I make a face and shake my head. “Not likely.”

“Eh. Your soulless, hoity-toity bread will have to do,” she winks. And the hot, heavy feeling from earlier unfurls once more.

“WHO WOULD KICK whose ass in a fight: Iron Man or Batman?”

Ally tears off a piece of her grilled cheese sandwich and pops it into her mouth. We’re both propped up on stools at a prep table, a spread of focaccia bread grilled cheeses, green grapes and red wine in front of us. Ally sits across from me, plucking off a few grapes to make a happy face on the metal tabletop.

I swallow a bite and wash it down with a sip of wine. “Why are Iron Man and Batman my only choices? Why can’t I pick Superman? Or Spidey?”

“Nope,” she says, shaking her head. “You can only pick two. Iron Man or Batman. And, ew…Spidey? Lame.”

I take a bite of sandwich and contemplate my answer. “Fine. I guess I’d have to go with Iron Man.”

“Why him?” She finishes her grape happy face then eats the poor guy’s left eye.

“Well, he’s got the suit-”

“Batman has a suit!”

“—and he can fly.”

“Batman can fly!”

“But Batman can only swing from things from a bungee cord. He can fall. He does that a lot. He’s a pretty great faller.”

Ally frowns. “He is not a faller. He glides.He’s an ass-kicking glider.”

“With a rubber suit?” I smirk. “Because that is just somuch more impenetrable than crystallized armor.”

“Bullshit. Iron Man is only good because he has Jarvis. They should just rename the franchise Jarvis Man because the computer does all the work.”

“Jarvis Man?” I raise a playful brow.

“You know what I mean. Or Jarvis and the Iron Asshat. They could be a team.”

We share an easy laugh and take sips from our glasses. That’s how things feel between us—easy. Uncomplicated with expectations or formalities. We’re just two people who share a mutual love of grilled cheese and superheroes.

“Why only two choices?” I ask as I refill our glasses.

“Huh?”

“When you ask me these little random gems of useless information, it’s only two choices. Mint Chocolate Chip or Rocky Road. Batman or the Iron Asshat.”

“I don’t know.” Ally shrugs and picks at a crust of bread. “I guess, to me… Life is just a series of choices. We try to always make the best ones, but really we’re just settling for the lesser of two evils. Or at least trying to.”

She looks at me and a sad smile touches her lips. I don’t know how to deal with it so I just look down. Coward.

“Is that what you feel you’ve done? Settled for the lesser of two evils?” I don’t elaborate, but she knows what I’m talking about.

“Honestly? I don’t think the choice was ever truly mine to make.”

I know I should just leave it at that, letting her words drift into another, simpler conversation. But, of course, I find myself needing to delve deeper into those turquoise waters. “Why do you say that?”

“There are things expected of me. Things I can only provide by marrying into an influential family and representing them in a certain light.” She turns to me, pinning me with those haunted, ocean irises. “We’re all just trophies. Shiny, plastic, useless trophies. Exciting at first, but we have no real purpose other than attesting to someone else’s grand achievements.”

I tilt my head to one side thoughtfully, my eyes trained on anything but her and those sad eyes. “A diversion—something pretty to distract from the real turmoil festering just beneath the surface.”

She nods but asks, “Is that how you see me?”

I lift my gaze to hers and find her expression filled with genuine curiosity—not anger or hurt. I shake my head. “No. Not you.”

“I had dreams, you know. Goals.” She smiles, but looks down, hiding its brilliance. “Now, I’m no different than them. I’m just like all those other women. Fighting, clinging on to the hope that we could be more than arm candy for business functions or designer incubators. That we could be truly loved for who we are, and not what we represent.”

I don’t respond, letting the words hang in the air until they dissipate under the weight of Ally’s pain. She stands and begins to collect the uneaten food. “It’s late. And you need your beauty sleep,” she winks at me, that carefree smile restored. I help her discard the trash as she takes the dishes to the sink.

“Me? Beauty sleep? What makes you think I care anything about beauty?” I take a washed dish from her and dry it with a towel.

“You’re kidding, right?” she smirks, scrubbing a pan. “You possess beauty like most women possess shoes.”

“Not following you.” And I’m not. I could give a fuck about what’s deemed beautiful by modern society’s standards.

“Well, first of all, look at this place,” she says, waving a wet hand around the room. “This estate is magnificent. Like paradise in the middle of the desert. Seems almost like a mirage.”

I nod my head in agreement. Oasis is myoasis—my refuge. My escape from all the incessant narcissism and fuckery that comes with fortune. I didn’t end up in the middle of the desert—as far away as I could possibly get from my original home in NYC—by accident. Eleven years ago, when I said goodbye to the noise, traffic and permeating scents of piss and diesel fuel, I told myself that I would never, ever look back at my old life with a sense of fondness. A few years after that, I found Oasis, and I knew I was home.

“And then,” she says, turning to me, her cheeks flushed pink, “there’s you.”

I smirk and look down to hide my own blush.

Yeah. I’m fucking blushing.

My entire life, I’ve been told I was strikingly handsome, and I’ve always believed it. Dark hair, cobalt eyes, and naturally tanned skin—I was the good ol’ American Abercrombie prototype. That theory was confirmed soon after puberty when girls constantly defied their daddies and tarnished their good family names by spreading their legs without so much as a wink in their direction. As a kid, I knew about sex, but I wasn’t really interested it. Not until my seventeen-year-old Algebra tutor, Jessica, undressed me and swallowed my thirteen-year-old dick during a lesson on linear equations. It was an act of divine intervention that I passed the class with an A-minus, because I didn’t do much more than study every inch of Jessica’s body that school year.

Yet, hearing Allison even imply that she finds me attractive, let alone beautiful, makes me feel brand new.

She hands me the rinsed frying pan, and I take it from her without looking.

My hand covers hers.

Now this is the part in every gag-worthy, chick flick where the guy and girl instantaneously lock eyes and sparks fly. Cue James Blunt or some other sappy cliché as they move in slowly, lips parted in preparation for their first kiss.

Fuck that.

See, that’s the kind of bullshit that makes it difficult to have real, genuine connections. It’s what gives these women a false sense of hope that their men are anything more than walking dicks with eyes and limbs.

I’m a guy; I should know.

And even though I am so goddamn distracted by her every quirky laugh and goofy grin, that I ache to spend hours tracing patterns with her freckles while she’s spread out beneath me, I’m smart enough to know that this is reality. This isn’t some movie where the underdog wins the girl, saving her from a lifetime of heartache. This is real life, and in this episode of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Lonely” the good guy doesn’t rescue the girl from her philandering husband.

No. He teaches her how to fuck him.

I pull my hand back and quickly dry the pan before stepping away from the sink. “This was…fun. Thanks for the sandwich.”

“It was. Thanks for the company.” She dries her hands on a towel and smiles. She’s always smiling at me. I soak them up like precious rays of sunshine, because if she really knew me, if she knew the truth, things would be different. She wouldn’t only pity me—she would loathe me. I’m not sure which one is worse.