I contemplate this as I stick my sleeping fiancé’s hand in a bowl of warm water and tiptoe out of the bedroom.
Ten minutes later I hear a fabulous yell. I smile and stir my Fruity Pebbles. It’s going to be a great day! I check my phone for the fiftieth time in an hour, hoping for a missed call—a voice-mail from Print-Rite, a paper store in Fairview looking to hire a receptionist to work four days a week, six hours a day. The pay’s a joke, but at least they’re not demanding I have fifteen-plus years of secretarial experience and a bachelor’s degree. I can’t tell you how many entry-level positions I’ve been circling in the newspaper, getting hopeful and calling them up for details only to hear I need a PhD and half a century of experience in their specific field.
Suffice it to say, the job hunt isn’t going so hot. Every now and then Nicholas makes a comment under his breath about myriad job opportunities in Madison, and how different our lives would be if he’d accepted that job, and it fills me with the stubborn desire to prove him wrong. I will find work here. I’ll find fulfillment. I’ll be so damn fulfilled, it’ll make him sick.
Nicholas stalks into the kitchen holding an empty bowl. He looks deranged.
“Something wrong?” I purr.
“I didn’t piss myself, if that’s what you were hoping for. But I did knock the bowl over in my sleep, and it fell on my phone.” He shows me his phone’s screen, which has more cuts than the diamond on my ring finger.
Oh, shit.
“I didn’t have anything to do with that,” I say quickly.
“I had everything on my phone! All my pictures, my contacts. Important information.”
“Isn’t it synced to your computer? You should be able to—” I start to ask, but his dark look shuts me up.
“This is over the line, Naomi.”
“This is the line? I think taking someone’s pet home with me was worse than this, to be honest.”
He’s an avalanche of rocks, crashing through the house. He crashes upstairs and grabs some clean clothes out of the hamper, which I haven’t folded and put away yet because I am Extremely Busy checking my phone for missed calls from employers. I don’t have time to sort socks. My career is at stake.
He crashes into the shower, where I and all the ghosts who live here listen to one half of an argument he probably thinks he’s winning. Some of the points he makes are valid, but I holler back anyway. He’s even angrier when he emerges. It’s too bad nothing fun came out of the warm-water trick; I’ve been dying to try that one out since I was a kid and I’ve got to say, I’m disappointed.
“I can’t believe you,” he thunders, shaking his head.
“You’re really mad for someone who didn’t wet his pants. What’s the big deal?”
He waves his cracked phone screen at me. Oh, right. I’d already forgotten. The fact that I’ve forgotten and I’m calmly spooning Fruity Pebbles past my lips is more than he can handle. Nicholas reaches out and swats the box of cereal, like a spiteful cat. Fruity Pebbles rain off the table.
“Hey!” I stand up. The kitchen’s a mess now (after I just swept it four days ago) and all that’s left inside the cereal box is an inch of rainbow dust. “You wasted the whole box! How am I supposed to have a balanced breakfast tomorrow morning?”
“You don’t deserve a balanced breakfast tomorrow morning! You can eat butterless toast and think about what you did.” His feet are cinder blocks as he marches off for his wallet and keys.
I’m still frozen in surprise, half-standing, half-crouched. “But my nutrients!”
“You think I care?” he hollers from another room. “You put my hand in a bowl of warm water.”
Seriously, this is not as bad as taking someone’s dog. I stole a living creature. Who is part of someone’s family. I didn’t get this bent out of shape when I had to rip my underwear down from the ceiling, even though he’d punctured holes in all my favorites. Nicholas is a giant baby.
“But it didn’t even work!” I yell back. Or so he says. I’m not totally convinced I didn’t succeed, with the way he’s reacting. I turn to go paw through the mountain of dirty clothes piling up against the side of the washing machine. The dryer door is swinging wide open, and you could see the clog of lint from outer space. I recognize the turquoise fuzz from a sweater he only wears for Visits With Mother.
Fucking hell. “Clean the lint trap or I will seriously, literally murder you,” I threaten. “With an axe. Your blood will spray the walls. There are a million places to hide a dead body out here.”
“Oh my god, please do,” he responds. “Kill me and put me out of my misery.”
“My anger is way more justified than yours. You’re just mad about your phone, which isn’t my fault. I’ve been telling you forever that it’s stupid to keep your phone on the floor all night, next to the bed.”
Nicholas materializes in the kitchen, three feet away from me. He looks like he wants to push me down a very long flight of stairs and I’m sure I’ve got an expression to match. I feel alive and awake, adrenaline surging through my veins. Everything is falling so wonderfully apart, I hope.
“My charger is short! That’s why I have to leave the phone on the floor. It won’t reach the nightstand because my cord’s not long enough.”
I don’t have to crack an immature joke, because my smirk says it for me.
He throws his hands up. “God! Sometimes it’s like I’m engaged to a ten-year-old.”
“What does that say about you?” I muse.
“Stop distracting me. I’m late. Again.” He glares at me like it’s my fault he stapled my underwear to the ceiling and forced me to hit back. “Stop making me run late for work. I get that you’re bitter I still have a job when you don’t. Take out your aggression some other way.”
I make sure he sees me drag my gaze over his lunchbox when I reply, “You bet.”
Snarling, he tosses all of his pre-packed food (which I didn’t even tamper with, but the fact that he can’t be sure is a point for Naomi) into the trash and pulls his coat on. He skipped a shave and his hair’s a bird’s nest since he forgot to style it with pomade after his shower. The brightest hope in my life right now is that he won’t remember, so that he’ll get a glimpse of his tragic hair in the bathroom mirror after lunch and want to punch a wall. The two nosy receptionists at Rise and Smile, Nicole and Ashley, will whisper that he’s having “trouble in paradise.”
Lol.
He shakes his head, doing up the buttons on his coat. “You are just …” Words aren’t adequate to convey his feelings, so he growls in his throat. He’s so mad that he keeps missing buttons, skin burning from the roots of his hair all the way down past his collar.
“I’m just what?”
“Unbelievably self-absorbed.” He walks backward to the living room, glaring daggers. He still hasn’t realized he forgot his hairstyling products and his hairdo’s going to air-dry like something from an eighties music video. The cold, moistureless air will not be kind. I sneakily check outside. It’s windy as all getout. Somebody up there loves me.