That should not have made me want to laugh, but it did, a small nervous sound slipping out before I could stop it. “I’m fine.”
He nodded once. “Alright.”
Then he folded his arms loosely and looked at me for long enough that I started wishing he would just get to it already.
“Do you want to explain why you were at the club?”
There it was.
I opened my mouth, ready with something halfway polished, and then gave up before I even started. I was too tired to lie well, and something about the way he was standing there made lying feel pointless anyway.
“I saw the flyer in your mail,” I admitted. “I was curious.”
He didn’t react right away, which somehow made me talk faster.
“I wasn’t trying to, like, dig through your stuff or anything. I just saw it when I brought the mail up, and then I looked it up online, and then I don’t know, I just…” I blew out a breath. “I was curious.”
“I know,” he said.
That stopped me.
He rubbed one hand over his jaw and looked at the counter for a second before meeting my eyes again. “I understand being curious. I just wish you had asked me instead of deciding to walk into a place like that by yourself.”
I stared at him. “That’s it?”
His brow lifted slightly. “What were you expecting?”
“I don’t know. For you to be pissed.”
“I’m not pissed.”
I searched his face for a second, suspicious on instinct. “You’re not?”
“No.” He paused, then added, “Concerned about the way you went about it, yes. Angry, no.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “Oh.”
The knot in my stomach loosened just enough for me to think again.
“I’m sorry,” I said anyway.
His expression shifted a little at that, not softer exactly, but something close to it. “There’s nothing to be sorry about. You’re an adult. If you’re curious, you’re curious. That isn’t something you need to feel ashamed of.”
That landed harder than I expected, not because he said it harshly, but because he didn’t. He said it like it was obvious, like this wasn’t some humiliating thing I needed to apologize for or explain away, and that alone made something in me unclench.
He kept going before I could figure out what to do with that.
“If you’re interested in learning more, there are safer ways to do that than showing up alone and hoping for the best. And if you’re not comfortable talking to me about it, I know women in the lifestyle I could introduce you to. People who would answer your questions, make sure you don’t walk into something unprepared.”
I looked at him for a second, thrown all over again by how reasonable he was being.
“You’d do that?”
“Yes.”
No hesitation. No weirdness. Just yes.
Something about that, about the fact that he was taking me seriously instead of treating me like a kid who had gotten caught doing something stupid, made my chest ache in a way I did not want to think about too closely.