He shrugged. “I guess I’m a man of contradictions.”
That was true. One minute he was kissing her possessively, like he had the right to just grab her on an elevator. Or on a ferry. The next, he was making her late-night platonic nachos as if she were his frat brother after a night of bar-hopping.
“So what about Mr. Tinder? Turn out to be not your type?”
He wasn’t going to let it go, was he? Well, if they really were friends, why not? She had planned on doing the postmortem with Cassie next week, so how different could this be? She cleared her throat. “He was really nice. Polite, into real estate—lawyer by day, house flipper by night. And he was into me—at least initially.” God, this was so embarrassing.
“Then you turned into a werewolf, and he changed his mind?”
She laughed, grateful to him for putting her at ease. “No. In the end, I just couldn’t do it.” She searched his face. Eyes narrowed, he didn’t look happy. “He said I wasn’t the hookup type.”
“Maybe you aren’t.”
“But I want to be. I’m trying to be.”
“Because you’re out to prove something to yourself about Mason.”
“I don’t know.” She blew out a frustrated breath. Wasn’t a hookup supposed to be simple? Why did it all have to be so complicated? “I guess I’m just defective when it comes to…” She waved her hand back and forth, still unable to say the damned word, hoping he would get the point.
“Fucking?”
Alrighty then. She nodded, a little bit miserable and a little bit ashamed.
“That’s just not true.” His voice had gone all low and raspy and it went straight to her core. “I guarantee that’s not true.”
“How do you know?” Why was she arguing with him? Still, she couldn’t help herself. “I couldn’t…deliver the goods with you, either.”
He was seated perpendicular to her at the island, and when she looked down at her hands, mortified, he tipped her chin up with his finger. God, she wanted to grab the hand that was attached to it and…do something with it. Paste it onto her body. Stuff it into her mouth. Maybe there was something to be said for chemistry. Maybe she wasn’t inherently bad at hookups, just that she and Greg hadn’t had the right spark.
After looking into her eyes for a long moment, he let go of her, and a wicked grin spread across his face. “It doesn’t matter. I know enough to know you would have been spectacular. You were spectacular.”
She shook her head. “How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
She hadn’t really meant to get into a discussion about this, but what the hell? If anyone could give her advice on the topic, it was him. “Hook up with women like it’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing! I love women.”
She held up her hands. She hadn’t been trying to insult him. “That’s not what I mean. It’s something I aspire to! I want to find a guy and keep things causal, but I just…” Gah, she sounded like a total idiot.
He rested his chin on his hands, looking thoughtful. “I don’t think it’s something you can just do or not do. I think it comes from your whole attitude about love and relationships.”
“You always say you don’t do them.”
“I don’t. Which you shouldn’t mistake for a disrespect for women.”
“I don’t—anymore.” It was true. She’d always called Dax a womanizer, but spending so much time with him recently had shown her that it wasn’t so black and white with him. He was an honest womanizer, which should be a contradiction but somehow wasn’t.
“I just have no interest in getting emotionally entangled with a woman. So since I operate from that underlying principle, it’s actually easy to have casual relationships as long as everyone is clear about the terms. I don’t think you operate from that assumption.”
“I want to, though.”
He shrugged.
“So you’ve never had a real relationship? One you were emotionally invested in?”
He looked down at his hands and was silent for so long that she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Finally, though, he said, “Once. In college.”
“What happened?”
He looked up. His eyes were empty. All of his usual spark was gone. “I tried to break up with her, and she killed herself.”
She gasped. “I’m so sorry.” When he didn’t say anything more, she asked, “What was her name?”
“Allison.”
“You have to know it wasn’t your fault.”
“I do. Or I came to understand that—my parents forced me to see a shrink. Allison was…not well.” He cleared his throat. “The relevant point is that it made me see that relationships aren’t worth it. The brutal truth is that I was never that into her. She asked me out initially, and we just sort of stayed together through inertia.”