4. The Red Pen Amendment
Chapter four
The Red Pen Amendment
Sterling
My kitchen is not designed for this level of threat.
I’m standing at the island, slicing packaging and boxes with a chef’s knife that could bisect a brick, but my primary weapon is denial.
Denial that Mandy is ten feet behind me, wearing my T-shirt and my boxers and nothing else.
Denial that the shirt hits her mid-thigh like a sleepover fantasy.
Denial that my body is, as of this morning, mutinying against all rational definitions of friendship.
The solution is simple, I do not turn around. I focus on the litter box. The litter box is fine. I am fine. Nothing is different.
I bend to line the litter box up against the wall and realize too late that my hands are shaking.
I breathe through my nose and recalibrate, centering myself on the tile grid of the floor.
One square per exhale. This is a house of order.
Like the firehouse. I can handle some fabric and exposed knees.
Behind me I can sense her leaning on the opposite side of the island, watching me. Not because she’s a creep, but because this is how she operates, take in the scene, gather data, assemble the appropriate level of sarcasm for deployment. I have to fight not to look back at her.
I stand and turn around. She’s perched on a stool, knees drawn up, bare legs tangled under the hem of the t-shirt, and I have to forcibly route my gaze to her face and nowhere else.
“All set furball,” I announce, as if this is a public event and not a war of attrition between my brain and my hormones.
She grins, which is worse than her ignoring me entirely. “Is this one of your ‘signature moves’?” she asks. “Impressing women with breakfast and baked goods?”
“Technically,” I say, “only two percent of women survive to the breakfast stage. You should be honored.”
She props her chin in her hand, elbow to the counter. “How many are you up to now, Captain Save a Hoe, was it?”
“I’d have to check the records. But you’re the first to get the bakery upgrade.
” I wink and place the other bakery bag in front of her and try not to notice the way her hair is still damp from the shower, or how the steam off the sandwich fogs her glasses for a split second before she slides them up the bridge of her nose.
Bowie is already orbiting, winding between the stool legs, tail flicking at the hem of the shirt like it’s the world’s smallest flag.
Mandy hold out a small crumb of egg towards my furred nemesis.
The cat goes for it, misses by a mile, and then leaps up onto the counter with the entitled grace of someone who knows the rules do not apply to him.
I shoot Mandy a look. She shrugs, innocent. “He’s food, motivated,” she says. “He gets it from his roommate.”
I could argue. I do not. Instead, I reach behind me, grab the spiral notebook with the cracked blue cover from the coffee table, and drop it onto the island between our plates. The impact makes her jump, which is a win.
“New house policy,” I say, uncapping a pen with unnecessary force. “We are setting ground rules.”
Her eyes light up, but she tries to suppress the smile by biting down on her lower lip. “This feels ominous. How many rules are we talking?”
“Depends on how quickly we can agree to them.” I print the first one at the top of the page in block letters:
NO JUDGING CEREAL CHOICES.
She cackles. “I don’t like anything with little marshmallows.”
“That’s not my problem,” I say. “Rule two.” I write:
BATHROOM SCHEDULE IS SACRED.
“Do you want to post a time sheet on the door?” she asks. “Or can we just have a whistle system?”
I ignore her and proceed.
BOWIE IS NOT ALLOWED ON THE KITCHEN COUNTERS.
I underline it, hard. Bowie, mid-sniff of Mandy’s sandwich, makes direct eye contact with me and licks the plate anyway.
Mandy raises her eyebrows. “Do you really think you can enforce that one?”
“I have military training,” I inform her. “You have no idea the lengths I will go to.”
She leans forward, grabs the red pen from my coffee mug, and in a move that is both reckless and exactly in character, she adds, in looping, deliberate script at the bottom of the list:
NO BEING WEIRD ABOUT THIS.
She sits back, arms crossed, and studies my face like she’s waiting for the retaliation.
I read the rule. I cap the pen. I extend my hand across the notebook. She shakes it. Her hand is small, her grip firm, her expression daring me to call her bluff. I do not call her bluff. We seal it.
