“Oh, come on. You’re all, you will do as I say. And that thing last night. The carrying me up the stairs!” Her voice is lowered now, but her eyes are shining as she gets angry. “That shit tells me you most definitely see women as second class. The whole me man, you woman act.”

She sits forward a little and grins at me. “Cat got your tongue? Huh? I’m right, and you have no comeback.”

She’s not wrong about me carrying her up the stairs. That was a dick move. The slap to her ass? Major dick move. “Okay.” I hold my hands up. “You’ve got me. That was wrong. And I won’t ever do anything like it again. Major asshole move on my part. In my defense, I was coming up on almost fifty hours with no sleep, and at that point you were working yourself up into a rage, so I took action. In retrospect, it was the wrong action.”

“Apology accepted. You could get sued for that kind of thing, though. It proves my point. You wouldn’t do that to a guy. So you de-facto see women as lesser.”

“I fucking would do it to a guy if he was being a whiny pain in my ass.”

“You would not. Would you?”

“We were on tour once, and we were embedded with an army unit. Engineers and the like. British and Australian. We’d gone ahead and cleared the way and then circled back. Or we thought we’d cleared the way; turned out we hadn’t. Anyway, not all, but some army units, they don’t see a lot of actual combat. They go in after the forward units, Marines, Special Forces or whoever, have cleared the way. When we came across enemy combatants in what we thought was a deserted village, one of the guys started having a rolling panic attack. Whoever the fuck said panic attacks can’t last longer than ten minutes because you run out of adrenaline hadn’t met this dude. He was hyperventilating, panicking, and asking fucking nonstop garbled questions the entire time we were trying to deal with the threat. I knocked him out and put him over my shoulder. So yeah, I would do it to a guy, and I have, but not as nice.”

“You’d knock me out?” Her eyes widen.

“Jesus no. Of course not.”

“Why not?”

I stare at her. “Are you insane?”

“No. Why wouldn’t you knock me out?”

“I don’t go around knocking women out.”

“Ha. Got you.” She jabs her finger at me in triumph. “You do see women as different.”