Her dogs barked their encouragement from a few steps ahead while her cat watched the entire process from the welcome mat in front of the door, with a look of total contempt. If it had been anyone else, she would be laughing—how could a person not in this ridiculous situation? Here she was, with her arm around a guy who was a solid foot taller than her and wider than her size-sixteen self, slow-walking down her hallway because her cat had tried to slice and dice him while her dogs had gone for a little light bondage in public.

Did her brain go to bondage while holding onto a guy so solid he seemed like he’d tell a tree how to tree? Yeah.

What could she say, she was a woman who wrote erotic fantasy stories based very loosely on Greek myths with bisexual double-dicked satyrs and nymph assassins working together to save the world, so “going there” was kind of in her wheelhouse. Never mind the fact that she never actually submitted her stories to a publisher and that all of them had ended up printed out, bound, and in a box in her front closet. She was a woman with a vivid imagination, and she liked using it.

Plus, she was a sucker for whatever cologne Nash was wearing. It was just woodsy and manly enough that she was having way too many mental images of a guy who looked a lot like him with the perfect level of Viking-rugged-lumberjack bod sitting half naked in front of a fireplace and reading The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin out loud to her. Yes, he’d totally do all the voices.

That fantasy was enough to block out the shakes in her thighs—from overwork and not because she kept taking extra sniffs of him, even though she had (a fact she’d spend the rest of her life not telling anyone) as they got closer to her apartment.

“It’s the next door on the left,” she said.

“The yellow one?” He shook his head and made the same disappointed clucking sound his mom had made at the park yesterday. “You should consider matching your neighbors’ doors. The yellow makes it stand out and could make you an easier target for someone unsavory.”

She laughed, a harsh blast of sound that sounded about as joyful as burned popcorn tasted. “I’m a round woman in her forties who is forever single. I stand out no matter what.” She fished her keys out of her pocket on her non-Nash side and unlocked her door. “Besides, I like this goldenrod shade of yellow.”

That seemed to shut him up, but only until they got inside. He stood in the middle of her living room, weight all on his right foot, as she cleared the stack of books on the closest chair so he could sit down, and took a look around her pre-war apartment.