Page 10 of Forged By Sacrifice

“Stupid. How come us males are so stupid?”

“Says the guy who just admitted to never having dated someone for longer than a month.”

“True. But when I do decide to go all in, I’ll be just that—all in.”

“You’ll go from never having dated to dating one woman and marrying her?”

“I didn’t exactly say marry, but what’s wrong with that?”

“How will you know she’s the right one? If you’ve never tested out a relationship, how would you know the one you pick is the one for forever?” she asked.

“Instinct.”

She gave a little disbelieving shake of her head.

“Don’t you trust your own instincts?” I asked. “For example, what made you decide the boyfriend needed to be dumped and not kept?”

“Instincts are just another one of the senses. And senses can often lead you awry.”

“Says who?”

“Says me and Descartes.”

“This Descartes was not a military man, I take it?”

“Philosopher and scientist,” she told me. “But what has that to do with anything?”

“When you serve…probably if your life is on the line in any job?police, military, whatever?you have to listen to your gut. It can save your life.”

“That’s training, not instinct.”

“I kind of believe it’s both. But this Descartes guy…why didn’t he believe in using your senses?”

Her hand went to her ponytail, smoothing the wind-blown tendrils away from her face.

“He theorized that just the fact that we dream is proof enough that we can’t trust our senses to determine reality from imagination, because we sense things in our dreams that feel incredibly real but aren’t. So, any time our senses are telling us something, we should, at the very least, be wary of them until we can test them to be true.”

Her little speech quieted me. It spoke to a level of education that I’d been judgmental enough not to have expected in a hairdresser. Sure, she had to have been savvy to run a successful salon in New York City, but I hadn’t expected a degree in philosophy. Not that I knew what her degree was in, but I hadn’t expected this kind of discussion.

I was ashamed. Because I was routinely frustrated by people judging me for my brawn versus my brains. For seeing a uniform and thinking that it meant I was just some meathead with a gun who screamed, “Don’t go quietly into the night.” Yet, I’d done the same with her. Judged her by her occupation and the spiked purple hair she’d had when I first met her. Judged her by the row of earrings that went up her earlobe.

I was quiet for so long that I’d almost forgotten that she was still beside me.

“Too deep?” she asked with a slight curl of humor in her voice.

We’d made it back to the firepit. She picked up her blanket, book, and an empty glass before we continued along the path to the house.

“No. Not at all. I just was surprised. And ashamed.”

She stopped and turned so suddenly that I almost ran into her. “Ashamed?”

“For judging the book by its cover when I hate that people do it with me,” I told her.

“Oh.”

We stared into the darkness of each other’s faces for a moment. I wished that it was daylight, and I could have seen better what was going on inside her eyes. I was hoping they were full of desire. That she felt the way our bodies were talking to each other just as much as I did.

She turned and kept going.

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