Chapter 3
Noor
I draft the memorandum of understanding on Wednesday night, between the hours of nine and eleven, with a cup of jasmine tea cooling at my elbow and Bridget periodically wandering past the kitchen island in pajama shorts to say things like "you're insane" and "I support this insanity" and, on one notable pass, "if you marry him I will plan the wedding," which I receive with the silent dignity of a woman who has not yet, technically, finished planning the fake relationship and is therefore not yet contractually obligated to plan the imaginary real one.
The document is four pages. I will not apologize for it.
The document covers definitions, scope, conduct, exit clauses, and an appendix on social media.
The appendix on social media is the longest section, because Bridget asked me, when I told her about the project at six o'clock that evening, "Are you going to post photos?
Because if you don't post any photos the bikers are going to know it's fake," and I had to sit down on the kitchen stool and incorporate her observation into the document, which annoyed me, because it was a good observation and I had not arrived at it independently.
I will, eventually, give her credit. Not yet.
Rule One: physical contact is limited to publicly appropriate gestures — handholding, a hand at the small of the back, an arm around the shoulders or the waist. Cheek kisses are permitted but not initiated. No mouth-to-mouth contact under any circumstances.
Rule Two: no improvisation of personal narrative.
We agree on a backstory in advance. Met at the Sunrise Grill, where I was meeting a vendor and he was finishing a shift.
Have been seeing each other casually for approximately two months.
Are not, at this stage of the relationship, exclusive, because exclusivity invites questions about commitment and timeline, and I do not want to answer questions about commitment and timeline because I have not built any.
Rule Three: the arrangement terminates the day after the rally concludes. There will be no extension. There will be a clean break. Both parties resume their previous social arrangements with no expectation of continuing contact beyond what is professionally required.
Rule Four: confidentiality. The arrangement is between the two of us. Neither party discloses the nature of the relationship to friends, family, club members, or coworkers, except to the extent strictly necessary for safety or logistical reasons.
Rule Five: weekly check-ins. Every Sunday, six p.m., we meet for thirty minutes to debrief the previous week, surface concerns, and adjust as needed.
There is also Appendix A, which covers social media, and Appendix B, which is a non-binding statement of preferred language and tone — I am asking, essentially, that he not refer to me as "babe" in public because I have feelings about the word "babe" that are too large to fit in this document — and Appendix C, which is a contingency protocol for what we do if we are, at any point, asked directly whether the relationship is real.
I print three copies. I drive to the compound on Thursday morning before he arrives. I leave one copy on the seat of his motorcycle in a manila envelope. I keep two for my own files.
He calls me at nine forty-six.
"Ms. Abbasi."
"Mr. Brennan."
"I have read the memorandum."
"And?"
There is a pause. I can hear him breathing. It is the breath of a man choosing his words.
"Ms. Abbasi."
"Yes."
"I have one objection."
"Which is?"
"Appendix B, paragraph three. The list of forbidden endearments."
"Yes?"
"I would like to add 'sweetheart' to the list."
"You don't want to be called sweetheart?"
"I don't want you to call me sweetheart. It would be psychologically destabilizing."
I laugh. I cannot help it. I am alone in my office and I am laughing into the phone, and Camila — who is back from vacation and pretending to do payroll at the desk across from me — looks up sharply, and I have to wave at her to indicate I am not having a stroke.
I cover the receiver. I tell Camila I'm on a personal call.
Camila has worked for me for fourteen months and has, in that time, never seen me take a personal call from this office.
She does not buy the lie. She returns to her payroll and watches me out of the corner of her eye for the rest of the morning.
"Mr. Brennan."
"Yes."
"Sweetheart is not on the list because it was never on the list. The list is babe, baby, doll, hot stuff, and my woman. "
"Who calls anyone my woman? "
"You'd be surprised. I have been called my woman twice in vendor negotiations, both times by men I had never met before."
"Jesus."
"Yes. So. Sweetheart is permitted, but only in private, and only if you don't make it weird."
"Define weird."
"I will know it when I see it."
"Ms. Abbasi."
"Yes."
