You Deserve Each Other(48)

In retaliation, he hid all of my shoes, which meant I had to wear slippers when Brandy and I went out for brunch. To get back at him, I took the dress shoes that he wears every day to work and tied the laces into a tight bow, then dabbed the middle of each bow with super glue. Watching him try to untie his shoelaces and getting progressively more and more pissed ranks right up there in the top five of Naomi Westfield’s Life Highlights. I don’t regret it even if he did end up nailing all of my underwear to my bedroom ceiling with a staple gun.

The Junk Yard is officially dead and I’m officially unemployed, so I have no reason to wake up in the morning anymore except to exact Nicholas sabotage. The effort has absorbed one hundred percent of my focus. Honestly, if it weren’t for the prospect of ticking him off I’d probably be steeped in a deep depression right now.

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.”