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said, trying for soothing when I wanted to scream at him to do it already, I was losing my nerve. He nodded and lifted his arms, letting me pull off his shirt. I could barely make out the number tattooed on his shoulder, a big, blocky 58, before he moved up over me, tongue sliding from my stomach to the valley between my boobs and then to my neck. “I like you. Okay?” He whispered against my ear, slurring worse than ever. I turned my face to kiss his cheek mostly to keep myself from saying anything stupid.
    Get it done , I said to myself. Shut up and get it done .
    “You’re okay, Maggie?” He said, and I realized he expected me to answer. This wasn’t drunken rhetoric.
    “... yeah. I’m okay. I like you, too.”
    “Cool.” I heard him fumble with his belt, and was about to offer him a condom from my purse, but he pulled open the drawer of his nightstand and got one of his own. He shifted, there was a snapping sound, and I braced below him, going rigid in anticipation of... well. Sex. I guess I figured he’d ravage me like some rutting tribal beast. If the way he’d pawed me was any indication, he assumed his penis was the Hatfields, and my vagina was the McCoys, and we were at war. It didn’t bode well for the actual deed.
    The truth was, he was gentle, and slid a tiny bit inside of me as he rained kisses over my ear. I closed my eyes and forced myself to relax, sweeping the tips of my fingers over his shoulders and upper back for encouragement. He liked that and murmured, going deeper, moving over to capture my mouth in a kiss that, under any other circumstance, would have been sweet.
    For a moment, I believed it was good, that everything was good and we’d be okay, that I’d done all right by finding Ian and tomorrow I’d be a journeyman hunter.
    And then he collapsed on top of me, totally passed out.

CHAPTER FIVE
     
     
    I DIDN’T KNOW if I should laugh, cry, or put Ian in a sleeper hold. No, he already slept, that’d exacerbate the problem. I shoved his shoulder, at first to see if I could get him to wake up and finish—he was clearly capable by the feel of things—but when that proved futile, it was to get him off of me. I only half-managed the second, oozing out from under his weight so he sprawled across my right side. I stared at the wall, incredulous that what should be a simple thing had somehow managed to go so wrong.
    I wasn’t sure what I should do with myself then. Julie’d been drinking, and she told me when we made the plans that we’d be staying overnight. I wasn’t such an ass that I’d ask her to risk a DUI so I could sulk in the comfort of my home. I supposed I could socialize with other people, maybe salvage something decent out of my failed hookup, but being the lone sober person in a nest of drunken idiots wasn’t my idea of a good time.
    Screw it, I was going to bed.
    I wriggled out from under Ian to slide under his blankets, uncaring that I hogged both them and the pillows. It was his penance for failing to properly hump me. I hoped he got frostbite on his butt crack, or at the very least slept poorly because he was cold. I growled as I pounded on his pillow and rolled over, away from him, willing the sweet oblivion of sleep to distance me from what happened.
    Falling asleep quickly was a relief and a surprise. I had a hard time with it whenever my mother wasn’t around. A stupid thing to admit considering how old I was, but we’d moved around a lot when I was a kid. We didn’t go far, mostly bouncing from one house to another in the same town so she could maintain her hunting territory, but that didn’t mean I didn’t know a lot of different beds over the years. Mom was my one stable thing—my fleshy night light.
    That didn’t stop me from drooling my dreams into Ian’s bed like it was the most natural thing in the world. Maybe it was having a body right there beside me. He’d be a pretty big human shield if something went bad, and I wasn’t such a peach I