"I am going to so deeply enjoy working with you."
He hangs up. I stand in my office with the phone still at my ear and a feeling in my chest I am not going to name, and Camila says, without looking up from the payroll, "Was that the boyfriend?
" and I say, with all the dignity I can summon, "He's not my boyfriend, Camila, he's a contracted associate," and Camila says, "Mm-hmm," in the tone of a woman who has heard this from her boss before and is going to bring it up at the next happy hour with prejudice.
The first test is on Friday afternoon. A vendor coordination meeting at the Holiday Inn off Route 9, fluorescent lighting, complimentary coffee that someone has been brewing since the Carter administration, three representatives from clubs I have not yet won over: a man named Hatch from the Vipers, a woman named Pell from a smaller outfit called the Ridge Riders, and a man named Booker from the Iron Stallions, the latter of whom Marlene specifically warned me about and who is, on this Friday afternoon, twenty minutes late and visibly hungover.
Callum arrives ten minutes before me. I see his motorcycle in the lot. I park beside it. I check my reflection in the rear-view mirror — lipstick, hair, blazer — and I take one breath, and I get out of the car.
He is waiting just inside the conference room.
He is wearing his prospect cut, clean, with a black T-shirt underneath.
His hair has been deliberately tousled in a way that I recognize as someone's attempt at "casual," and there is a small piece of toilet paper on his jaw where he has nicked himself shaving, which I gently reach up and remove without saying a word.
He freezes when I do it. I freeze too. I have, technically, just touched his face.
Rule One, I tell myself, allows for this.
Rule One was written for exactly this. I am compliant. I am within scope.
"Ready?" I ask.
"Ms. Ab— Noor. Sorry. Practicing." He clears his throat. "Yes. Ready."
I take his hand. His hand closes around mine.
I have never held this hand before, except in the brief, professional handshake at the end of yesterday's contract conversation, and I am unprepared for the texture of it — the calluses across the knuckles from working on engines, the slight roughness of the palm, the warmth that travels up my arm and parks itself, uninvited, in my collarbone.
I do not adjust. I do not flinch. I walk into the conference room with my fake boyfriend on my arm and my tablet in my free hand, and I greet the three vendor representatives with the smile of a woman who has done this a hundred times.
Hatch's eyes go to Callum first. He registers the cut.
He registers the patch — Prospect — Iron Vow — and he recalibrates.
I watch him do it. It happens in the space of one breath.
Pell does the same thing a half-second later.
Booker, when he finally arrives twenty-three minutes into the meeting, does it as he sits down, and his entire posture changes — he straightens, he stops sprawling, he sets his coffee down without making a show of it.
Callum says nothing. Callum, in fact, says nothing for the entire two-hour meeting except to introduce himself when I introduce him and to murmur, at one point, when I mention a tent specification I am still negotiating, "She's been working on that for three weeks; it's going to be tight but she'll get it done.
" It is a single sentence. It is exactly the right sentence.
The vendor reps register it without registering it, the way a carpenter registers the sound of a level being placed on a beam, and the meeting continues.
I run the meeting. I run it the way I would have run it without Callum there — same agenda, same firmness, same refusals to budge on the items I had decided in advance would not budge — but the room is different.
The room takes me at my word the first time I say something, instead of the third.
The room asks me clarifying questions instead of skeptical ones.
The room, in other words, treats me the way it would have treated me from the start if I had been a man, and I do not know whether to be grateful for the simulation or furious at the fact that I needed the simulation in the first place.
I am both. I am, throughout the meeting, both.
I keep my face neutral and my voice even and my pen moving across the notepad, and I let the rage live in the spreadsheet I am building in the back of my mind, and I get every commitment I came for.
When the meeting ends, the three reps stand.
Hatch shakes my hand. Pell shakes my hand.
Booker — and this, more than anything, is the moment that surprises me — Booker offers me his card and says, "Ms. Abbasi, I think I owe you an apology for being late.
Won't happen again." Then he nods at Callum.
He says, "Brennan." Callum says, "Booker.
" It is a single word. It is, apparently, the equivalent of a peace treaty.