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She looked completely lost, and I wasn’t in the mood to make this picture any clearer.

Before I could say another word, she looked into my eyes.

“So,” she said, still in shock, “all the things on your profile were a lie?”

“No. Everything on my profile is one hundred percent accurate.” I pulled out my phone. “I specifically wrote what I’m in for, and I’ve been more than lenient spending my time with you. You seem like a nice person, but after tonight—whether we f**k or not, I won’t be speaking to you again. So, what’s it going to be?”

She stood there, her jaw dropped once more, and I glanced at my profile.

Sure enough, I’d forgotten to adjust the default settings when I’d signed up for Date-Match, and my “What I’m Looking For” box was still set to bullshit: “Long conversations, a connection with someone I can truly relate to, and finding my one true love.”

Ha…

I quickly erased all of the text and looked up, noticing that my date for tonight was still in the room.

“If you continue standing here,” I said,” I’m going to assume that you do want to f**k tonight. If not, the door’s right behind you.”

The sound of her huffing was the last sound I heard before the door slammed so hard it rattled the mirror on the wall.

Unfazed, I contemplated what I wanted to write in my profile’s box. Over the past few months, I’d found disappointment after disappointment—wasting too much of my time and money on women who were not on the same wavelength as me.

And now it all made perfect sense. All those unnecessary dinners, late night conversations, and utter bullshit was about to end right now.

I didn’t need another relationship—those days were gone forever, and I would never spend more than a week talking to the same woman on the phone.

As the sun set outside the hotel room’s window, the perfect phrasing came to me, and I typed: One dinner. One night. No repeats.

Then I highlighted it and placed it in bold.

Staring at it, I realized how bare it looked, how someone might actually think I wasn’t dead ass serious, so underneath, I made things completely clear:

Casual sex. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Condone (v.):

To forgive, support, and/or overlook moral or legal failures of another without protest, with the result that it appears that such breaches of moral or legal duties are acceptable. An employer may overlook an employee overcharging customers or a police officer may look the other way when a party uses violent self-help to solve a problem

Aubrey

I sat in the back of the courtroom, listening to Andrew break down on the stand. Twice, when the defense purposely brought up Emma, he lost all composure.

Yet, as I saw the look in his eyes at the mere mention of her, of the “slip” of her name, I felt his pain.

I kept my head down the remainder of his testimony so our eyes wouldn’t meet, so he wouldn’t know I was here, and when the judge called for a short recess, I slipped outside.

Reporters were murmuring in the hallway, hoping he didn’t read any of their old articles about him years ago, and suddenly they were shouting questions.

“Mr. Henderson! Mr. Henderson!” They hounded him the second he stepped outside of the courtroom. “Mr. Henderson!”

He stopped and looked at them. “My name is Mr. Hamilton.”

“How do you feel about potentially sending your former partner and best friend away to prison?”

“He’s sending himself to prison,” he answered.

“Do you have any intentions of reconnecting with him while he’s behind bars?”

He ignored that question with a blank stare.

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