Being Good: Polyamorous Passions, #5

By Sagan Morrow

It's not always easy to follow your own rules...  

Helen is ecstatic that her fiancé, Ben, has agreed to "open" their upcoming marriage. They've outlined the new rules of their relationship and are finally on the same page to embark on an ethically non-monogamous adventure together. 

One of the most important rules? You can look at other people, but you can't touch… at least, not until after the wedding. 

But it's harder than Helen expected to stick to that particular rule when she can't stop drooling over their wedding photographer! And what's more, she doesn't even know if the photographer feels the same way about her. 

Will she be able to wait patiently until after the wedding to make her move? 

Join Helen and Ben on their exploration of an alternative relationship style in this romantic comedy! 

About the series... 

Being Good is Book 5 in the Polyamorous Passions series. Each book can be read as a stand-alone.

Polyamorous Passions follows the lives of three best friends as they each embark on their own journeys into consensual non-monogamy. Books 1—3 focused on Emma, Books 4—6 focus on Helen, and Books 7—9 will focus on Scarlett.

This series is suitable for anyone interested in real-life polyamory, open relationships, ethical non-monogamy, feminism, positive female friendships, alternatives to monogamy and monogamous relationships, and explorations of sexuality. Includes explicit language and sexual situations; intended for mature audiences. 

About the author... 

Sagan Morrow has a degree in Rhetoric, Writing & Communications, with a decade of experience as a businesswoman, blogger, and copywriter across a variety of industries. Based in Winnipeg, Canada, Sagan is a hobbyist burlesque dancer and identifies as polyamorous.

Sagan has authored several business books and teaches online courses to empower new freelancers as they grow their own successful businesses. The Polyamorous Passions series is her first foray into fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sagan Morrow
• Release date: Oct 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393406150

Book preview

BEING GOOD: Polyamorous Passions, Book 5

By Sagan Morrow

It’s not always easy to follow your own rules...

Helen is ecstatic that her fiancé, Ben, has agreed to open their upcoming marriage. They’ve outlined the new rules of their relationship and are finally on the same page to embark on an ethically non-monogamous adventure together.

One of the most important rules? You can look at other people, but you can’t touch... at least, not until after the wedding.

But it’s harder than Helen expected to stick to that particular rule when she can’t stop drooling over their wedding photographer! And what’s more, she doesn’t even know if the photographer feels the same way about her.

Will she be able to wait patiently until after the wedding to make her move?

Join Helen and Ben on their exploration of an alternative relationship style in this romantic comedy!

Note: While reading this story, you can tune into the special Being Good soundtrack at SaganMorrow.com/playlist5 (the complete list of songs is available at the back of this book!).

Being Good is Book 5 in the Polyamorous Passions series.

Polyamorous Passions follows the lives of three best friends as they each embark on their own journeys into consensual non-monogamy. Books 1—3 focused on Emma, Books 4—6 focus on Helen, and Books 7—9 will focus on Scarlett. Each novella can be enjoyed as a stand-alone.

This contemporary new adult series is suitable for anyone interested in real-life polyamory and open relationships, feminism, positive female friendships, alternatives to monogamy and monogamous relationships, and explorations of sexuality.

Read other books in this series, available now:

Book 1:A Choice Between Two

Book 2:Gaming the System

Book 3: Make Me Forget

Book 4: She Wants More

Connect with the author: @Saganlives onTwitter andInstagram.

Get updates on new book releases, access sample chapters of each novel, and tune into the indie author podcast atSaganMorrow.com/books.

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Any likeness to actual persons and events is purely coincidental. The views of the characters do not necessarily reflect the views of the author.

Please note that the Polyamorous Passions series uses sex-positive language and both reclaims and embraces terms such as smut and slutty.

All rights reserved. This book is not to be reproduced or distributed without express written permission from the author.

Chapter 1

Helen sat at the dining room table with her wedding vows in front of her and a green pen in hand, ready to mark-up the document.

Never use a red pen during the revision process, she had been told when she was a teacher’s assistant, back in her university days. Red pens have too many negative connotations.

That was all well and good, Helen remembered thinking to herself, but the entire point of a red pen was that it showed up bright on the page. Neither black or blue were striking enough to stand out on a typewritten page.

