Blurred Lines

by Lauren Layne

  “Well, you know that girl I dated a couple weeks ago? Kim?” he asks. “She wanted me to go to her sister’s engagement brunch, and I told her I was busy all day. But she’s just crazy enough to stop by and see if I’m actually out of the house, so I thought we should be elsewhere….”

  I hold up a hand. “Fine. I’ll be your alibi. But I get to pick the restaurant, and you’re buying. Oh, and you have to put the toilet seat down every day for an entire week.”

  He raises his hand as though wanting to say something in class. “I’d like to add a house rule: Parker isn’t allowed to tell Ben how to pee.”

  “You don’t make the house rules. I do. And I didn’t tell you how to pee,” I say exasperatedly as he wrenches open a dresser drawer and pulls out a pair of boxers. “I’m trying to do your future wife a favor by teaching you how not to be a pig.”

  He inches by me into the hallway. “Another house rule: Parker shalt not say profanities as future wife to a dedicated bachelor.”

  “You’re not a dedicated bachelor. You’re just a typical horny twenty-four-year-old dude, and, again, you don’t make the house rules—hey!”

  He shuts the door to our shared bathroom in my face, and too late I realize that I’d missed all the classic signs of a skilled Ben Olsen diversion. He’d just wanted to beat me into the bathroom.

  “Don’t use all the hot water!” I shout, pounding my palm on the door.

  The door opens just enough for me to see one blue eye blinking back at me. “Didn’t you say Polly had a tangle? You better go get on that.”

  The door shuts again, and I pound a second time. “Remember, the green towel is mine. The white one is yours.”

  I wait for confirmation, but there’s only silence.

  “Ben, I know you can hear me! Don’t ‘accidentally’ use mine just because yours smells funny.”

  More silence.

  Damn it. He is so planning to use my towel.

  So, yeah, my best friend is a guy. Doesn’t mean I have to like it all the time.

  Chapter 2

  Ben

  Most of the time, having a girl for a best friend is awesome.

  Among the highlights:

  (1) My color-blind self never has to worry about going out the door looking like a sad clown.

  (2) The Brita water filter is always replaced on time.

  (3) Parker actually likes doing laundry for fun, and she only complains when I sneak my stuff in with hers about 30 percent of the time.

  Oh, and as this morning’s adventure displayed, she’s an excellent excuse when a person needs to rid himself of clingy one-night stands.

  But then there are the not-so-great parts. Like when she’s spent thirty-five minutes looking at lamps.

  “Just get that one,” I say, lifting my arm to point at a random floor lamp as the noisy, child-filled scariness that is IKEA threatens to choke me.

  She barely glances at the one I’ve selected. “It looks like a uterus.”

  “What the fuck does a uterus look like?”

  “Like that lamp. And honestly, for as much time as you spend rummaging around in women’s panties, you really should get familiar with their parts.”

  “Isn’t the uterus the—” I break off, looking for the right word to describe the random memories from eighth-grade sex-ed class.

  Parker lifts her eyebrows. “The baby cave?”

  Like any normal guy would, I wince. “Christ. Why would I need to know about that? I use a condom.”

  “Several of them, judging from the state of your bedroom,” she says, tilting her head to study the lime green lamp shade in her hands. “Do you think this would clash with my bedspread?”

  “You’re asking the color-blind guy? Like I have any clue what color your bedspread is.”

  “Seriously? Don’t act like you’ve never seen it. Two nights ago you flopped onto my bed in your sweaty gym clothes and it took me two washes to remove the man stank.”

  I shake my head. “Poor Lance. Do you make him wear a plastic bag when you guys hook up so he doesn’t get his man stank on your sheets?”

  “Lance doesn’t have man stank.”

  I frown. “Hold up. If I have man stank, Lance has man stank.”

  “No.”

  I open my mouth to argue, but instead I shrug. That’s another thing you learn having a girl best friend. You pick your battles.

  “You have two more minutes to pick your lamp,” I say. “I’m starving.”

