response to protect is part of his DNA or we all got brainwashed by the patriarchy male BS from birth onward.” He saw something he’d glimpsed only a few times before in her large, wide, intelligent eyes: an emotion he couldn’t name, but it sure felt damn good to see the way she was looking at him, softly holding his gaze. He forced himself to sip his coffee.
“You haven’t tried to smother me, which is the experience I’ve had in the past with men in other relationships. By the time I was twenty-five, I was tired of it. Women can’t do this, they can’t do that, blah, blah, blah. This is a man’s job. Only a man can do it.” She snorted. “Please.”
“My sense of protection toward you was because I sensed your being upset at the airport and I didn’t know where it was coming from, or why.”
“But you didn’t try to do anything. I certainly didn’t feel smothered by you.”
He grimaced. “Whether I want to admit it or not, I’ve had some women in my life, from my past, that kicked my ass sideways about it. I’ve never married, but I had two serious relationships, both in the Marine Corps, which looking back on it, were bound to fail. I was out on missions in enemy territory probably seventy-five percent of my time in the Corps. That didn’t leave room for any kind of relationship to grow.”
“What did these two women teach you?” she asked. “I know the three relationships I had each taught me something; usually what I didn’t want in a man.”
“Well, my first serious relationship was with Hannah. She was one of the first women snipers in the Marine Corps. We met in Afghanistan, stationed at the same top secret installation in-country. She was fearless, damned intelligent, and I fell for her like fifty tons of rocks. I’d never been around a wholly independent, confident woman like her before.”
“She was matriarchal, then?”
“Yes, at least by the present-day definition. That’s how we met, at a cantina, going in to get a cold beer after coming in from different ops, and I saw her at the bar. She was utterly fearless. Completely, fiercely independent, and blew off guys like someone flicking an irritating fly buzzing around their head. I watched her in action with a number of men, mesmerized. She was sitting with another woman who was also in the Corps, but not a sniper. She ran Comms for our top-secret base, and they were the only two women on our small base. Thoughtless marines would approach both of them and they just blew them off. I found out later that the Comms officer was married and had two young children at home that her husband was taking care of.”
“Hannah drew you because she was independent?”
He scratched his head. “Well . . . sort of. To me, she was like a star person, an alien female dropped in from another world into ours.” He managed a wry glance. “I was fascinated with her. She didn’t need anyone. She certainly didn’t need a man. Or at least, the men who were, what she called, Neanderthals and patriarchal.”
“Ah, so Hannah was completely matriarchal. If she was using that kind of language, she understood the difference, like I do.”
“I’d never heard the word patriarchy before that. Hell, I had no idea what it meant. The only reason I heard it was one marine sergeant went over to hit on her and she let him have it, calling him a patriarchal Neanderthal. I had to go back to my room, go google the term in order to understand it. That sergeant didn’t know what she was talking about, either.”
“Of course he didn’t.”
“Is that why your relationships didn’t work out?”
“Yes, all of them. After the third try, I just gave up. That was at twenty-five. I found my life just went better by avoiding males of the patriarchy, at least, on a personal footing. I had to work with them all the time in my career. After a while, it gets exhausting to deal with it day in and day out. That’s when I decided to create my own beekeeping consulting firm. ”
“Hannah taught me to put myself in a woman’s place. God knows, we had a lot of hotheaded arguments about it, but in the end, I had to agree with her. Women do have it tough. They are suppressed by males. They are underpaid. Underacknowledged in every possible way. And