“That’s it, then,” she says. “We’re cohabiting like civilized people.”
“Pending the result of a mandatory two-week review,” I say.
She tips her head, pleased. She tips her head, pleased.
“Can we add a clause about noise-cancelling headphones?” she asks.
“Because I do not want to hear your hoe-saving activities.” I look up from the notebook.
“Mandy. I am a gentleman.” She gives me a look that could strip paint.
“The headphones,” I say, “are already in the welcome basket.”
She rolls her eyes before we both laugh.
The sandwich is going cold. I pick it up, take a bite, and am immediately reminded that I forgot to add salt. Rookie move. I finish it anyway.
Mandy picks at the edge of her sandwich, peels the bread back, and eats the filling first, which is a thing I have seen her do a hundred times but never called out.
“Do you always eat it that way?” I ask.
She shrugs. “Only when it’s not homemade. It’s a trust exercise.”
I want to ask what the test is, but before I can, Bowie edges forward and starts licking the abandoned crusts off her plate.
She catches me watching. “He likes you, you know.”
I look at the cat. “I’m not convinced.”
She grins. “He only destroys the property of people he respects.”
I hoist myself up onto the counter and cross my arms. “Is that why you torched your last landlord’s security deposit?”
“That was mold,” she says. “I was being a responsible tenant.”
I smile. She smiles back.
The notebook sits open between us, the red-inked “NO BEING WEIRD ABOUT THIS” underlined for emphasis. She glances at it every so often, like she’s checking whether the words have changed, and I realize that beneath her bravado, she is bracing for something to go wrong.
We finish breakfast in the kind of silence that doesn’t itch. I clear the plates, rinse them, and stack them in the dishwasher. Mandy wipes the crumbs from the counter into her palm and makes a point of feeding the last ones to Bowie, who acts as if he’s just been bequeathed the family fortune.
She stands, stretches, and in the stretch, the shirt rides up just enough that I have to stare at the faucet for three solid seconds. She doesn’t notice or pretends not to.
“Alright,” she says. “Work time. I have a logo deadline at noon. You want more coffee?”
I nod. “Iced, decaf, extra-hot flat white with an espresso shot.”
She raises a finger. “That’s not a thing.”
“It is if you try hard enough.”
She makes the coffees. I move to the living room, set up my laptop on the edge of the couch, and start going through my emails. There are three from Chief, two from the shift scheduler, and one from a guy I barely remember from Army days, subject line ALL CAPS: “YOU STILL ALIVE?”
I don’t answer that one.
Mandy brings over the coffee and sets it down next to my hand. She sits at the other end of the couch, Bowie immediately filling the gap between us, and boots up her own laptop. The next hour is a blur of keys, clicks, and muted cursing.
But every so often, I catch her looking up from her screen, glancing over at the notebook on the counter, and then back at her work, as if she’s checking to see if the rules are still holding.
I look at the notebook too.
I wonder which of us will be the first to break one.
By eight p.m., the day has been accounted for.
Mandy hit her noon deadline, I cleared my emails and did two loads of laundry, we ate lunch at separate ends of the kitchen island, and somewhere around three o’clock we watched half a documentary about competitive dog grooming before mutually abandoning it without comment.
Now I am stretched out at one end of the couch, one socked foot on the coffee table, the other tucked under my thigh, and Mandy is at the opposite end with her knees drawn up and her laptop balanced on her shins, glasses sliding incrementally down her nose with each click of the trackpad.
Bowie is the Switzerland of this arrangement, sprawled diagonally between us, tail draped over the touchpad of my work laptop so that any attempt to get productive is interrupted by a judgmental cat.
The lamp is set to low, just enough yellow to keep the city’s cold blue from dominating the room.
Mandy’s screen is a sunburn, bright white rectangle, reflecting in her glasses and painting her features in a series of flickers, intense, intent, then abruptly softened as she flips from email to meme, then back again.
I make a show of scrolling through my phone, but mostly I watch her through the middle distance.
