"Anyway. We meet these guys at a cheap restaurant, us in our cute sundresses and them in jeans and t-shirts, which might have been a clue that we had different expectations for the evening. After dessert, the guys invited us back to their place – they were roommates, too – and while Marina was all about what that meant, little virginal Leah actually thought we were going to play poker together." I grinned at Zhiolas, who was giving me eyebrows, and nudged my glowering Dain's foot. "Funny story," I reminded him. "Ha-ha."

"Convince me," he said, leaning towards me with heat in his eyes. "I don't mind going hunting in the human world."

"Ridiculous man," I said, rolling my eyes. "We did, in fact, start playing poker, but Marina got up onto her guy's lap about two hands in, and they ended up going off together. My guy coaxed me into his bedroom, which was a classic man-cave full of dirty laundry and with cheap swords on the wall, and I zipped off to the bathroom." I smirked at Dain, who kept looking more and more like he wanted to go hunt down some fairly harmless Navy boys and remove their dicks with his not-cheap sword.

"These guys, not really being set up for female company, did not have any soap on their sink, so I went hunting in the shower." I tried unsuccessfully to smother my mirth at the memory. "The shower possessed a bar of soap with a hole in the middle. Never having seen a dick, I did not immediately realize that it was a dick-shaped hole, and was really curious as to why he'd done that."

"Never tried a hole through soap," Zhiolas said thoughtfully. "That's actually quite clever."

I waggled my eyebrows at him. "Well, I washed my hands, then took the bar of soap back to the guy's bedroom to ask him about it. He, having had very different ideas about the evening, had his pants off and was stroking himself in what I'm sure he thought was a very sensual position."

Dain snarled, an actual angry snarl that I felt in my chest.

"Funny story," I reminded him.

His claws dug into the table. "There's nothing amusing about a man trying to take advantage of a woman who doesn't know what she's doing."

"Anyway," I said, frowning at him. I didn't know how to take protective Dain. I understood him keeping me from, you know, getting murdered or drugged, but this was something from my past, and not even anything serious. "I sort of just stared at him, with no concept of what to do in this situation. I held up the soap and said, 'Your soap has a hole.' The poor dude had no idea how to handle that, and said, 'Yeah, uh, that's... mine?'"