who’s trying to avoid me.”