“I like that.” She laughed. “In English,scatis a term for animal poop.”
“That’s definitely not what I meant.” He kissed her, trailed his fingers up the silky skin of her back, and found himself smiling.
One… two… threeee.
Yeah, she’d lost count pretty quickly.
“What is it? Why are you smiling?”
“For someone who doesn’t care for oral sex, you seemed to enjoy it.”
“That’s only because you’re so good.”
“Yeah?” He wouldn’t lie. That didn’t hurt his egoat all.
“I’ve never come that way before. I’ve never come twice, either.”
Thor found that hard to comprehend. She was as responsive as any woman he’d known—more responsive than some. “I think you need to stop sleeping with jerks.”
She arched her head, looked up at him, and laughed, the sound putting a hitch in his chest. “I gave up men a few years ago.”
“You gave up men? Last time I looked, I was a man.”
“Yes, you are.” She ran her palm over his bicep. “I mean, I quit dating. I gave up trying to meet someone.”
Something told Thor this was about more than mediocre sex. It wasn’t like him to want to hear about the previous lovers of the women in his bed, but this time he was curious. “What happened?”
“My first boyfriend was a guy named Scott. We met in chem lab my freshman year and started going out. He was the first guy I slept with.”
Thor hated him already.
“One night afterward, he sat up in my bed and said he’d never really found me attractive. He said he liked curvy women who did feminine things. Then he got dressed and left, and that was it. I cried for a week.”
Now Thor really hated him. “What an asshole.”
“He wasn’t the first person to say something like that. I heard it all the time in high school from boys and girls. ‘Sam is flat-chested. She’s a nerd. She thinks she’s so smart. We hate her.’ One football player grabbed my breast in the hallway and said he was just trying to decide if I was truly a girl.”
“What a shitting bastard. Please tell me someone kicked his ass.”
“I never reported it.”
“You’renotflat-chested.” It hurt Thor to imagine a teenage Samantha enduring assault and taunts. He understood now why she had so little confidence. “They bullied you. Wasn’t your mother a teacher? Didn’t she try to stop it?”
Samantha shook her head. “I didn’t tell her. Are you kidding? It would have been so much worse if I had.”
Thor couldn’t imagine that. “That’s just wrong. In Denmark, children are taught not to bully as soon as they start school. They’re also taught to intervene if they see another child being bullied. We believe that everyone has a right to be a part of things. No one should be left out.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“If people can’t learn at an early age how to be kind and get along with one another, how can you have a functioning society?” It seemed obvious to Thor.
She tilted her head back, looked up at him. “I like that.”
“So, Scott was a bastard. Who else?”
“Nathan and I met in grad school. My parents thought we’d get married, but everything was a competition with him. If I got a better grade than he did, it made him angry. He would yell and tell me the professors were going easy on me because I was a woman. When I got the post-doc at the University of Chicago, he said it was only because of my sex. Then he packed and left. I was … crushed.”
The hurt in her voice made Thor want to punch the fucker. “What a fragile ego. He believed he had to compete with you. You’re better off without him.”