Chapter 8 Maren
The thing nobody warned you about, when three men move into your house, was the war.
I had lived alone for six years. In six years I had set the thermostat to one number and then forgotten what the number was. The house was a temperature. I had no opinions about it. I was a woman at peace.
Then the men had moved in, and it turns out Damian runs cold, which I would not have guessed about a man who can find your location from a photo alone. He wanted the house at a temperature I associate with storing meat.
And Brady ran hot. He wanted the house at a temperature I associate with proofing bread, which, to be fair, he was often also doing.
And Thomas did not appear to feel temperature at all. I could have set the house to either extreme and Thomas would have stood in the middle of it writing in his little notebook, unbothered, like a man who had decided a house could not touch him.
"That's a war crime," Brady told him. "You don't get a vote if you don't have a body that works."
"Hey, my body works!"
"Name one time you've been cold."
"Latvia," Thomas said.
"That was a deployment."
So Brady declared the situation called for diplomacy, by which he meant he found a takeout menu in my junk drawer, flipped it over, and started writing on the back of it at my kitchen island with the focus of a man drafting the Constitution.
"This," he announced, "is the Thermostat Accords."
"The what?!"
"We're going to do this like adults." He clicked his pen. "Daytime, we run Damian's number, because Damian's awake and miserable either way. At least this way he's productive."
"Acceptable," Damian said, not looking up from his laptop.
"Nighttime, we run my number, because human beings sleep warm. This is science. Look it up."
"That's not science," Damian said.
"It's my science."
"That's the problem."
"And Thomas," Brady went on, "since you refused to participate in the climate of this household, you owe the household reparations. Two cups of coffee a week. Made by you, for the group."
Thomas considered it. "That makes no sense, but fine," he said, and signed the back of the takeout menu with the fountain pen, one clean line.
Damian signed under it like a man signing away land he had fought a war over. "Under protest," he said.
"Noted in the margins," Brady said, writing under protest in the margins.
They all looked at me.
"You have to sign too. It's binding."
"It's a Thai menu, Brady!"
I sighed and signed the Thermostat Accords in purple glitter, and Brady held the menu up to the light like it was the Declaration of Independence, and Keith barked once, which Brady recorded as the dog's official ratification.
I did not notice something for a while, because it came in so quietly. There started being a mug of tea outside my bedroom door in the morning.
Earl Grey. It showed up around the time I usually woke up, sitting on the floor by the doorframe like it had grown there overnight.
The first morning I assumed it was a fluke.
The second morning I assumed it was Brady.
By the fourth morning I had stopped assuming anything and started just drinking it, warm, in the hallway.
I soon realized it was likely Damian. He never said.
Then there was the book. I had mentioned once that there was a romance novel I read in college and loved so much I had loaned out my copy and never gotten it back and had been quietly heartbroken about it for a decade. I said it in passing, not expecting anyone to remember.
It appeared on the desk in my office, the same edition, with the cover I remembered.
And then there was the dish.
I had complained, very lightly, one evening, about how my earrings rolled off the nightstand and under the bed and how I had probably lost a small fortune in single earrings to the void beneath my own mattress. It was not a real complaint. It was the kind of thing you say to fill silence.
The next morning there was a small ceramic dish on my nightstand, for the earrings.
I did not ask Damian about the dish. He would’ve said something about clutter and trip hazards and pretended it was about the floor. So I let him have it. I let it be about the floor.
There was one morning the mug was not there.
I stood in my own hallway feeling personally abandoned by a hot beverage, which is not a normal way to feel, and I want that on the record.
But there was something else where the Earl Grey usually sat.
A different mug. A different tea, something with ginger in it.
And a folded note. I opened it. One sentence, in his handwriting, which is small and even and a little impatient, like the pen cannot keep up with him.
It told me a movie I should watch. That was all. A title and a reason, eight words.
I kept the note. I still have the note. I am not going to tell you where.
Meanwhile my dog had become a politician.
Keith divided his affection like he was running for office and needed every district.
Mornings he loved Brady, because Brady was at the stove and Brady dropped things.
