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“Okay?” She looked at him like he was crazy. “What are you saying? You’d never have had the idea to choke a woman during sex if you had never seen it on porn?”
“I mean, probably not. It’s not exactly intuitive, is it?”
She thought about it. “I don’t know. It’s a dominance thing.”
“Yeah, but sex is about being in love and making babies.”
“I think it’s also about dominance,” she said.
“Well, maybe it is sometimes, but it shouldn’t be.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s what you think. You have a lot of shame, don’t you, Decker? Why are you so ashamed of something that’s natural?”
“Well, because there are lots of natural things that we’re ashamed of,” he said. “It’s totally natural to pick your nose, for instance, but no one says we should all indulge in that.”
She laughed. “Okay, well, it’s not the same thing.”
“No, it’s not. It’s different, because picking your nose is, you know, not about hurting anyone. Not about, you know, oppressing an entire gender to use them for the pleasure of the other gender.”
Her eyes widened. “Decker, you’re making it into this thing it isn’t.”
“I don’t think I am,” he said. “Look, there’s a reason that women were ever oppressed in the first place, and it’s not because men had no interest in keeping docile, submissive sex slaves.”
“Yeah, but… it’s so much more complicated than that,” she said. “Men fall in love, too, Decker. They fall in love with their wives and their daughters, and they’ve always loved their mothers. And once a man and woman have babies together, it’s all different. I’m not saying that systemic oppression isn’t a thing, but it’s also true that people have always, always fallen in love.”
“It seems to me,” he said, “that you are incredibly and borderline idiotically optimistic about individual people, while being sort of down on society as a whole. And I think I might be the opposite. I think generally speaking, society is fine, but individuals are awful.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Idiotically?” she repeated, lifting her hand.
As she did so, the handcuffs fell off.
He looked down at his wrist to see that his was opened as well.
They both sat back, clutching their newly freed wrists to their chests.
“What just happened?” he said.
10:47 p.m.
ESSENCE STOOD UP from the table just in time to see Hollis’s form silhouetted in the doorway between the two rooms of the Mecklenburg. Her heart was beating too fast in her chest.
“There you two are,” said Hollis. “I’ve been looking all over for you guys. You left, didn’t you?”
“Did you do this?” said Essence, pointing down at the cuffs on the table.
Hollis looked from Essence to Decker and then down to the cuffs. “Well, you got them off. Good, because I was only maybe seventy percent this spell was going to work.” He came over, scooped up the cuffs, tucked them into his pocket and grinned at them.
“We don’t know how we got them off,” said Decker.
“You must have revealed a truth,” said Essence to him.
“Oh, yeah,” said Hollis, digging the cuffs out and looking at them. “Yeah, this is definitely the rune for truth. And we thought maybe they’d stay on until some hidden truth was revealed. So, there we go. What’d you say?”
“I don’t even know,” said Decker. “We were sort of talking about porn.”
Hollis laughed. “Come on, I’ll buy you guys a drink or something to celebrate.”
Essence let out a breath and looked toward Decker, although they were no longer handcuffed together, so they didn’t need to look to each other anymore. She was now free to do whatever she wanted. “You, um, you can still stay with me if you don’t want to drive.”
