I didn’t say anything else. I just looked at him. Bev ping-ponged her head back and forth between us, trying to see who would break the tension. Knowing that I wasn’t going to win, I sighed and asked, “You on your way out?”
He nodded, then said, “Yes, but we have a date for dinner later this week, right?”
It was my turn to nod.
“Alright then.” He retreated while saying, “Nice to see you, Beverly. Make sure she finishes that chemistry. Also, tell your father I said hello.”
“Sure thing, Sheriff.” Bev winked. God, she’d wink at anyone.
When we heard the car turn on in the driveway, Bev said to me, “He knows you’re an adult, right? Like not kinda sorta—we’re legit adults at this point for more than a decade.”
“Yeah, clearly not to him,” I huffed.
Sweetly, Bev said, “You have to talk to him. We both know he loves you, but it’s just not okay to try to control your life anymore.”
I rubbed my hand over my face. I hated the idea of disappointing him, almost clinically. I’d seen a couple of shrinks when I was in med school because after studying mental health, I started thinking that there might be some emotional repercussions to being a prodigy, and to my surprise, I spent all my sessions talking about how I couldn’t seem to shake the need to please my father. It was possible my need to keep him happy stemmed from my mom leaving and never looking back.
I was also constantly off-put by the fact that he didn’t try to find her and bring her back. Honestly, my therapists always wanted to talk about how I felt about her leaving, but I didn’t wonder about her much. Kids, small-town life, marriage—they’re not for everyone. I assumed that if she left without looking back, she did me a favor. Rather than obsessing over the parent that didn’t care, I was always more concerned with making sure my father loved me—because I didn’t want him to leave, too. Rationally, I knew he wasn’t leaving. But still, because of my own baggage, I let him be controlling and didn't stand up to him. Honestly, I really didn’t want to think that garbage. I just wanted to focus on the task at hand: my agreement with Wyatt.
“Bev,” I begged. “I’ve got to come up with some rules.” Feeling anxious, I shifted and tried to get up and move about, but as an adult my bean bag chair was no longer novel. It was now a black hole that swallowed me up and wouldn’t let me go, so I gave up, resigning myself to staying put for the time being.
Responding to my obvious physical and mental discomfort, Bev sat up, crossed her legs, closed her eyes, positioned her hands in some kind of yoga mudra, and resting them on her knees, she took a series of deep breaths. Behind her, the sun poured through my bedroom window, casting a perfect shadowed likeness of her on the floor. I found myself thinking of Penny Darling trying to sew Peter Pan’s shadow back to his feet. That was really such a silly notion—that one's shadow could escape—but also such a delightfully childish fantasy: the shadow as a living entity. I always loved Peter Pan and his lost boys. In fact, when I was a girl, I used to think of Wyatt and his brothers as something akin to that ragtag group of wildlings. They were almost feral. Maybe all broods of boys are but the Morgan boys, as well as Sarah and Kat, they were like a wolf pack: protective, fierce, and so loyal. I’d always envied their camaraderie.
When Bev's eyes fluttered open, she was like a new person, grounded and completely centered. She emanated leadership vibes. All business, she said, “We have to go about this another way. We can’t think of this situation from a sexual perspective. We have to be practical, logical.” Gently teasing me, she quipped, “Honestly, for the first time in our entire friendship, I think we have to think more like you would.”
“Finally,” I sullenly joked back. “I knew someday you would see the genius of my ways.”
“Don’t get used to it,” she smarted.
“Okay, so thinking logically, how do we come up with these rules?” I asked, still clearly in the dark.
“We work backwards.” She flipped the page of the spiral notebook, starting from scratch. “Let’s consider why you need rules for this endeavor.”
“To maintain professional distance?” It should have been a statement, but it came out as a question.
She pursed her lips and scolded me with her eyes, making a face that clearly said, girl, don’t lie to me. I know you better than you know yourself. I stared back at her. Challenging her expression with my own silent, I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Shaking her head, she said, “No offense but it is a forgone conclusion that this will not be wholly professional for you, Caroline. First of all, it’s sex. Sex is not really an act that lends itself to professional exchanges.”
“There are sex professionals,” I argued.
She snorted. “You are not one of them. Secondly, you have been crushing on Wyatt Morgan for as long as I’ve known you, and I remember you before you even realized you were gonna get boobs, let alone getting around to actually growing them. So, you might be able to lie to yourself, but you can’t lie to me. Wyatt Morgan is your dream boy, nothing professional about that.”
She was right, but still I found myself arguing with her. “Okay, fine, I will admit that this is perhaps a bit exciting from a personal standpoint, but I’m first and foremost a scientist and this endeavor is in many ways an experiment, so I feel I should at least attempt a certain level of professionalism.”
Shaking her head again, Bev smiled. “Okay, you do that. Good idea. Sounds very sexy. I think you’ll be rocketing off toward an orgasm any day now.”
Huffing out my nose and crossing my arms over my chest, I harrumphed. “Fine, why do you think I need rules for this endeavor?”
Gently, as if I were made of glass, Bev said, “I think you need to protect yourself, in more ways than one.”
Relaxing my arms a little, I questioned, “Such as?”
Bev shifted, lying back down on the floor rug before she asked, “Do you want Wyatt dating other women while he’s sleeping with you?”
I did not. I didn’t want Wyatt dating women other than me period, but I most certainly didn’t want him sleeping with other women when he was sleeping with me. All I said was, “No.”
“I didn’t think so,” Bev said, picking up the pen. “Rule one: During the duration of the friends with benefits agreement, neither party will date or sleep with other people.”
That was a good rule. I liked that rule. And it made me think of another rule.
“We should get tested for STDs,” I said. “So I don’t get distracted worrying about all that.”
“Good,” Bev said, approving of my thinking. “Rule two: Both parties entering into the friends with benefits agreement will undergo a full battery of STD testing and openly share their results.” She wrote as she spoke. Then she looked up at me and asked, “What about contraception?”
Another thing to consider, for sure. “I don’t know, but I’ll think about it. Just write rule three, birth control.”
She nodded, making the note. When she was done writing, she glanced at me and then said, “I’m sure we can come up with some other very practical thoughts, and quite possibly some more giggly ones. And I know that this whole fiasco was my idea, but now that we are in the thick of it, the thing I’m most worried about is how we are going to come up with a rule that padlocks and protects your heart.”