Sage loosened his grip. “I apologize for dragging you away. I wasn’t going to feel OK until I talked to you.” But he didn’t want her to worry about him—he had a lot of women, he said, running through a list of those he’d spurned. He seemed to mean this as a reassurance: Only “desperate” men, “vulnerable” men, rape, he said, and Sage was neither. He warned her not to send mixed messages. For instance, he said, she shouldn’t put her hand on a man’s knee if she didn’t want to have sex with him. Sage put his hand on Ellen’s knee. This was not a mixed message, he wanted her to understand. She
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