Page 126 of Hate You More

I ask you—is there really any need to be strutting around the kitchen in a towel?

There are texts with double meanings, which I ignore, along with impromptu hugs and accidental brushes that send my nervous system haywire. In the end, I pull up my big-girl panties and sit my ass at the dining table, timing it for when he comes home from work.

“What’s this?” Troy eyes the pens and the squares of paper cut from a yellow legal pad I found in his office.

“Homework.” He frowns. “Ways to get out of sex Lent.”

“Oh?” He’s fooling no one with that expression. He puts down his phone and his keys, then slips out of his jacket as though he’s in no hurry. Lies, all lies.

“Where’d you want me?” Still with the double meanings.

“Just sit your butt down.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He grins as he does, picking up a pen. “What’s the plan, my little sexual guru?”

“We’re each going to write down an idea on a square of this paper. Then we’ll fold it and put it in here.” I tap the lid of an empty jam jar on the table next to me. “Then we just randomly choose a scene.”

“When?”

“When what?”

“When do we choose a scene? How often? And who chooses?”

“I don’t know, I hadn’t thought that far.”

“Well, get on that,” he says, pulling a stack of cut paper squares closer.

“That’s a lot of paper.”

“I have a lot of ideas.” His mouth tips.

“Oh.”

“Which brings us back to my question: How often do you want to have sex?”

“How often do you want to have sex?”

“Clara, you already know the answer to that.”

“All the time?”

“All the fucking time.”

I can’t articulate the reaction that has on my body.

“How about this,” he says. “We keep the lid on the jar, and when you’re feeling . . . frisky, you loosen the lid. That’ll be my signal.”

“Like Batman?” I frown doubtfully.

“I’m more than willing to put the bat in your hand.”

“Knock it off with the innuendo,” I retort, snatching up my pen. Troy is already writing. “How many have you got?” I don’t mean to sound so worried.

“Fantasies?” His gaze lifts and glides over me. Slowly. Sensuously. “I’ve had a while to think, lying in my bed all alone.”

“Not in the bed.”

“What?”