  Parker adjusts her purse strap on her shoulder. “Oh, I’m not buying a lamp. I was just browsing.”

  I inhale deeply to rein in my women suck rampage when I catch her smirk.

  “Oh, I get it,” I say as we move toward the end of the store where we’ll pick up my dresser. “This is payback. You’re mad because I made up that story about you having a creepy doll collection.”

  “Actually, it was more punishment for destroying the house rules. I’m totally laminating them next time.”

  “Or you could just create an online version and keep them in the cloud like normal people born after 1980.”

  I see a little lightbulb go on in her head and almost regret giving her the idea. Not that it matters much. I’ve never really followed her fussy rules anyway, although for the most part I try to not be too much of a dick. The towel incident this morning notwithstanding, it’s like I said, Parker loves laundry. I knew she had extra clean ones stashed away.

  “Seriously, don’t get that color finish,” she says, shaking her head at the dresser box I’m about to pull off the shelf.

  “Wood is wood,” I say with a shrug, starting to maneuver the huge box onto our flat cart.

  “No, there’s old-man wood and there’s modern wood.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “Old-man wood, huh? You and your kinky fetishes. Do you make the dolls watch?”

  She ignores me, and uses her hip to push the box I’d started to move back onto its shelf. “That one.” She points.

  “Espresso?” I ask, reading the label.

  But Parker is now typing away on her phone. I shrug, pushing her out of the way so I can get at the box she indicated.

  “How about tacos?” she asks, glancing up briefly from her phone.

  “I just had Mexican last night,” I say through a grunt as I move the box into position.

  “You said I could pick.” She gives me a challenging look, her goldish brown eyes practically daring me to argue with her.

  “If it was a unilateral decision, why’d you even ask?”

  “Unilateral. Good word. And it was a test. You passed,” she says, trotting to catch up with me as she replaces her phone in her purse. “So how did you and Airhead meet? The Beta Phi party last night? She looked like she was eighteen.”

  “Airhead?” I ask.

  “It was written on her pants. Literally.”

  “Oh, right. Those weren’t her pants. Lindsay left them last week.”

  She makes a disgusted face as she pulls her long dark hair into a messy bun. I don’t notice most things about Parker as a girl, because, ya know, it’s just Parker, but she does have some damn good hair. It’s all Victoria’s Secret model–-like, long and dark with lightish streaks running through it.

  The rest of her is kind of Victoria’s Secret-ish, too, but other than an initial moment of whoa when we first met, there’s never really been anything between us. I guess you could say I like her too much.

  That and she’s dating Lance, and I like the guy. I mean, we’re not best friends or anything, but it’s impossible to live with Parker and not have some sort of friendship with her significant other.

  Lance and I stop short of braiding each other’s hair, but we watch games together on occasion. I’d never make a move on his girl—even if I wanted Parker.

  Which I don’t.

  “So let me get this straight,” she says, as I swipe my credit card through the self-checkout machine. “One of your booty calls leaves her pants, which is weird, by the way, and the
n a week later, an underclassman sorority girl willingly puts them on?”

  I shrug and give her a look out of the corner of my eye. “What’s wrong with that?”

  Parker closes her eyes and sort of scratches at her eyebrow. “You don’t tell your mother any of this, do you?”

  “Sure, we actually have a family blog, and I list my sexual activity for the week every Sunday. Is that weird?”

  She ignores me, pulling out her phone again.

  “Everything okay?” I ask curiously, as we head toward the garage.

  “What do you mean?”

  I glance at the phone in her hand. “You’re always riding my ass about being glued to my phone, but you’ve been on that thing all morning.”

  “Sorry,” she says, glancing up and looking genuinely contrite. “Just going back and forth with Lance. He might have to cancel our date tonight.”

  I don’t say anything. I don’t really pay much attention to Parker’s love life. I mean, I like Lance well enough. He’s cool, and I appreciate that he’s never been a jealous dick about the fact that his girlfriend lives with another guy.

