You Deserve Each Other(49)

“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.

“Self-absorbed?” I repeat in my highest register. What absolute slander! “Do you have any idea how many Livestrong bracelets I’ve owned? Oh, and I’ve stopped killing all those bees! What have you ever done?”

I follow him to the door. He slams it shut but I open it up again, beaming at him as he terrorizes the poor driveway. Leaves have never been stepped on so hard. He realizes too late that a puddle is hiding beneath some of the leaves and a string of curses rips from his throat when he inspects the soaking hem of his trousers.

“If you’d used common sense, then you wouldn’t have wet the bed, now would you?”

“If I’d used common sense,” he shouts, getting into his car, “I never would’ve proposed!”

The remark is a direct hit on my pride. It’s sharper than it looks, surprising me by tearing right through its target and lodging a few inches deeper. I cross my arms. “Oh, shut up. Anyone would be lucky to have me. I’m a prize.”

“You’re the trophy they give to last-place losers.”

He hears his self-burn and bangs his head on the steering wheel.

“Good luck!” I shout over the rev of his engine. “Have a great day, sweet pea! Try not to think about how everyone is staring at that zit on your chin.”

Through the windshield, he murders me with his eyes. He’s got his entire soul compressed right up against his irises and they’re the color of hatred. They desperately want telekinetic powers so they can blow me into the sky, through the fabric of our universe and into another one. I hope it’s a parallel universe with a parallel Nicholas and Naomi. I want to torture him with two of me.

I’m so busy dreaming of teaming up with my parallel-universe self for evil purposes that I don’t notice he’s backed over the baby evergreen poking crookedly out of the earth. The Charlie Brown tree. Jason.

He plows forward over Jason and backs up again. Weakling branches snap and crunch. It’s twenty-two degrees and I’m standing in the yard in a tank top and an old pair of Nicholas’s boxers that I laid claim to long ago. Yesterday’s mascara clumps in my eyelashes and my cheek is wearing the pattern of my wristwatch. We belong on Jerry Springer. I inhale half the oxygen in Morris and bellow: “NICHOLAS ROSE, YOU UNFORGIVABLE LITTLE SHIT.”

He arches a brow at me. Then, to test my nerves, he puts his car in park and revs the gas. I try to convey with my stare exactly how deceased he’s going to be if he runs over Jason one more time. Poor Jason. He’s leaning so pitifully that another punch will do him in.

Nicholas smiles. Then his Jeep lunges forward, dragging up Jason by the roots.

Nicholas and I are a parable about bottling your frustrations. We’ve been inflicting a quiet violence onto our own feelings by confining them to tiny spaces with only a teaspoon of oxygen, fermenting them into an ugly chemistry incompatible with love. We’ve felt the glass trembling from the increase of pressure but continued suffering through our smiles.