Page 61 of Knocked Up

Five. This arrangement ends on the due date. The 26th of June.

Six. For the duration, after mine, his is the number the answering service calls.

Seven is the only one in red. I wrote it last and fast and I did not trust myself to do it slowly.

Nobody falls in love.

He read all seven in a flat voice, like a man reading a lineup.

"That's it?"

"You said read it. I read it."

"You want to argue about any of them?"

"No."

"Number two is going to be forty hours a week."

"Fine."

"Number five is a date. It's a real date. It's on a calendar, it isn't a way of speaking."

"I know what it is," he said.

"And seven."

He looked at seven.

I had responses ready for whatever he was going to say about seven. Every one of them was a good one.

"Do you have a pen?" he said.

"What?"

"For initials." He was already looking around my counter. "There's seven clauses. I'd rather initial them than say I read them, because saying I read them isn't anything."

So I stood in my mother's kitchen at nine at night and watched Beckett Douglas initial a dry-erase board seven times. He wrote B.D. all the way down in small neat letters. He did not slow down at number seven and he did not speed up either. That was the part that got under my skin and stayed there.

"Done," he said.

"You didn't even hesitate."

"On which one?"

"Beckett."

"It's your house," he said. "You set the terms. I'm not going to bargain with a woman about the rules in her own building."

He put the cap on the marker and set it on top of the fridge where I cannot reach it. I did not notice until Thursday.

Then he said, "Can I ask a clarifying question? On three."

"On quiet hours."

"You've written quiet hours are quiet hours. That defines the term with the term."

"Are you serious?"