"Well, that's everyone else's loss," she said stubbornly.

Pepper nodded then, taking another small sip of her drink. "Yeah, I know. I'm mostly reiterating for myself, I think, since before I should have said something about not sleeping with other people if you're dating someone else, and I didn't. So I'm... amending that for myself, I guess, since we had different assumptions about what that meant when I first said it, and now I know what those assumptions were. Shifting my mental gears."

Okay, that probably wasn't helping clarify things. Maybe working through this for herself out loud wasn't the best plan. Sex can just be sex, and it could be mutually exclusive to being in an emotional relationship. She won't pretend to be thrilled about it, given the worldview she was raised with, but... "You can keep hiring her, if you want to," Pepper repeated. "And I'll try to get better at thinking outside my own box."

It wouldn't help anything if she got this riled every time she knew Eisso was over.