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Archer leaned forward on the glass counter next to the register and rested his forearms on the aluminum frame. He was careful not to smudge the glass. A stack of receipts lay in front of him for the various ingredients he used to make onigiri—rice balls—and bean-paste filled buns. He needed to tone back the treats for the anime club meetings. Sure, it was a tax write-off, since they were a community-college club. And if he was honest with himself, he enjoyed hosting them for weekly screenings.
The problem came down to money; it wasn’t flowing in the comic shop as it had in the past. The club members weren’t buying like they used to, and he didn’t know if he could afford the added expense much longer.
He sank onto a stool behind him. He was bummed Tori hadn’t been able to make it. Again. He might have been worried the kiss scared her off, but he knew she spent the entire day working. He desperately wished he could get her to take a stand with the people who worked for her. Point out that screw-ups wouldn’t be tolerated, instead of fixing the problems for them. But she insisted it was better not to rock the boat.
Wishing wouldn’t solve anything with Tori. He needed to concentrate on business. If he got his latest project off the ground, he wouldn’t need to tell the anime club to find a different place to hang out on the weekends. Charging them for the snacks didn’t feel right. He turned his attention back to his laptop, eyes glazing over when he looked at the search-engine optimization information again. The website was his attempt to bring in business on a national scale. He had to get his name on the radar, and he didn’t have a lot of money left, so he was pecking through the process himself.
Tori offered to have her future sister-in-law look at it for him. She insisted Gwen was a genius at this stuff. Archer couldn’t ask something like that, though. Not for free, and not from a friend of a friend.
Fortunately, he’d picked up enough from Zane over the years that he knew his way around most of the back-end technology. Zane. Archer’s mood dropped another notch.
A bell chimed, drawing him out of his plummeting mood, and he looked at the door. He pushed a smile onto his face for the distributor from his favorite independent comic company. “Hey, man.”
Archer liked Elliot. The guy didn’t give him crap about his order numbers being down, he had a sense of humor, and he never seemed to know if he dressed the salesman or the fanboy part. He tended to wear all black—the universal uniform of the geek who didn’t want to put time into their wardrobe—but instead of T-shirts and tattered jeans, he donned more professional corduroy slacks and button-down shirts.
Elliot lounged against a nearby wooden back-stock rack. “I’ll put you down for five hundred copies of our next month’s releases?”
Even when things had been good, he couldn’t have moved that many issues. “Sure. And toss in a thousand action figures, too.”
“So what have you been up to?” Elliot asked.
They bullshitted for a couple of hours, and as the sun vanished behind the mountains, Archer realized he needed to close up soon. He tried not to acknowledge that no one else had come in the shop during Elliot’s visit.
A familiar car pulled up out front. Tori had broken free of her self-imposed shackles for the night. That was a bright spot. He turned back to the conversation. Why did seeing her make him so happy? Tori stopped by all the time, and it had never before put this kind of smile on his face.
Then again, he’d never before had memories like those of the kiss, to draw from and expand on. The way her body molded to his. The soft, hungry swell of her lips. Her moans.
And that was a couple of kisses. Since Saturday, his imagination treated him to what it would be like to strip off her clothes, taste her smooth skin...
He pushed the thought away before it could make his cock any harder, and forced his attention back to business. The bell on the door chimed again, and Elliot looked up, pupils dilating when he saw Tori.
Archer bit back an unwelcome rush of jealousy.
Heavy circles hung under Tori’s eyes, but her smile was genuine when she looked at him. She held up a dry-cleaning bag, wrapped around what looked like red velvet. “Someone is supposed to come looking for this tomorrow.”
When Tori wasn’t babysitting the assholes who didn’t respect her, she designed and made custom costumes. She occasionally took commissions from Archer’s clients. If he remembered right, this was supposed to be a recreation of an outfit seen on one of those pseudo-historical dramas on cable. The Tudors, maybe?
He nodded behind him at a closet rod he’d suspended from the ceiling for her. “You know where it goes.”
She stepped around him, and her shoulder brushed his back. A jolt ran through him. That felt nice. Damn. What was wrong with him? Too long since he got laid, or something.
Seconds later, she took her spot on the stool across from him. He almost gave her crap about working too hard, but he wasn’t in the mood to be snapped at. Instead he settled for, “We missed you yesterday afternoon.”
“Trust me, I would’ve rather been here. I mean, that’s normally the case, but especially yesterday.”
An ache echoed through his knuckles, and he realized he’d clenched his hands into fists. He flexed his fingers until the blood flow returned to normal.
“This is beautiful work.” Elliot leaned over the counter to examine the dress, and rubbed a bottom corner of the hem between his fingers. “Really gorgeous. Have you ever thought about doing this full time?”
