About a month after they’d started having sex, Sheila asked Nils if he thought they should try using a condom.

“I thought you were on birth-control?” Nils said.

“I am,” Sheila said. “I just thought maybe we should give it a try. So we could compare.”

Nils’ expression said he wasn’t sure about that.

“What’s wrong?” Sheila asked.

Nils took a breath. “What if it turns out you prefer sex with condoms?”

“So if that were the case, you wouldn’t want to fuck me anymore?”

“No, I’m not saying that. But...”

“It’s just that I’ve been thinking about it,” Sheila said. “Kind of making a list of the pros and cons.”

“Besides birth-control what are the pros?” Nils asked.

“Well, there’s disease.”

“I don’t think we have to worry about that. I’ve not been with anyone else since I’ve started seeing you.”

Sheila smiled. “What about me?”

Nils’ face dropped. “You’ve been... ?”

“No, but it’s a pro, right?”

“I guess so,” Nils conceded.

“Also they say that with a condom the man is less sensitive, so he can go for a lot longer.”

“So you’re not satisfied with how long I can... ?”

“I am satisfied,” Sheila said. “It’s like you can last forever. And even after you come, you recharge right away.”

“Right,” said Nils. “But with a condom, once it’s filled, it wouldn’t be as easy to go right away again.”

“True,” Sheila agreed. “On the other hand, there’s not so much mess.”

“So you’re saying you don’t like the feel of my—my semen inside you?”

“I love the feeling,” Sheila said. “But it can be a little inconvenient when it leaks out. And you always have so much stuff.”

“I guess,” Nils said, frowning.

“Sometimes I like that it leaks out,” Sheila admitted. “It makes me feel, I don’t know, womanly. Proud.”

“Makes me feel proud too,” Nils said.

“But not womanly?”

Nils laughed. “Manly. And what about the inconvenience of it? Someone has to buy them. And I always feel a little embarrassed about that.”

“Embarrassed because people will know you’re having sex with me?”

“No. I don’t know. Just embarrassed. And then there’s the inconvenience of putting them on. And taking them off. And there’s a kind of smell to them.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah,” Nils said. “More than anything, I like the feel of you. The heat. The slipperiness. The intimacy of being inside you. It’s incomparable. There is nothing in the world better than that.”

“And I like that too. The feel of your cock. The intimacy of it.”

“So we agree.”

“Yeah,” Sheila said. “Now put this on and let’s fuck.”

Sometime afterward Sheila held up the used condom. “Take a picture,” she told Nils.

“How come?”

“So we can put it in our scrapbook. The picture, not the condom.”

“We don’t have a scrapbook,” Nils said.

“We will,” Sheila said, waggling the condom. “And this baby’s going on page 1.”