Page 28 of Thank you, Next

“A chauffer never would have hauled your ass up and down stairs.” Will put a plastic take-out container in front of her. “Are you hungry?”

“You don’t have to feed me.” Alex felt like she was truly intruding at this point and made to move around the counter. Will blocked her with his body and they stared each other down for a long moment. Just like when he’d fixed up her knee the other day, there was a moment that felt like it stretched out longer than the few seconds that it had to have been. She felt as though his unfathomably dark eyes were looking straight through her. The urge to touch his face, feel the texture of his beard on her fingers if she couldn’t feel it against other parts of her skin, was almost too much for her.

As much as she’d hated needing him to pick her up from the dentist, she hated the needy feeling that he stirred up in her belly even more. The last thing she needed was to feel want when she looked at Will Harkness. The only thing they had in common was Lexi, and that was the only reason he’d hauled her ass up and down stairs after her dentist appointment gone awry. The look in his eyes wasn’t anything but frustration that she wasn’t bending to his whims and eating his soup like a good girl so he could lord it over her for weeks and weeks.

She’d caught a look at herself in the bathroom mirror before Will had returned with soup and a bad attitude. She knew her hair was sticking up and out of its usual ponytail and she had half of a Hapsburg jaw from the swelling. All that on top of smeared mascara and wrinkled clothes. Will definitely wasn’t feeling the same kick of attraction she was. Not ever, but especially not at the moment.

So, instead of going up on her tiptoes and kissing him, which was what she would do if this were the movie version of her life, she sat down and ate her soup.

“You have to stop this.”

“Stop what? I’m eating my soup.”

“You have to stop going to find all your exes.”

“You have to stop telling me what to do.” Alex scowled at him, even though the soup was really good. Possibly the best soup she’d ever had. She would not tell him that, though.

“Well, someone has to keep you safe.” She didn’t like that he was implying that she couldn’t keep herself safe. She’d been keeping herself safe long before she’d met Will.

“I wasn’t at risk when I went to go see Andrew.”

Will leaned back against the counter opposite her and crossed his arms over his chest. When had he started doing that all the time? Or had she just noticed that he did that all the time because she was allowing herself to see him as a man and not the first guy who had thrown her over for The One.

“I don’t like that guy.” Well, there went any hope of a business deal with Andrew. Once Will decided he didn’t like someone, he was done with them. That’s why any thoughts she had about how well he filled out a T-shirt were futile. He had never really started with her, but that didn’t matter. He’d shut her down. “I don’t like the way he looks at you.”

“Oh please. You seem to forget that you are not my actual male relative. Even if you were, you’d have no business telling me who I can’t go talk to.”

“And what about the dentist?” Will gave her a meaningful look. “Did you go in expecting not to be able to walk yourself out?”

Okay, maybe he had a point. That she was sitting here was a testament to how wrong her visit to Lyle’s office had gone. On the one hand, she was glad that her tooth was fixed. On the other, she’d had to rely on Will Harkness for an extraction.

“I still haven’t figured out why every man I date ends up with the next person they date after me.”

“Which proves that this is pointless.” She hated how smug he sounded.

“I have gotten a couple of useful insights.” Her head might still be foggy, but she couldn’t help but notice that both Andrew and Lyle had had a certain look in their eye when they talked about their wives—gratitude.

Will looked skeptical. “And?”

“I think that dating me is such a harrowing experience that they are so grateful they find a nice person after me. So they marry them.” It almost felt better to think of herself as a bitch on wheels than it did to think that she might be intentionally self-destructive.

“Fuck that.” Will grimaced.

“Well, what do you think it is?” Alex took another spoonful of soup because this conversation was making her hungry. And she thought she’d said enough.

“Dudes are dumb. All of us.” There was a hint of something on his face that she had never seen before. Will had always been resolute—a pain in the ass, but he’d never seemed unsure of himself. “And you’re very much not dumb. You see right through the games and shit that we try to play with you. I can’t imagine very many guys want to deal with that.”

“So I should just give up? Like you?” That wasn’t fair, but he’d just called her essentially undatable, and she was desperate to turn things around on him. “You haven’t dated anyone since separating.”

“No time,” he grunted at her, and she knew that she’d made a direct hit. “I don’t want you going around on your own anymore, talking to these guys.”

“Of all the patriarchal, bullshi—”

“I’ll go with you.”

Alex stood up and walked close to him, getting into his space. “I don’t need to have some big strong man to protect me.”

“I’m not saying that you’re weak.” His words were quiet, but she knew that they were meant to soothe her, and she was in no mood to be soothed. “I’m saying that guys get weird when you throw failure in their face. And”—he tucked one of the many pieces of hair that had fallen out of her ponytail behind her ear—“any man that’s ever lost you is going to view that as a failure.”