This is the kind of evening that is supposed to make a place feel like home, predictable, harmless, sanded smooth of anything that could get under the skin.
It should not be difficult, and yet I am hyper-aware of every inch that separates us on the couch, every shift in posture, every time she tucks her hair behind her ear or absently taps her thumb against the space bar.
At some point she uncurls, leans forward to plant her feet on the floor, and Bowie, sensing a betrayal of his Switzerland status, shifts to wedge himself more firmly between us.
Mandy laughs, not the polite kind or the filtered through teeth kind, but a real, surprise your self kind of laugh that bursts up and out and momentarily resets the oxygen content of the entire room.
She glances over at me and, for once, doesn’t try to take it back.
I feel it hit, somewhere in the space between my ribs, and immediately redirect my gaze to the TV. Which is not even on.
“You ever seen a cat this lazy?” she asks, stretching her toes until Bowie rolls belly, up and exposes a patch of orange fur that practically glows in the lamplight.
I shake my head. “The department got a call once about a cat who went missing for three days. Turned out he was living in the drop ceiling at the McDonald’s on 17th. Gained two pounds on fries and Filet-o-Fish. We had to lure him down with a Happy Meal.”
She grins, genuine, then picks up her mug and sips. She’s switched to tea, and as she sets it down, I can just barely read the inspirational quote on the tag: “Great acts are made up of small deeds.” I file this away, unsure whether it’s ironic or a sign from the universe.
After a lull, I realize I have been resting my arm along the back of the couch for the better part of an hour, elbow just inches from where her hair is feathered out on the cushion.
I have no recollection of putting my arm there, but now that I notice, I cannot un-notice.
I slowly retract it, hoping she doesn’t clock the maneuver.
She does, of course, but she lets me off the hook.
The living room fills with the low hum of the city outside, the radiator clanking in a language only it understands, and the periodic click of Mandy’s keys. Slower now, though. More errors. I’ve watched her delete and retype the same word three times in the last five minutes.
At 9:13 she closes the laptop.
It’s not a dramatic gesture. She just folds it shut, sets it on the cushion beside her, and sits there for a moment with her hands in her lap, like she’s waiting for her body to remember what comes next.
“Okay,” she says, mostly to herself. She pulls her glasses off and rubs the bridge of her nose. “I think I’m done.”
“You’ve been up since the fire,” I say.
She looks at me. “So have you.”
“I’m used to it.”
She makes a sound that is not quite a laugh. She stands, collects her mug, and pauses at the edge of the hallway. Something in her posture is softer than usual, the bravado dialed down to something closer to actual human tiredness.
She stops at the hallway. Leans a shoulder against the frame.
“Night, Sparkles.”
She looks back, just for a second. “Night, Sterling.”
My room is dark, the sheets cold but clean.
I lie down on top of the duvet, hands laced behind my head, staring at the cracks in the ceiling that look like ancient rivers on a map.
The bed is supposed to feel familiar, the place I default to when all else fails.
Instead, it feels too big, too quiet, even with the sounds of the apartment filtering in from the other side of the door.
I run through my own personal incident report.
Patient presents with symptoms of acute distraction, probable origin 5’4” with auburn hair, prognosis uncertain.
The dry-spell theory, which seemed airtight twelve hours ago, now feels like a blanket with too many holes.
I have lived through longer periods of forced celibacy, and none of them have resulted in a loss of fine motor skills or a re-routing of blood supply to critical systems.
I think about the other women, the ones I have let into my apartment, my bed, even the ones I have let into the firehouse as an emergency contact.
None of them have ever managed to burn a hole in my retinas just by eating a sandwich.
None of them have ever made me want to turn on a lamp just so I could keep seeing their face after dark.
I shut it down, hard. This is not a useful avenue of inquiry. The verdict at the end of this process is not one I have any desire to render. We are just friends and this is temporary.
I fall asleep like a monk on a mountain chanting a mantra like it will save me from drowning.
We are just friends and this is temporary.