Ambassador Whiskers' Curriculum of Desire
Copyright© 2025 by Eric Ross
Chapter 1: Lawrence the Lonely
The cat wore a tiny tuxedo and demanded to be addressed as “Ambassador Whiskers.”
Lawrence stood in the kitchen with a chipped mug in his hand and a brown ring of coffee cooling at the bottom. The cat’s bowtie gleamed as if someone had polished it. The voice—low, assured, faintly bored—hung in the air like cigar smoke. For a heartbeat he could only stare, then the world tilted, and he grabbed the counter to keep from sliding off the edge of it.
Before the cat—before lapels and baritone pronouncements—there had been only Lawrence and the conviction that he would die alone.
Two nights earlier he had dressed for a date as if the outcome could be tricked by layers. Hoodie under the one blazer that had shoulders, dark jeans, shoes he’d scrubbed with a toothbrush because the internet said women noticed shoes. He’d stared at his face in the mirror until it separated into parts he didn’t like: eyebrows too long, stubble uneven, mouth pinched by habit. He considered cologne, set the bottle down, picked it up again, set it down for good. Real men didn’t need perfume, he told himself, which sounded braver in his head than it did whispered to the sink.
The bar had a name that sounded like an apology—Sorry Charlie or Pardon My French, something with chalkboard cursive and Edison bulbs. Kim was already there when he arrived, sitting at the far end where the light pooled gold around her. The green dress she wore was modest in theory, but the way it caught and released the ambient glow made it look like a river moving over the shape of her body. Her hair was pinned up with a pencil as if she’d been working and paused for a drink.
“Lawrence?” she said, and the way she stood made clear she was ready to sit again quickly if necessary.
“That’s me,” he said, and then, as if somebody had pulled a string in his back, he blurted, “Do you usually dress like that?”
Her eyebrows lifted. “Like what?”
He felt the trap close and stepped in deeper. “Like, you put a lot of effort in. That’s not a criticism, it’s just—signals, right? Fashion as signaling. I read this study—”
“Should we, um, sit?” she said gently, already sitting.
They sat. The bartender arrived and Lawrence ordered a beer because beer was neutral. Kim asked for something with grapefruit and gin that the bartender mixed by scent. Lawrence watched the shaker and counted the seconds because it gave him something to do with his eyes.
“So. Books or TV?” Kim asked, a friendly on-ramp.
“Podcasts,” he said. “Mainly.”
“Oh! Which ones?”
He could have said something harmless. He could have said history or design or that one where comedians talk about their bad sets. He heard himself say, “Evolutionary psychology of mating strategies,” and then, because silence expanded dangerously around the phrase, he kept talking. “There’s this episode about hypergamy. Not as a moral judgment, obviously—just, you know, the data. It explains a lot of modern dating behavior.”
Kim’s smile turned careful. “Like what?”
“Well,” he said, flushing already, “like why a lot of women swipe right on the top ten percent and the rest of us—” He laughed, aiming for self-deprecating, hitting bruised. “It’s informative. People pretend those forces don’t exist.”
“Those forces,” she repeated, as if testing the words for splinters. “So the rest of us are just ... forces.”
“I mean, not you. I’m saying in general. Look, I’m not blaming anyone. I’m a nice guy.” He hated himself the moment the phrase left his mouth. “Not—nice like weak,” he added quickly. “Nice like respectful. But that doesn’t seem to count. And then people say ‘confidence,’ like—what does that even mean? Confidence is just the aura of past success, which is a feedback loop, and if you’re not fed into the system you’re—”
She held up a hand, palm polite, traffic-cop calm. “Lawrence.”
“Yeah?”
“I appreciate the thought you’ve put into ... all that. But I kind of just came to have a drink and see if we click.” She smiled to soften it. “Do you have siblings?”
He tried to pivot, felt the tires skid. “One older brother. He’s married. Met his wife in college before all the apps turned everything into a marketplace. It was simpler then. People weren’t optimizing.”
Kim took a sip of gin and grapefruit. “Where did you go to school?”
“State.”
“What did you study?”
“Computer science.”
“Do you like your job?”
He could have said yes. He could have said it pays the rent, the team is fine, he likes building small exact things that do what they’re told. Instead he said, “It’s ... fine,” and then heard in the hollow of that word the echo of his apartment, his fridge hum, the way he ate standing up.
