She found it comfortable to think of him as a statue. A man carved from granite. As a guardian. Some kind of supernatural protector. Not a man she could touch. A man whose hands could touch her.

Not a man who knew his way around a woman’s body. A man who might be more proficient at it than any other she’d been with before.

But then the idea of that... Of him touching her... Of him taking control of her in some way, even if it was for pleasure, made her break out in a cold sweat.

She didn’t like that. The thing she liked most about sex was the closeness; she hadn’t been lying. And also, she liked feeling like she’d affected a man in a positive way.

She had been so afraid of men after the way she’d grown up, and then Ryder had taught her that some men could be trusted. The guys she had grown up around at Hope Springs had only reinforced that.

And when it came to sex...

Boys at school had been grateful to her for it. And after that, it hadn’t really changed. Sixteen or twenty-six, men weren’t all that different.

And that made her feel...valuable and powerful in a way that she could contain all inside herself.

One that made her partner not matter quite so much as she did.

Ryder was talking about uncharted territory. Not just for their relationship but for her.

He was... Was that what he was expecting, really? To request that he give her a baby, or was he thinking to give her an orgasm, and to...

She couldn’t even wrap her head around it. So she decided not to.

A skill she had acquired growing up in a home that contained reality she found distasteful.

She was so good at deciding to be finished with thoughts.

And so she decided to be finished with that one, because she could not sort it out, and she didn’t like that. Didn’t like the uncertainty of certain lines of thinking.

She approached her camper, tiny but home, and jerked the door open, which caused the whole thing to rattle slightly.

This place still felt familiar. Smelled like her incense and candles. Things that Ryder really wished she wouldn’t have in her camper, because he was concerned about it being a fire hazard, in spite of the fact that she told him she only ever lit any of that stuff when she was watching it.

He didn’t trust her.

She frowned.

He didn’t really trust anything.

She crossed the tiny space and sat on the edge of her bed, batted the netting that hung from the ceiling and cocooned it in a diaphanous veil out of the way.

Ryder not trusting her didn’t have all that much to do with her, really.

He didn’t trust life. He didn’t take anything for granted. He never assumed that things were simply going to work out just because.

Of course he wanted to get his hands all up in her baby plan.