"I'm not sure I can rightly say."

  "How do you not know how long you've been dating?"

  "Because I don't know which meals he took me to after the sex dungeon were dates or just good after-care."

  "Agnes, you're trying to mess with me. I need to know if you're poking fun or if I need to find a tarp for my truck bed and one of those massive Venus fly traps that will dissolve a human body."

  "You are no fun at all, Shilloh. I'm mostly poking fun. But you know I don't keep track of anniversaries. Those are just an excuse to only treat housewives well once a year."

  Shilloh shook her head and muttered something about dangerous cougars. She sat on a comfy leather couch and examined Agne's new apartment. It was nice. Not 'nice' as in emotionally warm, but 'nice' as in expensive.

  There was fine leather furniture, real wood floors, all the mps matched, and it sported a TV so rge that it had to have been carried in by a team of men willing to disassemble and re-assemble the door so it could fit through.

  "Wait," the petite cartographer said, as Agnes groaned her way into a very bright yellow chair across from Shilloh. The chair, she noted, absolutely did not match the rest of the house. It was bright yellow, and everything else was brown and gray. Plus, it had dollies on it that screamed Agnes. She must have forced her boyfriend to bring it here. "Am I seeing things, or is that a pinball machine and a fake ser bster in a gss case?"

  "Clint, if you must know, is quite diverse in his interests. He knows a great deal about cinema and their prop departments."

  Shilloh raised an eyebrow and shot a meaningful gnce at a movie poster showing a mostly naked woman with a futuristic gun.

  " He's very in tune with his impulses," Agnes sniffed.

  "Yes, but is he also twelve?"

  "Props are a fascinating—"

  "Obviously, the props are fine. I dream of the day I can have a hobbit hole with an umbrel stand that will only ever hold Gandolf's staff and hat. But it's just that this feels like a kid's daydream, not a man cave. He doesn't have a nephew he's trying to impress by any chance?"

  "No. And not that it's any of your business, but he is twenty-four and already doing very well in his w firm."

  "Twenty-four!"

  "Yes. And if you think affording this pce at his age is impressive, well, you should just see what he can do with his tongue. It's remarkable. I swear it makes me wonder if he didn't start in the circus—"

  "Agnes, he's not even my age!"

  She shrugged, "No need to be jealous. Sharing is fine with me. I've been telling him for weeks that we should expand our borders. But he's afraid that someone else will take a fancy to me. He's such a sweet thing, but a terrible bore. He stopped letting another dominatrix in the room when we go to the local dungeon. Such a shy little boy."

  Shilloh threw a cookie at the old woman, "Stop deflecting. I came here to feel good about volunteering and to bitch about work. How is it you always end up talking to me about sex dungeons?"

  Agnes took a bite of Shilloh's cookie and grimaced, "How do you always end up eating sawdust? What is a cookie without browned butter?"

  "Cheap and delicious?"

  The older woman used both arms to push herself to her feet and bustled to the kitchen with authoritarian intent. "Tell me about your boy problems, and I'll make you some real cookies."

  "It's not boy problems."

  "Nonsense, they're always around and, forgive my nguage, but they send everything straight to hell. Show me a problem that isn't a boy problem, and I'll show you a song with no music."

  There was no arguing with her when she got like this. So Shilloh pulled her legs onto the overstuffed couch and shared some of her frustrations. She talks about wanting to save up for a big investment property. How nuts the hours had been. How awful the old hunters were. Then she said that an opportunity had come up when escorting them. However, she tried to whitewash the st part by saying she had 'seen the results of a crypto fight and some spooky magical traces' rather than give details.

  "Well," Anges said, having whipped up a batch of simple snickerdoodles and set them into the oven during the fifteen minutes it had taken Shilloh to vent, "there was this amazing sexual healer I went to, remarkable person. They were a savant about leading boundary talks and kink conversations. It seems to me that you should take some advice from her."

  "No need. My life isn't nearly as painful as talking about your sex healers again. I'll call back those three and guide them again. No more compining. Maybe ever. Just a vow of silence. In fact, I might go right now to—."

  "Oh, shush. Anyway, this healer was amazing. Not many can facilitate a pentruple without having to raise their voice a single time."

  Shilloh, who had mostly been joking about not wanting to talk about the sex healer, realized that she was no longer joking. As such, she didn't ask for crification about the pentruple or Agnes' involvement in it. In fact, she tried to completely wipe the thought from her mind as well as all the uncomfortably sweaty images that came with it.

  Anges kept speaking. "She always told us, 'find the common ground. Then look back on how you transted someone else's personal nguage through your own dictionary, rather than theirs.' It really was remarkable. An action or word can hold volumes of meaning to you and be a space-holder sound to someone else. Worse, they can use a word that holds a lifetime of affection for them, and another person will only see their own history of anger. You'd be amazed how the words' freedom', 'trust,' and 'a short time tied up in the closet' can look entirely different for different people."

  "I see what you're doing and refuse to blush. Also, I told you what Wade said. What common ground could there be? He's crossing a line."

  "Well, you tell me, Deary, what exactly is this line he's crossing?"

  "Okay. So… It's hard to expin. But it's like, would you go into Chad's office and move the furniture. Let's say it was blocking an outlet you needed, so you move it without putting it back afterward?"

  "My Clint," Agnes corrected her gently, "would be aghast. Chad, though, was a horrid man from years ago. I hope someone spills hot sauce on the razor he uses to shave his testicle."

  Shilloh ughed, "Brutal. What did Chad do?"

  "He asked me to marry him."

  "And he deserves a hot sauce sack because of that?"

  "I told him I wasn't going to be tied down to any single retionship! Menopause is God's way of saying that you are supposed to have the fun you couldn't when young. I mean, obviously, I can't bend the way I used to, so some things are lost to those years, but you can't imagine how excited I am for losing my teeth and being able to —"

  "SO LIKE I WAS SAYING! Every part of the forest is something's home. Every bush could be a wonder if you just looked at it with the eyes of a toddler. So, going in and not being hospitable. It's just wrong."

  "Hospitable, how?"

  "Like…" she trailed off, leaning back against the sofa and ignoring the scent of cinnamon and butter coming from the oven. "It's like when you hunt. I remember being taught to sneer if I saw someone who would go on a trail, find a good position, and snap a tree branch or stomp a sapling ft to clear their view. If a branch gets in your way, you crouch. If you don't want to sit in a spot without damaging something first, you find another spot. You don't change or break things. That is someone's home and is sacred to something, even if you don't know what."

  "And did Wade seem like someone who would snap tree branches?"

  "No," Shilloh frowned, fidgeting with the leg of her pants. "That's what bothered me. He wasn't like my usual tourists. They're hopeless from the start. But he should have known better. He moved carefully like he understood. Not like Jasque. He only looked down enough to find quiet spots to put his feet, even if it stepped on a flower. But Wade moved like someone who should have understood."

  "So why do you think he broke this rule?"

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