  But now that I think about it, seems like I haven’t seen him around much recently. Granted, they go over to Lance’s place more often than he comes to ours, seeing as he’s Mr. Fancy-Pants and doesn’t have a roommate, which means his place gives them more privacy to do…whatever.

  But in the past he’d be over at least once a week or so, his books spread all over the kitchen table, his overpriced beer stocked in the fridge.

  I try to remember the last time I saw him….It’s been days. Weeks, maybe.

  And I’m pretty sure this is the third time in a week that Parker has mentioned he’s had to cancel on her.

  “He’s crazy busy now with a bunch of group projects,” she says, even though I didn’t ask.

  That, too, is strange. Parker is the most secure, comfortable-in-her-relationship girl that I know. She never gets defensive or makes excuses.

  Still, I don’t bug her about it. That’s one house rule of hers that I happily get behind.

  Each of us is there if the other needs to talk—always—but no prying.

  We’re both social, but deep down we’re kind of private. I think that’s why we get along so well. We can be social butterflies all day long with other people, but when it’s just the two of us, we respect the quiet.

  At lunch, Parker doesn’t mention Lance again, and she’s her usual cheerful self.

  She’s not acting like a girl with guy troubles, and I figure she’s probably right about him being busy. I mean, dude’s a freaking genius. He had a triple major from UO and then just recently was accepted to some fancy MBA program where he learns to crunch numbers like a boss.

  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he jacks off to an Excel spreadsheet.

  When we were in college, Lance made me feel like the worst kind of underachiever. He and I didn’t hang out much back then—we ran in different circles. But he came over often enough to see Parker, and when he did…always with the damn books.

  Parker, too, for that matter. She’s not all savant like her boyfriend, but she was a bit more studious than me.

  And by a bit more studious, I mean the only reason I ever went to the library was because she was always dragging me along with her like there was a secret party I didn’t know about.

  Parker used to claim she brought me because she didn’t want to wander alone around a huge college campus late at night.

  Probably true.

  But I suspect she also knew that without her interference, I would have defaulted to watching sports rather than putting in the extra effort to bring my work from B quality to the A level.

  Because the truth is, I had to work my ass off to get good grades. I didn’t struggle with school or anything, but let’s just say that I’ve been out of college for two years, and hindsight has done nothing to change my perception that college’s real benefits don’t come just from the classroom.

  I was more into the extracurriculars. Sports. Beer. Girls.

  In other words, I was a regular dude. Still am.

  I mean, I work for a sporting goods store, for God’s sake. Technically, I work at the headquarters of a sporting goods store, and I’m on their e-commerce team, so it’s not like I’m handling footballs on a daily basis or anything. But still. Sports.

  And as for the women in my postcollege career? Plentiful. Despite everyone warning that it only gets harder to meet girls after college, I can’t say it’s been much of a problem. I just meet them at bars more often than at frat parties. Same game, different arena.

  So, basically, not much has changed since college. Sports. Beer. Girls.

  Sometimes I wish I cared a little more about bigger things, like work, or my future, the way that Lance and Parker do.

  But despite my mom checking my homework every night growing up, and my dad and stepmom paying me for every A I got in high school, the academic bug never really bit me. I did just enough to get to the next step: private high school, respectable college, and then on to a prestigious law school like my older brother. And my sister.

  It was the Olsen family path.

  And one I didn’t take.

  I’d made it as far as applying. Was even accepted to a couple JD programs, although nowhere particularly impressive like the sibs.

  And then was hit upside the head with the unpleasant surprise that I had absolutely zero interest in being a lawyer.

  Two years later, Dad’s finally getting over it. Mom’s not.

  Oh well.

  I pay for our lunch as agreed, and back at the house, I keep my fingers crossed that Parker will be in one of her laundry moods, because I’m wearing my last pair of clean boxers.

  Even though I’m far from a neat freak, I draw the line at doing underwear repeats. Especially when I’m planning on having female company. And since it’s Saturday night, I definitely plan on having female company.

