"I'll pass."

"Whatever.  It's here if you need it."  Edison put the tape back in her pocket.

Jordan turned around and looked full on at her reflection.  "I just don't want to look too planned.  Looking planned is the equivalent to looking desperate.  And looking desperate turns women off."

"I don't know about that," Edison said, "I kind of like a quiet air of desperation.  It means they're easy targets."

Jordan whacked Edison in the arm with the back of her bandaged hand.  "Ow!" she exclaimed.  "Your arm hit my hand."

"Listen, Jordan, reality-check here.  You're just going to see the Doc so she can take out the stitches.  It isn't a date.  She has a boyfriend, remember the guy in the photo."

"I know that.  But I’m not competing with him.  I would just be presenting another option so this could be the precursor to a date with a person who is offering another type of relationship.  You have to remember most of us didn’t start off gay.  We eventually realized it.  Maybe Amy hasn’t realized it yet.  That’s all I’m saying."

"So you are going to ask her out."

"If it comes up organically."

"How does asking somebody out come up organically?"

"You know like if her stomach growls and I hear it.  I could say, 'You must be hungry,' and she'd say 'I am hungry' and I could say 'let's go get something to eat' and then she'd say…”

Edison picked up, "And she would say 'I'm hungry for you, baby' and you'd say 'Here I am, come and get it.'"

They laughed, but stopped abruptly when the door across the hall opened a crack and one eye peeked out.

Meet Irma Kalandarishvili.  Irma had black hair, black eyes, and an entire wardrobe of only black clothes.  Or maybe she just had only one black outfit.  Jordan wasn't sure.  Irma was tall and thin like a ballerina and her hair was slicked back in a severely lacquered bun.  She never blinked.  Nobody had ever seen her blink.  She could've been mistaken for a stick of licorice.

Jordan had gone out on a date with her two years ago.  The date was horrible but the sex afterwards made up for it.  Irma and Jordan fulfilled a hunger in each other that other people couldn't.  It wasn't based on banter or intellect or common interests.  It was purely animalistic.  So, Jordan and Irma became friends with benefits except they weren't really friends.  And when Irma showed up one day needing a place to stay, Jordan rented her a spare bedroom.

Irma moved in and paid her rent on time with cash. Nobody knew where Irma was from – Russia?  Germany?  Or one of those Slavickstan kind of countries?  Nobody knew how she made her money or what she did behind the doors of her room.

Ever since Irma had moved in six months ago, Jordan had avoided her.  She didn't want to have a physical relationship with somebody that lived under her own roof.  It had been fine to be fuck-buddies when your buddy didn’t live with you but now it was different.  Jordan reasoned that it was too much like that old adage, "Don't shit on the hand that feeds you."  Or something like that.  She’d told Irma that but Irma wasn't giving up so easily.

Irma eyed Jordan up and down and said in her thick accent that sounded like Natasha from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, "You are dressing for big date?"

Jordan shrugged.  "Just a maybe date."

Irma leered at her.  "If maybe date is not what dreams are made, you come to Irma and Irma will un-dress you and show things you never experiment in wild dreams."

Edison said, "I think you mean experience in your wildest dreams."

Irma looked at her coldly.  "No.  Irma mean experiment in wild dreams." She looked back to Jordan and smiled wickedly before she ducked back inside and closed the door.

"Someday I'm going to scream in her face.  Just to see if she blinks," Edison said.

Jordan laughed.  "She won't.  I think her hair is so tight in that bun she can't blink."

Edison laughed. "I don't get what you see in her."

"We had an arrangement, that's all.  It worked in both our favors."

"What an arrangement," Edison said with a huge eye-roll.  "If you two aren't doing somebody else then you do each other."

"Operative word here is did. We no longer do. But I'm sure you could find the same type of arrangement if you wanted."

Edison said in an imitation of Irma's accent, "Edison not want.  Edison want love true not buddy fuck in experiment love."

"You don't really believe in true love, do you?"

"Sure.  Don't you?" Edison said, brushing a stray hair off Jordan’s shoulder.  She straightened her collar.

"Nope," Jordan said.

"Nope?"

"No."  Jordan looked at herself in the mirror again.  "I believe the concept of true love is just an illusion."

Edison looked at Jordan's face, at her reflection in the mirror, then back to Jordan.  She imitated Irma's accent, "Edison think one of you is big fat liar."

Happy Birthday to Me

Jordan paced back and forth in the small room.  There wasn't much to do or look at while she waited for Amy.  The décor left a lot to be desired.  One gurney-type rolling bed, one rolling stool, and a small desk holding some medical torture instruments.  The desk was on wheels, too.  What was it with doctors and rolling devices?

There were two doors.  One was the door that she had come in and the other door led to another room identical to this one.  Jordan knew because she had peeked earlier.

She stopped pacing long enough to study the poster that was taped to the wall.  It depicted a cartoon boy holding his hands over a sink.  There were bugs and worms crawling all over his hands.  Cartoon germs.  She moved to the next poster.  It was a drawing of the male anatomy complete with Latin-esque labels.  Jordan leaned in close and studied the side view of the phallus.  It was a sliced open view so you could see what the inside of the penis looked like.  It looked all spongy.  She reached out and touched it with one finger.  It just felt like a poster.

She wiped her un-bandaged hand on the side of her shorts.  Her palm was sweaty.  It was a cold sweat.  Nerves.  She didn't like to admit it, but Amy made her nervous.  Not like she was scared of her, but like she was scared of her.  That didn't make sense unless you were Jordan.  And it made perfect sense to her.  She was scared of Amy, all right.  Not scared of the physical person of Amy.  More like scared of how Amy made her feel.

