Oh. Forget putting one's foot in one's mouth; he'd really gone and shoved it straight down his throat, hadn't he? Don Juan flushed with embarrassment and hid behind a gulp of coffee again. He had never had a conversation like this before. Rules about seeing other people, set time dedicated to each other. No one had ever offered him anything like this. Most of his relationships were casual, in which case there was a paradigm that neither of them owed each other anything — trying to establish anything like this would have seemed overbearing. He'd been married once, and that was the only exception; it came with the opposite assumptions, that they would never sleep with anyone else and spend every waking minute together if they could. When the marriage had collapsed he had presumed he wasn't cut out for those sorts of commitments... but coming from Hudson they seemed — sweet. He still didn't know if he could keep to boundaries like these, but it might at least be time to give it another try.

But first they had to deal with the can of worms Don Juan had just accidentally opened. "It's not that," he said with a helpless shrug. "I mean, it is, but it's not just that." He did want to make Hudson happy; if this was something Hudson wanted then that would have been enough of a reason on its own, even if Hudson didn't think so. "It's — there's some part of you I don't know. I don't like that," he admitted. "I want... I mean, I don't know if I want to keep doing it," he hedged. "But I think I want to — see what it's like, at least once."

Another factor, which he wouldn't share: he wouldn't have minded overwriting that memory from February. Maybe if he had a more enjoyable time of it the second go around, even if it ended up being something he didn't want to keep engaging in, then he could finally put the first incident behind him, instead of letting it creep back into his brain every few weeks.

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