You Deserve Each Other(32)

I laugh at my own joke, but the noise lodges in my throat when the door opens and a version of Nicholas from the Upside Down strolls into the Junk Yard. He’s wearing hiking boots and a secondhand jacket the color of the woods. It’s so wrong on him that it takes me ten whole seconds to process that it’s camo. Nicholas Rose is wearing camo.

My jaw drops when my eyes reach the top of his head. His hair is stuffed under one of those old-fashioned winter caps that has fleece-lined earflaps. Its colors are ugly orange and brown plaid. It’s hideous. The whole ensemble has proved fatal to a handful of my brain cells and maybe my retinas.

“Oh my god,” I say in a hoarse whisper. “You’re going to drag me into the woods and shoot me, aren’t you?”

I’m not being dramatic. He’s dressed like one of Morris’s many avid hunters.

Nicholas rolls his eyes, but I sense a shift in his mood. There’s a calmness about him that unsettles me. “I’m picking you up. Remember that surprise I told you about?”

Brandy clutches my arm, and I can almost hear her thinking It’s more oleander!

I don’t know why, but I lie. “No. What surprise?”

He frowns, which must be why I lied to him. My subconscious is cruel and wants him to think I don’t listen to anything he says, which is only true half the time. I feel bad about it until I remember that he completely checked out of wedding planning the second his mother stuck her interfering nose in, and he didn’t stop her from trampling my every piece of input. We’re all invited to Deborah’s wedding in January.

I have been taught not to get into cars with strangers, so I wisely say, “My car’s here. I’ll just drive home.”

“Nope.” He takes me by the arm and leads me outside before I can blink SOS at Brandy and Leon in Morse code. I drag my feet on purpose, but he holds me against his side and lifts so that he can kind of glide me over the blacktop. I kick my dangling feet to leave scuff marks. This is how I’ll die: slightly unwilling but ultimately lazy.

I throw a pleading glance at my car across the way, but it doesn’t spur to life like Christine and avenge me. Soon enough I’m locked in the passenger seat of his Jeep, which he still hasn’t explained, and I’m split down the middle between curious and pissed.

“You’re pushy.”

He buckles me up and starts the engine. The Jeep smells like his Maserati’s crazy uncle. It drinks too much and plows over mailboxes. It had Taco Bell for lunch.

“What about my car?”

The question emerges as a whine, and he rewards my surrender of dignity with an indulgent smile that doesn’t make it to his eyes. “We’ll come back for it.”

“But why don’t I just …”

There’s no use finishing my sentence. He’s grit and steel now and won’t give me a straight answer. The weird outfit has toppled my grasp of him irrevocably. I don’t know this man. I’m at a severe disadvantage. If this bewilderment tactic is retaliation for my pancake makeup and Steelers hoodie, it’s working.

“Are you having a midlife crisis?” He’s a bit young for one, but then again he reads all the boring parts of the newspaper and there are usually Werther’s candies in his pockets. He mentions his 401(k) a lot.

The corner of his mouth tilts. “Maybe.”

We pass the turn to the street we live on and keep going. I desperately hope Deborah drives by and gets an eyeful of what her son is wearing. Actually, she wouldn’t recognize him right now. She’d assume I’m having an affair, which, I’ve got to admit, is what this is starting to feel like. There’s no way this is Nicholas. A thousand-year-old witch has hijacked his body.

Nicholas’s placid body language is freakish next to the apprehension seeping from my pores. I don’t know this car at all. I knew where everything was located in the Maserati, napkins and sunglasses and a mini bottle of Advil. For whatever reason I’m hung up on a bottle of sweet tea in the cup holder closest to the dashboard rather than the one close to the center console. That’s backward for him. Such a tiny detail, but it fascinates me. Why? Also, he never drinks cold tea. Only hot.

I tap the lid. “Whose is this?”

“Mine.”

My jaw unhinges. He feels me gawping at him and can’t hold a smile back. He tries, though, sinking his teeth into his bottom lip.

There’s an umbrella on the floor I’ve never seen before. I open the console and find Tic Tacs, a case of old CDs, and a plastic fork from Jackie’s still in its wrapper. Jackie’s is a tiny hamburger place with no drive-thru and barely any sitting room, so customers have to walk inside and order their food to go. The only item on the menu worth a second look is the fries, but their fries are legendary. Hands down, best I’ve ever had, and we used to swing by and grab dinner there before heading to the drive-in to watch movies. I haven’t eaten Jackie’s in nearly a year, ever since Nicholas and I stopped being a perfect couple. It’s blasphemous that he’s still able to enjoy our favorite date food without me.

The cup holder not cradling anomalous tea is occupied with wadded-up mail, one envelope incorrectly addressed to both of us: Nicholas and Naomi Rose. I want to toss it out the window. His regular jacket is an ivory lump in the middle of the back seat, the same color as his flesh. It makes me think of the witch who shucked him from his skin and is wearing him like a bodysuit.