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"This paper?"

"That paper."

I look down at the blank lines. I picture a woman at that house, sitting at a table and writing down what he couldn't do to her. She picks a word that will stop him, and she signs her name under it with somebody watching.

On the stone floor of the cigar room, nobody ever asked me what I couldn't take.

I know that's the difference. I'm still sick to my stomach.

"How often?" I ask.

"A couple nights a month."

"When were you there last?"

"A few weeks before you walked into my barn. I had my standing night booked again. I cancelled it the night you came to my kitchen."

"You cancelled it. Like a feed order."

"One word on a text. I didn't want anybody else under my hands. I still don't."

I flatten the open form against my knee until the creases give.

"I asked you where you learned to give orders like that," I say. "On your back porch, the night I couldn't breathe. You said running fights. Last night I asked who taught you to hold me down, and you told me to go to sleep. This morning you said not yet."

"Running fights is true. I use that voice in my ring, and I use it there."

"You let me believe it was only the ring."

"I did. You'd just come out of a cellar where men made you kneel. I wasn't handing you a bag of cuffs your first week out."

"That was mine to decide."

"It was," he says. "I decided it for you anyway."

"I sat on the edge of your bed and told you what I wanted on that hay bale at nineteen." I make myself keep going. "I told you I wanted to do what you said because it was you saying it."

"It was me."

"It was you. And a couple nights a month it's you in San Antonio, for whoever signs a sheet of paper."

"For women who asked me for it," he says. "In writing. Not whoever."

I know what I just said isn't fair. Those women chose him in ink, the way I chose him at his kitchen table.

I'm not angry that they had him. I'm angry that I asked him straight out, more than once, and he gave me half an answer every time.

He brought a glass of water and a folded quilt into this room before he ever touched me. Afterward he knew to rub my hands and to let me cry. I lay against his chest that night and guessed he'd done it before. I told myself it was different with me.

I never pictured a bag packed and waiting on a shelf, with blank forms in the pocket and sheepskin sewn into the cuffs.

"You knew what I'd need before I did," I say. "Every time. I thought you knew me."

"I do know you."

"You know the routine."

"There's no routine for a woman who walked into my barn in a dead man's boots."