  But Parker is in her room with the door closed, not prancing around the washing machine with her fancy detergent that she keeps hidden somewhere, so I’m on my own with the off-brand detergent.

  An hour later, I’m halfway through “folding” some of my T-shirts when Parker comes into the kitchen and shoots an appalled look at my laundry basket. Wordlessly she dumps the entire basket onto the table and begins refolding my shirts.

  “Thanks, Mom.” I start to back toward the fridge for a beer, but she makes a buzzing noise and points at the pile. “I’ll help. Not do all of it.”

  “Isn’t this, like, a step back in the women’s movement?” I ask, trying a little extra hard to line up some of the edges on my folding now that I have Laundry Nazi watching my every move. “You doing my laundry?”

  “Totally. And if you tell anyone, I’ll de-ball you. But I find it kind of soothing. And I love the smell of clean clothes.” She lifts a shirt and sniffs.

  I pause. “Well, that’s not disturbing at all. You and your doll Polly stay away from my new dresser. No sniffing the goods inside.”

  “Trust me, once these clothes enter the smelly pigsty that is your bedroom, I’m steering clear. But fresh out of the dryer, before you’ve had a chance to sweat all over them? I love the smell of clean cotton.”

  “You are such a weirdo,” I say. And then, on a whim, “Hey, Parks, you should come with me tonight.”

  Parker doesn’t pause in folding as she meets my eyes. “Could you be more specific? I don’t have my calendar where I keep track of your every move handy.”

  “There are a couple of parties happening. Thought I might hit up both, see which one is better.”

  She clutches a T-shirt to her chest excitedly, her eyes wide and girlish. “You mean it? I get to tag along and watch you put the moves on eighteen-year-olds?”

  “Hey, you were eighteen once, and I didn’t put the moves on you,” I say.

  I don’t add that for the life of me, I still don’t know why I didn’t put the moves on her. Because some
times when I look back at all those years, I’ll have a split second of regret that I didn’t act fast—that I didn’t snatch up the best girl I’ve ever met when I had the chance. Because I can’t now. She’s someone else’s girl. That, and I’m too afraid I’d mess up the best thing that ever happened to me.

  “Good thing, too,” she replies. “If we were dating, I wouldn’t be caught dead folding your shirts.”

  “You don’t help Lance do his laundry?”

  I’d meant it as an off-the-cuff comment, but her fingers falter a little, and I wonder if I’ve inadvertently struck a nerve. Maybe I should ask if everything’s okay with them.

  But she recovers.

  “Nah,” she says, with an easy smile. “He’s almost as good a folder as me. It’s part of why I love him.”

  I fan myself. “What, he’s a fantastic folder? Shit, you better put a ring on it, Parks!”

  She makes a face and flings the last T-shirt at me. “That one should go. It has holes.”

  “It’s comfortable,” I say, glancing down at the faded Boston Red Sox shirt. I can’t even remember where I got it; I’m a Chicago White Sox guy.

  “It’s a rag,” she says, snatching it out of my hands and tossing it into a bucket under the sink where we keep the cleaning stuff.

  “Do I get to do that It’s a rag routine with your underwear next time you do laundry?” I ask. “Because I’ve seen some of your panties. You may as well stitch death to boner across the front.”

  She takes a sip of her water. “New house rule: No talking about Parker’s panties. Actually, no using the word panties at all.”

  I’m actually pretty sure that’s not a new house rule. It sounds familiar, but I’m not about to remind her of this.

  “Oh, come on,” I argue. “You help my color-blind self pick out shirts, so why not let me return the favor by telling you which panties are going to depress the hell out of Lance?”

  “Pass.”

  I tell her anyway. “Those big bunchy ones that are light brown.”

  “Those are my PMS panties. They stay.”

  I point a finger at her. “House rule infraction. We’re not allowed to say panties.”

  She rolls her eyes and heads toward the stairs. “I need to go finish that presentation for Monday’s meeting.”