He makes an indulgent sound. Hum. I want to pinch him. He’s doing that thing again, where he belittles what I’m saying even if I’m right.
“Before we go in,” he says, halting my stride with a hand on my sleeve, “what do you think of it from the outside?”
“What?” I blink up at him.
His arm gestures to the house. I follow the swing. It’s … a house. Old, probably. Dark brown strips of horizontal wood and spring green shutters, one hanging crookedly. A deep front porch with tipsy steps illumined by the pinprick of a glowing doorbell. The chimney’s a column of lumpy round stones and the windows are the merry orange squares of a Tiffany lamp. A high tide of leaves swells up against the siding on the eastern wall, all the way up to a wide leaded glass window that must be the living room.
“It’s fine, I guess. Whose is it?”
“Ours.”
Ours. It echoes. Insensible gibberish. Undeniably false.
I snap my fingers and freeze time. Wheel to face him dead-on. The creature inhabiting Nicholas’s body looks down at me with the most peculiar mixture of pleasure and solemnity, and I get the feeling he is wide, wide awake while I am just beginning to stir from my hibernation. He’s skipped his contacts again, eyes sparking with intensity behind slate-gray frames. The ends of his hair curling out from his hat are so soft-looking, I almost want to touch but snatch my hand back because it feels too forward. He’s my fiancé, but not. I don’t know what we are. Who we are.
I unfreeze time and he smiles. “Welcome home.”
A Renaissance painting of us invents itself in midair, capturing my bafflement and Nicholas’s triumph. The second hand trickles at the slow drip of two million years, and then—
“What do you mean, ‘ours’?”
“I bought it.” His eyes never leave mine.
This—
But—
I—
!!!
The world flips as Nicholas turns our mind game on its head. I’m lost. It makes no sense whatsoever that he would buy a house and expect me to move in. We’ve been fighting for custody of the squat white rental. We’ve been fighting to push the other one to wave a white flag and get lost forever.
“Are you malfunctioning?” he asks, mildly entertained.
He’s twelve steps ahead of me. He’s twelve steps above. Behind. Everywhere. I don’t know where to turn and I don’t know what his objective is. He’s right, I’m malfunctioning. My circuit board is smoking. I have a house.
No, I don’t. I hastily remind myself that I don’t have anything that’s part Nicholas. He doesn’t belong to me, so neither does this. He’s termite Midas. Everything he touches turns to rot.
The only lucid thing I can think to say is, “I take it you won the coin toss.”
“Yes.”
“But.” Speech is not coming easily. My brain is continuously rejecting messages coming in from my eyes and ears as impossible. “A whole house?”
“I tried to buy half of one, but couldn’t find any that are gaping open on the side or missing a roof.”
I barely hear the joke. “How. Why. I don’t—”
“I bought it from one of the guys you work with. Leon. I ran into him a few days ago and got to talking about the sort of place I wanted to live in, and he told me about wanting to move out of the place he’s in now, and we realized we both wanted the same thing and could help each other. Turns out, he’s actually pretty cool. He let me play with his bow saw and we’ve got plans to build a couple of chairs.”
“Leon?” That’s what I’m stuck on right now. “You bought this house from Leon? Leon Duncan?”
He chuckles. “I’ll let him know you haven’t forgotten his last name yet. He’ll be shocked.”
Great, they’ve been swapping stories about how rude I am. Maybe blanking on Leon’s last name is the reason he didn’t say a word to me about this all day. What a Judas.
“He knew this was the surprise and he let me think I was about to get murdered!”
“You really need to stop telling your coworkers I’m out to murder you.” Irritation flits across his features. “Doesn’t give me a good rep.”
“We’ve never discussed the kind of house we’d buy together,” I sputter. “I wasn’t involved here at all.”
“I wanted it to be a surprise.”
“You wanted.”
He just stares, not getting it. “This isn’t the sort of surprise you spring on your fiancée! Couples do this shit together, Nicholas! One of them doesn’t go behind the other one’s back to do something of this magnitude. First you get rid of your car and bring home that—that behemoth over there—” He’s laughing, which exasperates me even more, but I forge on: “I’ve asked you where you’ve been. You’ve refused to tell me. Do you have any idea what that’s like?”
“Yeah!” he cries. “I do. I don’t know where you’ve been all year, Naomi. Your body’s here, but your head’s somewhere else. You’ve gone and left me all alone.”
If anyone’s been left alone, it’s me, fighting the War of the Roses all by myself. No way am I vaulting into that pool of lava, so I pick a milder topic to complain about instead. “We’re in the middle of nowhere.”
He shrugs. “So?”
I cast around for another complaint. What comes out of my mouth boggles even me. “I’ve always wanted a front door that’s painted purple. The color of magic.”
“That’s a terrible reason to reject a house. Naomi, I bought us a house! Take a beat here and let that sink in. How many of your friends can say their boyfriend bought them a house?”
1. He’s not my boyfriend, he’s my fiancé. (Sort of.)
2. He didn’t buy this house for me. He bought it for himself, without asking or wanting me to be a part of that process. Am I supposed to be grateful that he’s letting me tag along after he made all the decisions? If we’re supposed to spend our life together as equal partners, this doesn’t bode well.
3. My only real friend is Brandy, and at this moment in time she thinks I’m bleeding out in a ditch.
This is madness. I should go back to the white rental house now that he’s apparently living here, but I can’t give in yet. The war’s still on. He’s trying to pull the wool over my eyes, but I know we’ve simply relocated to a different battlefield. I’m not going to tell myself what I’ve been inwardly repeating for months now: It could be worse.
That’s what I’ve been doing. Justifying staying with him by reminding myself it could be worse. Look at her. Look at him. Look at those people. They’re alone and have nobody. They’re in terrible relationships. They’re so unhappy. It could be worse. That could be me.
Except, it is me. I’ve been unhappy. “Okay,” he huffs. “Except for the front door, which isn’t purple, what do you think?”
Truthfully? There are a lot of dead, dirty leaves and it’s out in the middle of nowhere and I so badly want it to be mine. I barely registered there was a house here when we pulled up, but after hearing him say the word ours, it was like the lights of a stage washed over the scene and made it all so beautiful I could cry.