Afternoons he loved Thomas, because Thomas walked the perimeter and Keith had decided the perimeter was now his job, a job he performed with his whole chest and zero actual skills.
Evenings he loved Damian, because Damian sat in the surveillance room and the surveillance room had, in Keith's expert assessment, the best floor in the house.
But I was neutral territory. I was the woman who raised this animal from a shaking rescue who would not eat, and I had been demoted to a place you pass through on the way to someone better.
"He's using me for my floor," Damian said one night, with Keith asleep across his feet.
"He's using all of us," I said. "He's a tiny crime boss. We work for him now."
Polly came over with a second bottle of wine. She’s read every romance novel ever printed and considered this a credential. She walked into my kitchen, set the wine down, and did a slow lap of my life like a building inspector looking for code violations.
She read the Thermostat Accords on the fridge. She clocked the earring dish through my open bedroom door. She clocked the book on my desk.
She watched Brady set a plate down in front of Damian first while insulting him, and she watched Damian wave off Brady's compliment about the sauce by muttering that the basil was bruised. She watched Thomas hand me a glass of water I had not asked for.
She did not say anything in front of them. She took me by the wrist and walked me out to the back patio.
"So," she said, settling into a chair like she had all night, because she did. "How lucky are you, on a scale of one to ten."
"I'm not on the scale. I'm a hostage situation with good catering."
"Maren, I'm being serious for one second." She looked at me over her wine. "That, in there? That's not a metaphor. That's not a vibe. That's three grown men paying attention to you on purpose."
"It's their job to pay attention to me. It's the whole contract. They watch me. It is literally the job."
"Do you have feelings for any of them?"
"I don't!"
Polly looked at me for a long moment. "Okay, here's where we are. As your best friend, I have a duty. If this is going somewhere, I'm going to have to interview them. Vet them. Run a process."
"You will do no such thing!"
"I'll be subtle."
"You have never been subtle in your life. You once asked my crush at my birthday party what his intentions were before he finished saying hello."
"And we learned a lot about him very fast."
"Polly!" I put my wine down so she would know I meant it. "If you embarrass me, I will go into your apartment, and I will find your collectibles, the ones in the special boxes, the ones you keep the temperature right for, and I will set them on fire one at a time while you watch."
"You wouldn't!"
"I would livestream it."
"That's dark."
We went back inside, and Polly, who had agreed to nothing, immediately began asking the men questions she clearly believed were subtle.
"So," she said to Thomas, refilling his glass. "Where do you see yourself in, say, five years? Settled? Putting down roots? Hypothetically?"
"I run a company," Thomas said. "I'll be running it."
"But personally?"
"Personally, I'll also be running it."
She turned to Brady. "And do you want children, or…"
"Polly," I said.
"It's small talk!"
"It is not small talk, you sound like a mother-in-law in a deposition."
Brady, delighted, leaned on the counter. "I want six kids and a dog that hates me and a kitchen big enough to ruin Christmas in. Why do you ask, Polly?"
"No reason," Polly said, writing something down.
She left when it got late. On the step she hugged me and held my shoulders.
"I'm coming back," she said. "With a real protocol, numbered questions and a scoring system."
"I will burn the special boxes."
"Love you too," she said, and got in her car.
I came back inside braced for it to be weird. Polly had spent the whole evening basically reading the room out loud, and I figured the three of them would be standing there in that careful silence men get into when a thing has been named and nobody wants to be the one holding it.
They were not. They were arguing about my dog.
"He loves me most," Brady was saying. "I feed him. Love goes through the stomach. Ask anyone."
"He sleeps on my feet," Damian said. "Love goes through the floor."
"That's not a saying."
"It is now."
"He works the perimeter with me," Thomas said, from the sink, where he was washing a pan. "He chose the job, and the job is loyalty."
"The job is sniffing a fence for two hours," Brady said. "He's not loyal, he's employed."
I stood in the kitchen and watched three dangerous men fight about which of them my idiot dog loved best. I was glad things weren’t going to be awkward.