You (You #1)(84)

#2 Karen Minty likes to clean.

“I grew up in a fucking pigsty,” she likes to say. “Only way shit gets clean is if I clean it and I like shit clean, so there you go.”

#3 Karen Minty likes to cook.

And she’s good at it. I haven’t eaten like this in I don’t know how long, real family food (a lasagna that will taste good even five days later cold), and the runner’s body I had going when I was tracking Peach Salinger (who would be absolutely horrified by Karen), well, I still have it for the most part because Karen likes to cook, eat, clean, and fuck. And she intends to do all these things with me forever. I found a little plastic file box of recipes that belong to her mother. I texted her about the recipes and she wrote back:

I’m cooking a helluva lot more in your kitchen than I am in mine.

Anything I want, anytime, I can ask her for it and she can make it because her mother knows how to make everything. I brought leftover lasagna for Ethan and he thinks her mother should do a cookbook. She is that good.

#4 Karen Minty is a good fuck.

The way that you like to talk shit about Blythe, the way that you like to tease—your nipples popping in the shop on Day One—well, Karen Minty just likes to ride dick. All dick; you can tell she’s been fucked a lot and it doesn’t bother me. I’m the best she’s ever had; her words, not mine.

#5 Karen Minty knows Ethan is good people.

We went out with Blythe and Ethan once. It was bad. Blythe balked at Karen’s greyhounds and told her that Leonardo DiCaprio drinks a lot of beverages, Karen. Are you that naive? Ouch. The next day, Ethan showed up at the shop apologizing—“Blythe doesn’t have a lot of girlfriends! I hope Karen isn’t hurt!”—and Karen popped in while he was there. Karen told Ethan that Blythe is “super smart” and “wicked pretty.” When Ethan went to go take a shit, Karen told me that she thought Blythe was a cunt. “Ethan should be with a nice girl,” she said. “But nice guys always get with bitches. They don’t break up if you call ’em out on it. Give him time. He’ll dump her eventually.” Karen Minty truly is a nurse.

A couple of days ago, he asked me, in complete seriousness, if I plan to propose to Karen.

“Ethan, it’s been two months.”

He shrugged and told me for the fiftieth time how he proposed to his ex Shelly after six weeks.

I told him straight, “And look how that turned out.”

“When you know, you know.”

“Well, I don’t know, Ethan.”

“Well, you better start thinking about knowing,” he said and for once he had a five o’clock shadow—another miracle. “Because she definitely knows.”

#6 . . .

It’s no use. Maybe Dan Fox loves Karen Minty, but I don’t love Karen Minty. I love you. I love your depth and your letters to yourself and I am wrong to be leading her on. And honestly, she comes on too strong. Otherwise why would Ethan and Nicky be talking about marriage when we’ve been going out less than two months. And here she comes, bounding down the apartment building’s stairs after me.

“Boo!” she screams.

And I flinch even though I knew she was coming.

“Oh my God, you scare so freaking easily.” She laughs. She sits down next to me and leans her head on my shoulder and she sighs. “I don’t scare at all. When I was a kid, my brothers tried to fuck with me so much that, I don’t know. I think I just like lost all my fear or something.”

It’s a nice night. There are kids playing outside. It’ll be spring before you know it. Karen Minty yawns. “What a night, right?”

“Yeah,” I say.

She hears the timer on the oven and she pulls me close and plants one of her hard, bossy kisses on me. “You want enchiladas?”

“Do I ever not want enchiladas?” I say and I get another kiss.

“Well, come on,” she says. “First enchiladas. Then you promised you’d help me with my flash cards.”

I pocket my store keys and follow her back up the stairs to my place.

#7 Karen Minty has a great ass.

#8 Karen Minty makes great enchiladas.

#9 Karen Minty mixes sexual favor cards in with her nursing school flash cards so that randomly, I’ll flash her a card that says TAKE MY TOP OFF.

#10 Karen Minty likes to fuck.

After we fuck, I look at my list and realize that I left off #6.

#6 Karen Minty knows what she wants. She wants to be a phlebotomist.

She doesn’t complain about her homework because she knows what she wants. She wants to draw blood from people; she wants to be a phlebotomist.

“I’m a great fucking stick and when you’re laid up in a bed for eight days with fucked veins and your IV jams because some dumb tramp messed up your meds, the most important thing in the world to you is a great stick. Not a great doctor, a great stick. And I want to be the stick heard ’round the fucking world.”

Do you see that, Beck? It’s not like she wants to tweet about being a nurse—“Fucking Twitter my ass, I prefer life,” she said just the other day. There’s a simplicity to it all that is really good for me and I know it because my cheeks are flushed, my belly is full, my dick is the stick heard ’round the fucking world—just ask Karen—and I wake up and I want to get out of bed and do my life. But I also wake up thinking about you.