The small room was giving her an acute case of claustrophobia.  The walls were closing in, making her brain play tricks on itself.  She swore the cartoon boy on the “Always wash your hands!” poster was talking to her. Which was markedly better than the penis one talking to her. The cartoon boy told her she should wash her hands.  Sweaty hands were germy hands and sing the Happy Birthday song because that was the specified length for optimum germ removal.  She didn’t know whether she should believe him or not but she had an instant driving desire to rid her hands of sweat and potentially hazardous germs.

She went to the sink, and turned on the hot water.  She didn't want to shake hands with Amy and have a clammy, sweaty palm.  That would be the death knell of any budding relationship.  Almost as bad as kissing and slobbering on her face.  She held her hand under the stream of water and sang the Happy Birthday song all the way through just like the cartoon boy in the poster told her to do.

When she turned off the water, she heard a voice.  No, two voices.  They were coming from the room next door.  One voice sounded like Amy’s.  Jordan pressed her ear to the door that led to the room next door, closed her eyes and listened.  There was a man’s voice, and Amy’s voice.

Here is what she heard the voices say:

“No!  Don’t!”  Amy said.

“Why not?  You want it.  You know you do,” a man said.

“I do not want it.  Especially while I’m working.”

“C’mon, this is the perfect place.  That way if it makes you sick you’re already in a hospital.”

“I don’t have time,” Amy said.  “I have an appointment any minute now.”

“I’ll be quick.  Here, open your mouth.”

“No!” Amy screeched.  “Put that back where it belongs.  I don’t want to even look at it.”

“Aw. C’mon.  Just put a little bit in your mouth.”

Amy screamed.  Metal clanged against metal and fell to the floor.  There was a giant thud.

Jordan immediately morphed into white knight mode.  She bashed open the door and crashed into the room, hands held high in a karate posture.  She hai-yai’ed and did the whooping crane stance that The Karate Kid made famous.

The frozen tableau she saw before her was this:  Amy was in a corner.  Jeremy was holding a bowl in one hand and a spoon in the other.  He held the spoon, which had some type of green sludge in it, only an inch from Amy’s lips.  A bedpan was on the floor, still spinning from its fall.

“Unhand her,” Jordan said because she was still thinking like a knight and Amy was her damsel in distress.

Jeremy clanked the spoon into the bowl and said, “Hey, you’re the lesbian hottie.”

Jordan relaxed, deflating from the whooping crane stance to one of an embarrassed penguin.  “And you’re Amy’s boyfriend.  Who’s trying to spoon feed her.”

Amy laughed and slapped Jeremy’s chest with the back of her hand.  “He’s not my boyfriend.  He’s my butthole roommate.  Who’s trying to make me eat my other roommate’s experiment.”

“Um, okay,” Jordan said.  “I’ll just be right over there.  In the next room.  Waiting.”  She held up her injured hand.  “Stitches, you know.”  She saluted them.  “Carry on.”

Jordan backed out the door, smiling so big her face hurt.  She closed the door and banged her head against it, muttering, “Dumb, dumb, dumb.”  She went back to the sink, turned on the water and washed her face with her one good hand while humming Happy Birthday.

"Is it your birthday?"

Jordan gasped and turned.  It was Amy.  She turned off the faucet and looked around for a paper towel.  "No, it's not my birthday.  I was just singing it because the cartoon boy told me to."

"Cartoon boy?" Amy asked.  She tilted her head to one side.  She squinted like she was trying to figure out if Jordan had gone bonkers.

Jordan gestured at the poster.

Amy studied the poster.  She looked worried.  "That boy in the poster talked to you?  You know he's not alive, right?" Amy handed her a paper towel.

"No!" Jordan said.  "I mean, yes, I know that.  I meant the bubble over his head said to sing…well you know."  She took the paper towel and dried her hands.

Amy laughed.  "I was just kidding."

Jordan breathed a sigh of relief.  "Oh.  That was funny.  You had me going there for a minute."  There was an awkward pause while she wiped her face with the paper towel.  “Um, sorry about bursting in on you like that.  It sounded like, you know…”

“Yeah, I know,” Amy said, “But it wasn’t what you think.  And he’s not what you think.”

Jordan nodded.  She nodded too much.  It was like she couldn’t stop nodding.  She felt like one of those toy Chihuahua dogs people put on the dashboard of their car.

"You're nervous, huh?" Amy asked.

Jordan nodded quickly about three hundred more times.

"No need to be.  Getting stitches taken out doesn't hurt at all.  Have a seat."  Amy looked over her paperwork on her clipboard and jotted down some notes.

Jordan sat on the gurney-bed.  She could feel the coarse paper lying across the top of it sticking to the back of her sweaty thighs.  Great.  She was so nervous that she was sweating all over now.  Amy was going to think she had some kind of sweating disease.

Jordan closed her eyes and took three deep breaths.  She couldn't ask Amy out.  There was no way this brilliant, busy, probably straight doctor would go out with her.  Jordan was certain she would just make a fool of herself by asking, and Amy was so nice that she'd have to make up an excuse and then they'd both know she was lying and that would make everything really awkward and tense and then she'd have to tell Edison about how stupid she'd been and she'd feel embarrassed about it for months or maybe even years.

"One down," Amy said.

Jordan opened her eyes.  Amy was smiling and holding one tiny little black piece of thread in some tweezers.

"That didn't hurt, did it?" Amy asked.

Jordan shook her head.  She'd been so wrapped up in the conversation with herself that she hadn’t known when Amy had unwrapped her hand and taken out a stitch.