“Any hobbies?” she tried.
“I used to play guitar,” he said. “Stopped. Hard to find people to jam with who aren’t—” He almost said “Chads,” swallowed it. “Who aren’t just doing it to perform.”
Kim’s eyes flicked to his blazer, to the hoodie zipper peeking like a tongue. “Performing can be fun,” she said lightly. “Do you, um, get out much? Like, with friends?”
“I keep to myself,” he said, as if it were a virtue. “I’ve been working on myself,” he added, and meant he had watched hours of men explaining how to stand, how to talk, how to hold eye contact for exactly three Mississippi.
The bartender set down a dish of olives. Lawrence took one and bit it. The pit cracked against his molar, a small pain that felt like punishment.
“Sorry,” he said, too loudly. “Sorry. Did you want—”
“Go ahead,” Kim said. “So, podcasts and guitar. Movies?”
“Mostly documentaries. Fiction tries too hard.” He grinned as if he’d made a joke.
She drummed her fingers once on the bar. A small space opened between them, the kind that is either room or distance. He filled it with more words. “I’m just trying to be honest. People say they want honesty but—like tonight—I was honest and you’re already tensing up and I haven’t even said the part about how the apps create this—”
“Okay,” she said, gentle but final. She turned a little on her stool so they were no longer angling toward each other. “I don’t think this is going to work.”
He hadn’t realized how high his chest had climbed until it dropped. “We only just sat down.”
“Sometimes you know,” she said. “And I know.”
“But you didn’t—” He gestured at the air between them. “You didn’t even give me a chance.”
She slid money under her empty glass, corrected herself, pushed it toward the bartender instead. “I gave it the time it deserved.”
He opened his mouth to argue—about fairness, about data sets, about sample sizes and second chances. She was already off the stool, purse over shoulder. “Good luck,” she said, not unkindly, and the two words were worse than contempt.
He watched her cross the room, the dress making little rivers of light. He watched other heads turn toward her and away again, ripples closing over where she had been. The bartender wiped the ring her glass left and set a coaster on top of it like a lid.
“Another?” she asked.
He shook his head and paid for both drinks in a grabby, overlarge way that made his hands feel visible. When he stood, the room shifted. He muttered thanks to no one in particular and left, the door throwing back a wash of street noise that felt like laughter.
On the walk home he argued with Kim inside his skull, explaining everything he had meant, how she’d misunderstood, how she’d proven his point without knowing it. He corrected his own tone in the reconstruction, made himself charming in hindsight, then heard her voice again—”Sometimes you know”—and scuffed the edge of a planter with his shoe hard enough to sting. He told himself the sting was clarity.
The apartment greeted him with the soft, damp smell of a place lived in by one. He dropped the blazer on a chair. It slumped the way clothes do when they remember the shape of the person who failed in them. He opened the fridge, stared at slices of American cheese and a jar of something pickled he had meant to finish, closed it again. The glow of his laptop was a lighthouse on the other side of the room.
He sat and the hinge made its familiar tired click. The password filled itself beneath his fingers. His body relaxed in increments as the forum loaded: black background, white text, avatars that were swords or wolves or anime eyes.
They were there, the voices he knew better than the ones in his day—handles as familiar as friends’ names, and perhaps better at answering.
IronCrown89: The feminine is chaos. The masculine is order. If you suffer, you are persecuted by entropy itself. You must not plead with chaos for mercy.
Lawrence exhaled. This was the tone that steadied him: declarative, elevated, authorial. He could sit inside its cadence the way you sit inside a lecture hall and pretend the shape of the room is the shape of truth.
ChadSlayer22: ANOTHER FOID WALKED OUT TONIGHT. LMAO OF COURSE. THEY’RE HARDWIRED TO HUMILIATE NICE GUYS. SMILE AT YOU, DRAIN YOUR WALLET, TEXT CHAD IN THE BATHROOM. EVERY LATTE IS POISONED.
WageCel420: did she drink the latte tho or did she just weaponize the foam art? asking for a friend:)
DoomerKid: Hope is cope. The blackpill is the only mercy—truth without anesthesia. The sooner you accept you’re invisible to them, the sooner you stop pretending to be human.