You Deserve Each Other(51)

Look at how well I’ve turned this around on him. Some of my best improv! I think all this fresh forest air and uninterrupted hours for plotting his ruination has beefed up my capacity for evil. I feel divine. Living in the wilderness is truly a form of self-care.

His mouth opens, ready for a retort, but he’s interrupted by a low buzz. My phone’s on silent but I’ve just gotten a notification. We both glance at the mantel where my phone’s plugged into a charger. We both dive.

I’m swaddled in blankets, and the two beats it takes me to detangle are crucial. He’s at the mantel by the time I’m free, and his hand closes over the dark screen. A tiny green light flashes. An email? A text? It could be Print-Rite responding to my application, and the contents of my stomach pitch wildly when I lay out my track record. I’m one hundred percent on nos and zero percent on yesses. You’re promising, but you’re just not what we’re looking for at this time. You’re good, but not good enough.

If I’m a millimeter from hitting my goal, that makes it even worse when I fail. I’d rather hear You weren’t even close. We never considered you for a second. Anxiety kicks in and my brain fractures, thoughts splintering in a hundred directions. I’m drowning in midair and my body burns hot, a physical reaction I have to conceal. It’s a no. It’s always going to be a no.

The odds are not one in ten or fifty-fifty or any ratio I can latch on to optimistically. The odds are this: I’ve most certainly just been rejected by somebody. I can’t let Nicholas see a rejection email. I can’t let him count my failures and recite the number out loud. He doesn’t understand what it’s like to not get the thing you want; he’s one of those people who believe that if you work hard enough, you can have anything.

To him, I’m a thoughtless slacker who doesn’t have enough ambitions to start with, and when I do get an ambition under my skin, I lowball myself to take the sting out of the unavoidable letdown. Underachieving. It’s a mortal sin for a Rose and the root of all my problems. I’m sure they whisper it behind my back.

What he doesn’t know is that I do try, and then hide my failures. It’s one of the reasons why I can’t completely hate him when he makes digs about my not going to college: He doesn’t know I ever tried getting in. He wasn’t there when I shredded the rejection letters, proof that my parents were right and I should have focused more on studying than passing notes in class.

This was before I steeled myself and changed my attitude with the only coping mechanism available. Who wants a degree, anyway? Not me. I’m glad I didn’t go. Look at all these suckers with student loans, in debt up to their eyeballs and no one’s even hiring.

“Give me that!” I scream, kicking him in the back of the knee.

He holds the phone out of my reach. I hate it when he does that, using his height advantage against me. “I’m going to borrow it until I can get a new one. It’s only fair.”

“Give it back!” I jump up, grabbing ineffectively. “That’s mine!”

His mouth purses, suspicious eyes calculating my flushed face and high-pitched voice. “Why are you so scared to let me see your phone?”

“I’m not scared.” He hears the lie, I’m sure of it. “Give it back.” I scrabble desperately, but it’s no use. He’s too tall and I’m trapped in some sort of Benjamin Button cycle—I feel myself getting shorter with every jump. “I mean it, Nicholas. I’m sorry your screen got cracked. I’ll get you a new phone. I’m sorry, okay? Just give it back.”

His expression turns downright lethal. This close up, I see my own terrified face imprinted on each of his pupils, two black mirrors. I see what he’s seeing, and I know what this looks like.

“You just get a message from someone?” His voice is silky. The tip of it is so sharp, it could nick your artery without pressing.

“No. Why would you say that? Give me my phone.” I hold out my palm expectantly and infuse as much authority into the command as possible. “Now.”

His nostrils flare. “It’s him, isn’t it?”

“Who? What are you talking about?” I shake my head, snapping, “Hand it over! I’m serious. This is my personal property and keeping it from me is illegal.”

Nicholas’s gaze slides to my phone and his thumb moves, as if to tap the screen and bring my notifications to light. I freak out way more than the occasion calls for and next thing I know, I’m hanging off his back. My arms are around his neck, which gets me closer to my target, but he’s squirming to get me off. “Give it!” I shriek. “It’s mine!” I lose all sense of which words are coming out of my mouth and which ones are nonverbally exploding in my frantic brain. “Do what I say, or else!”

Nicholas backs up against a wall. He doesn’t do it softly, either. I yank his hair and he spins, falling backward onto the couch. It’s a move he shouldn’t have made, because I lock my arms and legs around him with an iron grip and he’s now a turtle on his back. I expend a burst of precious energy launching him off the couch, facedown on the floor, and revel in my moment of triumph before he starts fighting back.

“Get off!” He rolls us, but I’m scrappy and I’ve been storing up my energy all day with bonbons and Real Housewives. He’s stressed. His mother has called his office fifty times. I’ve got an edge on him.