Page 115

“Yes.”

“But I don’t always want to plan it.”

The admission left me feeling strangely bare.

Cash looked at the paper for a moment.

“When you want me to lead,” he said, “you can tell me. Doesn’t mean you have to keep wanting it.”

I nodded.

“Doesn’t mean I get to stop paying attention.”

I swallowed.

“Put that in.”

He reached for the other pen.

We had become a two-pen meeting.

That should not have been romantic.

My chest tightened.

“There are practical things too,” I said. “Protection. Sexual health. We talk about those before anything happens.”

“Absolutely.”

“No assumptions about exclusivity.”

His face grew still again.

“What would you want?”

I considered pretending I needed more time to answer.

I didn’t.

“If we’re sleeping together, I wouldn’t want either of us sleeping with someone else.”

“Same.”

The word landed quietly.

My fingers tightened around the pen.

“We’d tell each other if that changed,” I said.

“Before acting on it.”

“Yes.”

I wrote that down.

There was now a record, in my own handwriting.

I sat back and looked at both pages.