Session Zero

Okay, so here's how my Thursday went sideways. It started at eleven at night, which is already a bad sign, and it ended with me on the break room couch at Oakwood University doing things I am definitely going to remember for a while.

But let me back up.

My name is Erica Park, I'm forty-four, and I'm a senior data analyst in the university research office. I've been dating Cass Swanson for three years. We met at a professional conference when I was forty-one, back when she was still charming instead of insufferable, and for the first year or so it was genuinely great. She brought me coffee. I fixed her Excel formulas. We were disgustingly cute at office parties.

And then her department and my department got put in direct competition over funding allocations, and everything went to hell in a very specific, very administrative way.

Here's what nobody tells you about dating a coworker rival. You don't stop loving them. You just start loving them in a tone of voice that makes your office manager flinch. Every meeting became a battlefield. Every shared spreadsheet became a hostage situation. Cass would "helpfully" copy-edit my methodology sections and I would "helpfully" point out that her sample sizes were decorative at best. We went from finishing each other's sentences to finishing each other's sentences with cutting remarks. Honestly, we still finish each other's sentences. We just do it mean now.

So Thursday night, quarter-end, the big proposal deadline was Friday at noon. I'd claimed the office after hours on purpose. I had my laptop, my regression model, one energy drink, and a plan to win the whole funding argument so decisively that Cass would have to admit, out loud, in front of the budget committee, that weighted multi-year averaging beats whatever seasonal cherry-picking nonsense she'd been peddling.

Was that petty? Sure. But she started it. Three years ago, with a comment about my "cute little interpolation," and I keep receipts.

The suite was empty and quiet, just the hum of the vending machine and the sad drip of the half-dead coffee maker in the break room. I'd set up camp in the break room itself, actually, because the couch was there and my back was already complaining about the desk chairs. Proposal open, charts polished, and I was maybe ninety minutes from done.

That's when I heard the keycard beep.

Now. Only about six people have after-midnight access to that suite. And of those six, exactly one would stroll in at 12:40 a.m. on a Thursday with a laptop bag and a reason.

I turned around and there she was. Cass Swanson, forty-two, wearing that gray blazer she knows I have feelings about, and already smirking. She hadn't even put her bag down yet and the smirk was fully operational.

"Erica," she said, all fake warmth. "What a coincidence."

"Cass." I kept my voice flat, which is an art form at this point. "It's almost one in the morning. What are you doing here?"

"Oh, you know. Thought I'd come in and make sure the data is handled properly." She said properly like it was a threat. She set her bag on the counter and started unpacking like she owned the place. "Wouldn't want anything sloppy going in front of the committee."

"You mean you came to snoop."

"I mean I came to work. This is a shared office, last I checked."

"It's my office tonight. I called dibs with facilities."

"You can't call dibs on a whole suite, Erica." She was already booting her laptop. "That's not a real thing."

"It is when facilities emails you a confirmation! Want to see the confirmation? I'll show you the confirmation."

"I believe you, you maniac." But she didn't leave. She just kept setting up, unhurried, like she had all night, which, fine, she did, because apparently we were both the kind of people who thought this was a normal way to spend a Thursday.

I should have packed up. I should have taken my beautiful model and gone home and let her have the stupid suite. But this is what you need to understand about me and Cass. Neither of us has ever once backed out of a room first. There's a reason our arguments last four hours at dinner parties. There's a reason our friends stopped inviting us to dinner parties.

So I turned back to my laptop and did the mature thing, which was work louder.

"Are you typing aggressively on purpose?" she asked after a minute.

"Yes. It's called emphasis."

"It's called being annoying."

"It's called winning, Cass. You wouldn't recognize it."

I heard her exhale through her nose, that little laugh-huff she does when she's actually amused but refuses to admit it. Then her chair scraped and she appeared in the break room doorway with her laptop under her arm, peering at my screen like she had any business on this side of the room.

"Can I help you?"

"Just curious what model you're running." She leaned in. "Oh. Oh, Erica. You're still using the weighted multi-year average? That's the model equivalent of a comfort blanket."

"It's the model equivalent of being correct!"

"It smooths out the exact variance the committee asked us to explain. They want to see the volatility. You're sanding it off. You're handing them a photo of a document."

"The volatility is noise. You'd know that if you ever modeled anything instead of just, what's your word for it, curating? Curating your sample until it agrees with you?"

That landed. Her jaw did the thing. "My samples are defensible."

"Your samples are cherry-picked. You drop the 2019 enrollment dip like it never happened. Everyone in that building knows you drop the 2019 dip."

"Because 2019 was an enrollment anomaly, not a trend, and any first-year stats student could tell you that."

"And any first-year stats student could tell you that deleting data points because they're inconvenient is called lying with charts."

We were standing up by then. I don't even remember getting up. That's how it always goes with us, one second we're sitting and being professional adults in our forties, and the next second we're nose to nose in the narrow galley between the counter and the microwave, and I'm pretty sure I was pointing at her and she was definitely pointing at me.

"Do not," she said, "accuse me of data fraud in a room with a microwave in it."

"I'll accuse you of data fraud anywhere. The microwave doesn't scare me."

"It's a shared appliance, Erica, there are rules about."

"There are no rules about microwave slander, Cass, that's not a category."

"It is now. Everything's a category when you invent it loudly enough."

Okay, look, I know how this reads. Two grown women, combined age eighty-six, squared off over a regression model at one in the morning next to a burnt coffee pot. But you have to understand. This is our love language. This has been our love language since the conference, honestly, since the second day when she tore my poster apart in front of forty people and I spent the whole next session plotting my rebuttal instead of attending the session. We fight like this because it's the only channel where we never, ever get bored of each other.

