“What do you think it was about?” Tinsley asks with a sparkle in her eye. Could merely be the reflection of the sun, but one suspects it is more than that. Though Lucas wishes it weren’t. Her insistence on conversation threatens his lovely but fragile high.

A few more tokes and he would have been molten.

“It was your idea,” he says. “Why don’t you tell me?”

“It made you uncomfortable, didn’t it?”

“Yeah, a little.”

“Why?”

“Because Barry was right there?”

“So? He and I aren’t exclusive. For your information, monogamy is just another stupid male paradigm foisted on women to keep us subservient. Why can’t women be as free with our proclivities as men?”

“Fine with me.” It dawns on him that the path of least resistance is agreement. And yet Sir Lucas the Faithful is not free, nor dost he yearn to be.

“And it is liberating,” Tinsley goes on. “Do you know that from the age of twelve, not only was I expected to always have a boyfriend, but I was a failure if I couldn’t ‘keep’ him? Forget about casual dating. That makes me a slut and a tramp. Just a ‘thing’ men can use and discard. But if a guy sleeps around, he’s a stud and a playboy. Who made up these stupid rules? Men.”

The male in their midst is painfully aware that a statement involving deductive reasoning has been put forth. (Or maybe it’s inductive reasoning? Is there such a thing as conductive reasoning? Has anyone asked ducks how they feel about this? When asked, do they duck the question?) “So now you go around putting guys’ hands on your breast?”

“If that’s what I feel like doing, why not? Do you have a problem with it?”

From the mystic misty swirl inside the crystal ball comes a glimpse of the discourse ahead. Lucas has been summoned to a repartee partee. But to gain admission, it will behoove him to organize complex thoughts and multisyllabic words into compound sentences. This is not what he wishes to be doing on this lovely late afternoon, but he feels obligated to give it a try: “Suppose I’d taken your hand and put it down my pants? You’d think I was a pervert. But when you place my hand on your breast, that’s just sexual liberation?”