SO…WHO GETS THE BED?
With all their guests having departed, Lee and Amanda are left to wait for an opportunity to search the Bodine house in the hopes of finding any clues as to why Betty Bodine was targeted. Sitting alone in the living room Amanda realises that Lee is going to need her help, although when he pops his head around the bathroom door, having heard her speaking her thoughts aloud, she quickly covers it and asks for his thoughts on her taking the job as a Connie Beth representative. Lee thinks this is actually a great idea – after all, she’ll have access to every house in the neighbourhood!
“Yeah, I’ll have the blisters to prove it too,” she responds before turning her attentions to more immediate matters.
She has already had to call Dotty more than once to say she’s running late and she’s adamant that she’s not going to do it again. After all, how long can a rummage sale go on for? She can see the time ticking away and would rather get on with the search they need to do rather than wait any longer.
However, any idea of leaving any time soon seems scuppered by Lee emerging from the bathroom casually unbuttoning his shirt and getting ready to go to bed. She really doesn’t need to hear that he is going to take a nap. After all, surely they can go and do their searching now? Frank Bodine isn’t home, having gone to the Rosemonts for the night so the house is completely empty.
“I don’t want anyone up to watch us break in,” Lee responds, making it all sound perfectly feasible that they should wait until gone three in the morning until they take any action. He is, after all, the agent. “Now, are you coming?” he continues, gesturing towards the stairs.
Amanda can’t believe what she’s hearing. “No!” she cries, horrified that if Lee has his way she will end up spending almost the entire night with him – and that’s something she certainly hasn’t accounted for! The fact that she will feel like she’s lying and cheating cuts no ice with Lee however. In fact he couldn’t be less understanding of her situation.
“No!” She has to try and make him understand how she feels. This is, after all, all new to her. She hasn’t had to pretend to be married before, much less wait until the coast is supposedly clear with a handsome spy whose inviting her to get some rest in the same bed as him!
And what about Dean?
If she stays here she will feel guilty and even though she knows nothing is going to happen it doesn’t stop her feeling as though she’s having a thing, although when she finds herself trying to explain this to Lee he merely looks at her with a somewhat indulgent smile.
“A thing?” he repeats softly, knowing precisely what she’s talking about even if she hasn’t used the word “affair”
“Yes,” Amanda clarifies, attempting to emphasise her point in order to fully drive it home to him. “You know. A thing.”
For the briefest moment he looks at her with a smile before, in the next moment, cutting any thought of such an idea to the quick. “Well you’re not,” he informs her briskly before proceeding to get back to the matter at hand.
He really needs to get his mind back on the case. After all, this really shouldn’t be any different to any other assignment he’s had with a female agent in the past although there’s no getting away from the fact that it is – however hard he tries to gloss over the fact. That doesn’t stop him from carrying on as if they haven’t just had the conversation they have though. “Now, do you like a window open at night?” It seems like a perfectly reasonable question in his mind.
Has he actually been listening to what she’s been trying to say to him? She has to think about Dean even if he won’t. “I have to consider Dean,” she tells him, trying to put her point across as succinctly as she can. Surely she can get him to understand how all this might look? She has a boyfriend and here she is standing in front of an open-shirted Lee who thinks it’s perfectly reasonable to expect her to spend what will end up being virtually the whole night in his company. She knew she would be posing as his wife for this assignment but staying with him until the wee hours of the morning was not something she envisaged.
“Ok. How does he feel about windows?” Lee replies unhelpfully to her words.
Amanda is losing patience fast. It seems that there’s no way she’s going to be able to make him understand how she feels about all this. But Lee has his own ideas of what he understands and it doesn’t include worrying about what Dean might or might not think.
She can only but agree that the situation between them is indeed business and having established that Lee continues on, telling her that they both need to get some rest to be able to do their job properly and if that means one of them getting the bed and the other the couch then he really doesn’t care! “You tend to get killed less often that way,” he concludes.
And that’s the end of the matter as far as he’s concerned. He’s said his piece and now he’s going to bed.
“Who gets the bed?” Amanda calls after him as she watches him make his way up the stairs, already knowing the answer.
If they are going to go down the route of one of them getting the bed and one of them the couch, for Lee there is only one response. Amanda merely responds with a knowing sideways look.
Lee turns to head up to bed alone as Amanda rolls her eyes irritably and marches back into the living room to sit out the time until they can go and break into the Bodine house.
Scarecrow & Mrs King - Getting to Know You 