Page 93 of Experiments in Offline Dating

“Come again?”

“No innuendos!” I pointed at him with the pen.

“I wasn’t! You’re the one with the dirty mind. So your rule is no handholding?”

“Yep. You’re a real handholder, and you have these . . . calluses.”

“Calluses? You mean those rough, nasty bits of skin?”

“Yeah. It’s a thing. Don’t ask questions.” I wrote it down. “‘No unnecessary handholding.’ Okay. Anything else? And your rule is what? No knee touching?”

“Rule Number Three B. No unnecessary, lingering touches.”

“Agreed. But I’m not writing ‘lingering,’ because I’m not sure I could spell it under the influence. What else? Anything else? I feel like we can do better than this.” I bit my lip and tapped the pen on the bar.

“All right, then. If you’re askin’. No tossing your hair.” He looked away from me and threw back a swig of whiskey.

“No what?” I jutted my chin out, wondering if I’d heard wrong.

“Ah, come on. You know what I’m talking about. That thing you do.”

I lifted my hand to my hair, flipped it, and gave it a scramble. He can’t mean this. “You mean this?” My face twisted into a disbelieving question. Curls needed to be fluffed every once in a while. It had become a habit I didn’t think much about.

His hand shot out and grabbed my wrist. “Yep. No more of that.”

“What the actual hell are you talking about? This isn’t sexy! Also, no touching!”

He let go of my hand as if it had scalded him. “Look, it just, your hair smells amazing, and then it looks all . . . Hey! I don’t have to explain myself to you. Rule Three C—write it down!” He was stern, and he tapped the napkin with a blunt finger. The sound of his voice made my head swim. As did the knowledge that I’d been secretly turning him on without even knowing it. The idea burrowed under my skin and sank into me. Like a foreplay montage, my mind flew to every little moment I thought I’d seen that same look in his eyes, now that I knew what it meant.

Whooo. Holy crap! Shut it down!

I thought about pouring my glass of ice water down my pants. I was basically on fire. Good thing we were getting all of this stuff out of the way now. This was a really good idea.

“Well, fine, then. No scratching your beard.”

“My beard?” he shouted. People turned around. “Scratching my beard?”

“Yeah.”

“Now you’re just being daft. If you’re not going to take this seriously—”

I moved into his space, locked eyes, and said very slowly, “No. Scratching. Your. Beard. Because when you scratch your beard, I immediately think of your beard scratching its way up my inner thigh, and I don’t want to be hyperventilating about the thought of your tongue inside of me when I’m interviewing a sweet old couple celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Get it?”

“Shhhh. All right, all right! Keep it down. I didn’t—I mean, that’s a weird one. But okay. No beard scratching. But only if you stop saying shit like that to me. I just . . .” He adjusted his seat on his barstool. “Don’t do it.”

Well. Maybe this isn’t working after all. I was so hot that I would have let him take me on the bar right next to the drill bits.

“You shouldn’t look at me like that either,” he added.

“Fine! Three F—no looking at each other. Anything else?” I could think of a million things that turned me on. His face, his smell, his purposeful, straight-shouldered stride, his scowl, God help me, and his oh-so-rare-and-all-the-more-delicious-for-it smile. But this was getting out of hand.

“Okay, last one. You can’t . . .” He let out a long breath. “When you get in the back of the car. It’s . . . a problem.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I was riled up now. “You’re the one who made me sit back there in the first place, like a naughty kid in time-out, you fucking monster!”

He put his hands up in surrender. “You’re right. This one is all my fault. I thought it would be funny to knock you down a few pegs, but honestly, I hadn’t foreseen the whole . . . situation.”

“Situation?”