Not in Love (Not in Love, #1)

by Ali Hazelwood

I knew that science communication was an important job, crucial to building public trust and informing a wide array of policies, but it wasn’t my job. I had no talent for enticing people to care about my work: either they saw its value, or they were wrong.

I was assaulted. By a three-hundred-pound grizzly bear. It bellowed at me as its paws slammed into my torso with the force of a dinosaur-extinguishing meteor, sending me careening back into Eli’s solid front.

“But in my experience, penetrative sex usually leads to two outcomes, and neither is good.” “What outcomes?” “A lot of men see penis-in-vagina sex as the end goal and forget everything else. Skip foreplay, move straight to the fucking, get their own, completely forget about their partner—which is not what I’m looking for. And that’s the best scenario.” “The best?” She sighed. “It’s better than them deciding that they absolutely need to get me off during the sex, which almost always ends up with them dragging it out to the point of pain. I can’t come from that, which means that we’re at a very unpleasant impasse that forces me to fake an orgasm just to get it over with.”

How was it, talking to Florence face-to-face?” Eli remembered her flushed face as he let her know that they had the books. Her bitterness and resignation as they ironed out the kinks of their deal. “I’d tried to imagine it, you know? How it would happen. What I’d say when I finally spoke to her again.” “Like, in the shower? When you have those forty-minute conversations with yourself?” He gave her a baffled look. “How long are your showers?” “A normal length, shut up.” “In my environmentally conscious, non-shower conversations, I was going to tell her how incredibly shitty my life had been after what she did.