The problem is the channel got clogged. Sometime in the last year, the fighting stopped being fun and started being the only thing we did. We'd have a fight, then a stiff dinner, then a fight about the dinner. Cass stopped teasing me. I stopped letting her win small things, which she used to love. We were both so busy defending our departments that we forgot we were supposed to be on the same team at home.

And standing there in that galley, close enough to smell her shampoo through the coffee stink, I realized I was furious and also relieved. Because this was the first time in months she'd looked at me like I was interesting instead of a line item.

"You're doing the eyebrow thing," she said suddenly.

"What eyebrow thing?"

"That one. The one where you think you're winning."

"I am winning. My model is going to make your proposal look like a collage."

"Your model is going to make the committee fall asleep, which, honestly, might be a strategy, maybe you're smarter than I give you credit for."

"Take that back."

"Which part?"

"The compliment part. It was condescending."

"Oh, so now compliments are condescending? Great, noted, I'll add it to the list. The list is very long, Erica, it has subcategories."

"I know it has subcategories. I started the subcategories."

And then she laughed. She tried to swallow it, I watched her try, and it got out anyway, this helpless snort of a laugh, and the worst part is mine came right after it, and for about four seconds we were just two idiots laughing at each other in a break room at one in the morning.

Then she stopped laughing, but she didn't step back. And I didn't step back either, because the galley really was too narrow for one of us to step back without it meaning something, and the microwave was humming, and she was looking at my mouth.

"Well," she said, quieter. "This is familiar."

"Shut up, Cass."

"Make me."

* * *

"Make me," she'd said, and my mouth was already open to come back with something, I don't even know what, some dumb pun about samples probably, and then, because one of us had to be the adult, I turned toward the door instead, and her hand shot out and grabbed my wrist.

Not a slap fight grab. Not a hold-me-back grab. She just wrapped her fingers around my wrist, right over the pulse, and held on.

"Cass."

"You were walking away."

"I was absolutely walking away. I have a proposal to finish."

"You were walking away mid-argument, which you never do, which means you were running, which means I win." She said it calm, like a fact she was reading off a chart, and her thumb was sitting right on the inside of my wrist and my pulse was doing something embarrassing under it.

"You don't win," I said. "Nobody wins this argument, this argument has been going on since March."

"It's been going on since the conference. March was just the fiscal year version." And she still didn't let go. I could have pulled free in about half a second, honestly, she's tall but I've got strong forearms from the rowing machine, and I didn't pull free, and we both knew I wasn't pulling free, and the microwave hummed on like it was bored.

Do you ever get caught by a feeling so obvious it almost insults you? Because I stood there with her fingers on my wrist and I thought, oh. Oh, we're not angry. I mean we are angry, we've been genuinely angry for a year, but underneath the angry there's this other thing and it never went anywhere, it just went underground and kept paying rent.

"You're breathing hard," she said.

"You're breathing hard."

"I ran here."

"It's 12:40. Nobody runs to work at 12:40 in the morning."

"I jogged. There's a difference and the difference is dignity." But she was breathing hard, and so was I, and neither of us had been doing anything but standing in a galley kitchen yelling about 2019 enrollment data, so you can do that math yourself.

"Erica." Her voice dropped into that register she uses maybe twice a year. "Let go of the argument for one minute. Just one."

"Why?"

"Because I'm asking."

That stopped me. That genuinely stopped me, because we do not ask, that is the entire problem with us lately, we announce, we rebut, we cross-examine. We do not ask.

"Okay," I said. "One minute. Timing you."

"You would time me."

"I literally have a stopwatch app open in the other room."

And she smiled. Not the smug debate smile, the other one, the crooked one from before everything got terrible, the one I used to see across the breakfast table back when we still had a breakfast table instead of two breakfasts eaten at two desks in two departments like rivals in a bad sitcom. Only we're forty-four and forty-two, so a very long-running sitcom.

And then I ruined it, because of course I did. "One minute of what, exactly? State your terms."

"There, you're doing it again, you're turning everything into a contract."

"Everything IS a contract. We work at a research office."

"For one minute be a person and not a department." She stepped in closer, which I didn't think was possible in that galley, and her blazer brushed my shirt, the gray one, the one she wears like armor to every allocation meeting. "For one minute remember you used to like me."

"You think I don't like you?" That came out way louder than I meant. "You think that's the problem? Cass, if I didn't like you I would have filed for a transfer. I would have moved. I like you so much it's made me completely unbearable for a year, ask literally anyone."

She blinked. "That is the dumbest compliment I've ever received."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

And then I shoved her.

Okay, it was a shove, it wasn't a punch, both hands flat on her shoulders, and she went back a step and her hip hit the counter and her elbow caught her coffee mug, the ugly one with the cartoon brain on it, and it went off the edge and smashed on the floor and coffee went everywhere, everywhere, up the cabinet, all over both our shoes, and neither of us even looked down. The microwave hummed. Somewhere down the hall a vent ticked.

"I didn't mean to do that," I said.

"You absolutely meant to do that."

"The mug was an accident."

"The mug was karma." She was pinned between me and the counter, not fighting it, arms a little out like she'd landed and decided to stay, and I should have stepped back, that's the moment a reasonable person steps back, and instead I heard my own voice say the craziest thing I've said all year.

"Fine. One minute. What's in your minute?"

"You still want to know?"