And so, when she was advised not to use red ink as a TA, she scoffed, ignoring the tip. Helen was confident the colour of ink wouldn’t make any difference for the students. Other professors and TAs could do what they liked, but she wasn’t going to avoid using a red pen for such a trivial reason.

To her amazement, however, that advice was well-founded: students in her class did not appreciate red ink, after all. They responded to it by sending frantic emails to her and fretting over their grades, regardless of how well they did on their papers.

All the students saw was the red colour.

By her third week of working as a teacher’s assistant, Helen gave up. She made the switch to using orange highlighters and green pens—and was astounded by the attitude shift in her students as a result.

I guess I was wrong, she remembered thinking to herself in bewilderment at the time.

From that day on, red pens had no room in Helen’s life. Her line of thinking was that if red ink held a negative connotation from the standpoint of marking papers for university students, then who was to say it didn’t have a subconscious negative connotation in other areas of life, too? She didn’t see the point in risking unnecessary negativity—not when she could avoid it by making such a simple change in her choice of writing utensils.

Her fiancé, Ben, was a university professor, and he followed the same no-red-ink rule in his classroom. Between the two of them, they hadn’t owned a red pen in years.

Which is how, on this particular day, Helen wound up using green ink as she revised the wording on their wedding vows.

Forsaking all others... be faithful only to you... complete and utter devotion...

Nope, nope, nope, Helen muttered under her breath, striking each phrase out with a decisive hand. The green slashed cheerily across the page. Red ink, she reflected, would lend an ominous feeling to today’s task. Green was much friendlier. It mirrored Helen’s own enthusiasm as she struck out each clause she and Ben didn’t need.

At the very least, in this case, the no-red-ink rule was a good one to follow. She was glad they adhered to that rule.

...Monogamy, on the other hand, was not a rule she and Ben would be following in their married life.

Monogamy—or a lack thereof—wasn’t something she ever thought would even be a topic for discussion between them. She was what she liked to call classic (or, as her sister Celine would say, traditional, which bothered Helen for some inexplicable reason she couldn’t put her finger on). There was something Helen liked about rules and social norms.

Helen usually had no problem at all with obeying the rules of society. She wasn’t like her best friends, Emma and Scarlett. Emma proudly flaunted her own rule-breaking ways, coming out openly as polyamorous to her friends, family, and workplace. And as for Scarlett—well, Scarlett was a professional burlesque dancer. Enough said.

No, that kind of public display of going against the grain was not Helen’s style. Helen preferred subtleties. And if she was going to skirt social norms, she was one to bend the rules, not break them outright.

Rules weren’t such a bad thing, anyway. They gave a person some kind of direction to go, guidelines to follow. Helen liked that. It made her brain happy when everything was in a tidy, orderly fashion. There was a degree of comfort in knowing what to expect.

This was exactly why she and Ben had already started coming up with a list of new relationship rules to follow for themselves, ever since they decided a couple months ago that their marriage would be ethically non-monogamous.

You know, they shouldn’t be called rules. You should instead think of them as agreements or boundaries, Helen could almost hear Emma scolding. The word rules sounds too rigid and strict.

But to Helen, that was the point of the whole exercise. She didn’t want to be wishy-washy. Her view of the world was black and white; a sharp contract to Emma’s preferred style of living in the grey.

That, no doubt, was largely why Helen found it so difficult to come around to the idea of ethical non-monogamy in the first place. She had rejected the concept when Emma first started the lifestyle a year or so ago. But when Helen, too, found herself becoming attracted to other men outside of her relationship with Ben... well. That created a complication to Helen’s values.

A classic case of cognitive dissonance, Helen thought to herself wryly. So to deal with the conundrum, she adjusted her mindset. She asked Ben if they could open their relationship and, although it took some time for him to come around and be okay with it, he’d agreed.

And from there they had created their own set of new rules for their relationship.

The rules were as follows:

No falling in love with someone else. (Emma might be full-on polyamorous, but she, Helen, was adamantly not. This was about dating and sex, not about a serious commitment to another person.)

Nothing could happen with someone else until after their wedding. Why over-complicate matters when they had enough on their plate right now?

Both Helen and Ben had to agree on an external person before anything happened—regardless of whether they brought that person into their own relationship, or if one of them had a separate one-on-one relationship with that other person.

Neither Helen or Ben wanted their family to know about their unconventional plans for their relationship. They were private people, and anyway, it was none of anyone’s business.

So Helen’s task today