The Reference Section

The plan was simple. Drive to Marrow's Books, pull every pharmacology annual and drug interaction handbook off the shelf, take notes on the three compounds Corvale was pushing for the spring launch, and be home by nine with takeout and no human contact. Sundays are for research and silence. That's been my rule since I turned forty and decided I'd earned the right to be cranky on a schedule.

The plan fell apart in the parking lot, because there was Geoff's silver Accord in the third row, the one with the dent in the rear quarter panel he refuses to fix because, and I quote from the regional meeting two years ago, it keeps him humble. The man sells statins for a living. Humility is not his problem.

I'm Kali, by the way. Forty-two, pharmaceutical sales, twelve years in the field, and for five straight years I have watched Geoff Harlan take the top rep spot in our shared territory like it's a chair he owns. This quarter I was one point two percent behind him going into the final week. One point two. I could have spit.

I sat in my Honda with the engine ticking and considered driving home. Then I thought about him pulling those same books off the shelf and walking out with the same research, and my pride did the thing my pride always does, which is make the stupid choice for me.

The store smelled like old paper and the coffee they sell up front. Marrow's is one of those independent places near campus that survived the internet out of pure stubbornness, all creaky floors and tall shelves and a cat that may or may not belong to anyone. The counter guy nodded at me. I nodded back and headed for the 600s.

Of course he was already there. Of course.

Geoff was halfway down the medical reference aisle, one hand on a stack of books on the shelf, his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, which he thinks makes him look distinguished and which mostly makes him look as though he lost his glasses. Forty-four years old, silver at the temples, and the smugness of a guy who has never once had to fight for a parking spot.

"Well," he said, without turning around. "I heard the door. I was hoping it was the cat."

"Buy your books and go home, Geoff."

"Can't. Reserved these." He patted the stack. "Dunn's Drug Interactions, the Corvale clinical monograph, and the 2011 pharmacology annual. There's a second copy of the annual on the top shelf, but you'd need a ladder and I don't see one."

"There's a stepladder in periodicals. I've used it before."

"Have you. Researching hard, or just losing gracefully?"

I grabbed the stepladder from periodicals and pulled the annual off the top shelf. The top shelf is a suggestion, not a law. He watched me do it with that half smile he does, the one that makes me want to throw a paperback at his head.

"You know," he said, "most people would've quit this territory by now. Five years of coming in second to me. That takes a special kind of stubborn."

"Ten years of you scraping by on a two percent edge and calling it dominance. That takes a special kind of delusion."

He leaned against the shelf, unhurried, which is his whole style. Geoff never rushes. He waits for you to get wound up and then acts like you're the unreasonable one.

"The Sandoval account," he said. "That was a nice run at it in September. I enjoyed watching you drive forty miles for a meeting they'd already given me."

"They didn't give you Sandoval. You sweet-talked a procurement guy at a golf thing."

"I played golf with a procurement guy. That's called networking."

"That's called knowing which losers to buy beer for."

"Hey!" He put a hand on his chest, mock wounded. "Roger is a delightful man with a boat."

The thing about Geoff is that I have hated him for a decade and hated him in a very specific, well-maintained way, the way you hate a rival who is actually good at his job. We have never been friends. We have never been anything else either until tonight. We orbit each other at conferences and trade shows and quarterly reviews, and every time, one of us says something that ruins the other's week.

He pushed his glasses down onto his nose and looked at me over them. "You're one point two behind, by the way. I checked Friday."

"I know what I am."

"Just making sure you know I know."

"You know what, Geoff?" I closed the annual I hadn't even opened and shoved it back onto the shelf, which was childish, and I did it anyway. "I'm sick of this. I'm sick of the golf guys and the quarterly emails and the little smile. You want to settle something? Let's settle something that isn't numbers."

He straightened up off the shelf. "Like what, a lawn darts match? It's Sunday, Kali."

"Like a contest. An actual contest. Something private, since apparently we can't be in the same county without one of us starting something."

There was a pause where I should have specified. I want to state plainly that what I meant at that moment was arm wrestling, or darts, or one of those chess machines in the back of a bar. Something with a winner. Something I could beat him at with my hands.

Geoff, being Geoff, took the vaguest possible reading of the sentence and ran with it downhill.

"Okay," he said slowly, and his eyebrows went up in a way I did not like at all. "Something private. First to finish loses?"

"First to finish what?"

"You know what I said."

I did know what he said. The aisle was empty, the store was nearly closed, a lamp somewhere buzzed, and the two of us stood there among the drug handbooks like a couple of professionals, which we were, just not of anything useful.

"That's your dare?" I said.

"That's my dare. You said settle it. I'm