“Technically, I do.”
Except with the custom work, she got to pick and choose which outfits to make, instead of bowing to the whim of some underwear store. Working a little harder, to make ends meet, had to be better than the shit she put up with. It wouldn’t do Archer any good to say anything, though. She’d resent him for it and then close off, instead of actually dealing with the problem.
The conversation slid from one topic to the next, until Elliot checked his phone. “Whoa. I love chatting with you guys, but I have to be in Denver tomorrow, and I’ve got an early flight out. I’ll catch you later.” He looked at Tori. “Seriously, you need to do more of the costume thing.”
A new surge of jealousy tore through Archer, and he pushed it back. “She absolutely should. Catch you later, man.”
He almost—but not quite—felt bad for rushing Elliot out the door and locking it behind him, but it had been a long day.
He turned back to Tori, who’d moved from her spot on the stool and leaned against the glass, watching him with an unreadable expression. The stretch showed off how well her jeans hugged her hips, and drew his eye to the Nintendo logo across her chest.
“You sure you’re allowed to be away from work for so long?” he asked.
“I think they’ll survive tonight.” Even as she answered, she checked her phone again, the way she had every five minutes since she’d arrived.
He wished her reassurance matched her actions. “You’re sure?” He kept his tone light. “You’re not convincing me.”
She gave a half-laugh, half-sigh and pocketed her phone. “I can’t help it.”
Inspiration struck. He shouldn’t indulge the thought, but it wasn’t going to leave him alone unless he did. “Maybe I’m not distracting enough. If I kissed you again, could I hold your attention a little longer?”
“I—...” She fiddled with her fingers, not quite meeting his gaze. “It was really good, don’t get me wrong, but I’m sorry I teased you. And even if it was amazing, and even though I like hanging out with you, I don’t like you that way, and I don’t—”
He placed two fingers over her lips, to stop the babbling. “It’s okay. Really. We went over this yesterday morning. A kiss is just a kiss. Sex is just sex. I’m not asking you to mar—” the words marry me died on his lips. Why had he gone down that path? He had a different goal in mind. “To go out with me.”
She was blushing, and standing right in front of him. “How do you do that?”
“How do I... tease you?”
She laughed, and it sounded more natural this time. “Joke about sex, like it doesn’t mean anything.”
“It doesn’t. Or rather it has some meaning, and it can be amazing when it’s done right, but there doesn’t have to be any love attached to it.”
She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. The pink in her cheeks faded, but her lips were still flushed and tempting. “You sound like Jen.”
“Can we not talk about my sister and sex in the same conversation?” He adored his sister—usually. But that didn’t mean he wanted to think about her now.
“Sorry. But seriously, I don’t know how you can say it doesn’t mean anything. Sex and love go hand in hand.”
“They don’t for me.” He didn’t know why he was beating his head into this brick wall. Tori didn’t think the same way, and he wasn’t going to convince her otherwise. But something—either stubbornness or the insistent throb of his cock—compelled him to keep talking. “Sure, you can have both. You don’t have to have both.”
“I get what you’re saying, but if it’s not... That is...”
Archer dug through his head for an appropriate response. This was one conversation he didn’t need her withdrawing from. “If your reason is you wouldn’t do it just because, then I’m cool with that. But if you’re thinking something specific, it doesn’t do either of us any good for you to not say it.”
“Since the sex isn’t that great even when I’m with someone I actually love, I can’t imagine it would be worth the trouble if there wasn’t an emotional connection.” She chewed on the inside of her cheek as she watched her shoes trace lines on the concrete.
He hadn’t expected that. Knowing her assumption was based on a past of bad sex made any response die before it surfaced. He considered his words carefully, still very much wanting to have the conversation and having no desire to piss her off. He couldn’t completely ignore the part of him hoping to change her mind. “It may not be emotion so much, as the other person involved.”
His confidence grew when she tilted her head to the side instead of scowling or storming away, and he continued. “And it may not have been him. It may have been you weren’t compatible with whomever. Different people have different kinks, and just because you find someone who’s got similar sexual preferences, doesn’t mean you have to love them. It simply gives you both a chance to get off, no strings attached.”
“You make it sound so simple.”
Damn, her shy flush was hot. He tried to push back his growing arousal and failed. “Finding the right buttons isn’t always so simple. The rest of it? It absolutely is. At least for me.”
“But— How do you know you’re both going to like it? Especially if you’re not dating.”
After the kiss the other night, he was pretty certain he’d enjoy it. And his experience told him Tori simply needed the right motivation to let loose. “You don’t know for certain, any more than you know how a relationship is going to go when you first start dating. Sometimes it’s incredible and there are fireworks, and sometimes... not so much.”