“Then I’m glad you agree with me,” Abi replied with a grin, genuinely happy to have a likeminded person sitting across from her. “The worst place I have ever found myself was a philosophy class, full of white men from wealthy backgrounds, pretending they knew anything about suffrage or bondage so they could sound intelligent. You should have heard them, honestly. Not one of them had read any source materials or researched for themselves and it ended up being like daycare. I didn’t know much but I knew more than those pricks.”
Abi snorted in laughter at him, having to cough to keep from choking on her coffee. “Honey, I am definitely in some kind of trauma state at the moment, everyone living here pretty much is. This isn’t normal life. 20 kids aren’t normal life. We’re all so fucked up here. It is beautiful.”
Boy had she re-lived that moment of her night again and again; not so much for the helpful man-saviour aspect but for the rush of sheer adrenaline, attraction and lust she had felt for him in that moment. Abi had barely been able to keep her hands off him, wanting to jump his bones. At least she’d waited until she was a little drunker before propositioning him. “Oh no, honey, you beat his ass down in a single punch. And he was tall and built and fired up for a fight and you floored him completely. If that’s not a beat down, then I don’t know what is.”
Her eyes sparkled when he talked about Harry Potter, and actually reading the damn things. Abi wondered if he had gotten hooked in them as much as most adults did, as childhood flashbacks and escapism from the real world. “And what do you think about them?” she asked, interestedly. “Good, bad, bit of both?”
After eating another spoonful and licking said spoon clean, she caught that hint of a look in his eyes, his gaze focussed on her lips. Fascinating. So this was the flirty game he wanted to play; the slow burn tease that had worked before. Abi was game for it. “I wouldn’t say yes if you did,” she retorted, arching an eyebrow at him. “Neither would you be the first to ask me and I turn down. And aren’t you technically still married?”