Scissor Link by Georgette Kaplan (good books to read for adults .TXT) 📕

full of wadded-up tissues, so it was either a cold or Janet was jerking off a ton, as Wendy’s scumbag brain pointed out, despite the obvious logistical issues there.

“Oh, yes, just a sniffle,” Janet insisted, though she still seemed perturbed, unaccustomed to being second-guessed or however it was she’d taken Wendy’s question. She knocked back what was left in Wendy’s tumbler. Well, she’s good at swallowing, Wendy’s scumbag brain added, before Wendy managed to silence it for good with threats of watching Downton Abbey.

“Please go,” Janet continued. “I’d hate for you to catch anything.”

“Yeah. Sure,” Wendy agreed, pausing nonetheless. Eyes frantically darting around, seeing if she could get Janet anything. She seemed to have plenty of napkins; a lot of fluids, even if they were largely alcoholic.

“Go, go,” Janet insisted. “Make me more money. Shoo.”

Wendy hurried along, reminding herself that Janet was a grown-ass woman and could buy herself all the DayQuil she needed.

Wendy did not think of her apartment as small. She thought of it as efficient. She really didn’t need a couch to sit on, after all, when she had a bed, or a TV when she had a laptop, or an oven when she had a microwave, or a closet when she had a floor. Sure, it wasn’t like home, where you could take a bath in water, but it was on the first floor of her building and she didn’t have to work up a sweat walking her Triumph Bonneville inside and getting it up onto the kitchen table (eating would now be done on her lap, which was sadly only a single entendre).

With her Bluetooth calling Tina, she got to work on her bike as a mother would fawn over a sick child (although the Bonneville was far more expensive).

“Wendy, hey, what’s up? Bike again?”

“Bike again,” Wendy confirmed. “One of the cable stops disappeared, now the carbs are completely out of sync.”

“You’re never going to get that thing running right,” Tina said between crunches.

Wendy could imagine her lying on her couch, enjoying some pita chips, while they spoke. “We’re never going to get a Terminator movie better than T2 either, but it doesn’t mean we stop trying.”

“Heh. Yeah. So I’m guessing the stop fell out?”

“Yeah, but that’s impossible, there was always tension on the throttle cable.”

“Betcha the cable sheath is dropping. When you turn the bars it straightens out, that puts slack in the cable and the little bastard escapes. Fuck it, tape the damn thing.”

“What about a snap ring?” Wendy asked. “On the outside of the major OD?”

“As you like it. Although you’d think if your dad was going to get you a motorcycle, he’d get you one that worked. Or a penthouse apartment, for that matter.”

“The bike’s a birthday present,” Wendy replied.

“So’s being rich.”

“You’re talking yourself out of riding bitch this very moment.”

“Hey, I always ride bitch no matter where I sit. Now, tell me you didn’t call me just so I could tell you to tape a loose cable?”

Wendy cracked her neck as she went to her toolbox, situated on top of a kitchen chair, and dug out her safety glasses and needle-nose pliers. “You know any homeopathic cold remedies? You know, tea leaves or whatever?”

“You mean from Vietnam, where I was born, or from Cleveland, where I actually grew up?”

“Either’s fine,” Wendy said, pouring an añejo into a tequila glass. The most important safety equipment of all.

“Because if we can’t figure out how to win the World Series, we definitely can’t cure the common cold.”

Wendy got a sangrita from the freezer, carrying the shot glass in the same hand as the añejo. She was a professional. “Okay, but you guys have noodles, right? You eat noodles when you have a cold? That’s like a universal—universally acknowledged treatment for—”

“Don’t.”

“What?” Wendy asked, getting a snap ring out of the parts shelf on the wall.

“You’re planning something. Don’t do it.”

“I’m trying to do something nice for a friend who is down with the cold.”

“I’m your only friend, remember? Who’s this skanky other friend? Is she younger than me?”

Wendy paused, finding the new cable stop that she’d already put in. This one she wasn’t losing. “She…might be Janet Lace.”

“Don’t,” Tina said, one note higher than before.

“It’s not—”

“No.”

“I’m just—”

“Nooooo.”

Gritting her teeth, Wendy jammed the tips of the pliers into the holes at the end of the snap ring. It took her a moment to get them through. “It’s just a little care package to let her know I’m thinking of her. It’s barely even romantic.”

“It’s your boss! She can fire you!”

“I’ve thought of that.”

“And?”

Wendy opened the pliers, forcing the arms of the snap ring to open. “She’s not going to. Listen, men have been seducing women for hundreds of years at least. I think I can pull it off.”

“Remember the last time you tried to seduce someone?”

Her hands occupied with the pliers and snap ring, Wendy bit down on the rim of her tequila, eased the glass over, and sucked up what she could. “That lawsuit was dropped.”

Tina took a breath deep enough for a spiel as Wendy slipped the widened snap ring over the cable stop and the groove where she wanted it to stay. “Listen—if this Lace person is so nice, why don’t you just ask her out on a date? The worst thing she can do is say no, and then at least you can forget the whole thing like I’m telling you to do right now.”

“I would,” Wendy protested, closing the pliers gently. “I absolutely would, but, she might be, and this is just a possibility—she could be married.”

“Could be married? What, was he shot down over German lines or something?”

Wendy pulled the pliers away, letting the ring snap closed. “She wears a wedding ring… It could just be so that men don’t see her as an object of desire and sexually harass her.”

“Yes, that wedding ring is clearly discouraging people from obsessing over her.”

Wendy heard a crunch of pita chips over the line. She’d driven Tina to stress