Every Wrong Reason by Rachel Higginson
To my parents,
For teaching me the magnitude of forgiveness.
Prologue
Reasons He’s Wrong for Me.
1. He’s the most selfish person I know.
2. I would be happier without him.
3. He can’t take a shower without leaving water everywhere.
4. If I have to clean up his toothpaste one more time I’m going to go insane.
5. How hard is it to put the milk away?
6. I don’t love him anymore.
7. We were never right for each other.
How did we get here?
Again?
I just wanted to go to bed. I had the most obnoxious day of my freaking life and all I wanted to do was come home, take the longest, hottest shower in the history of showers and face plant into my pillows.
Instead, it’s three o’clock in the morning and I have a migraine that’s trying to murder my brain. Goddamn it.
“This isn’t about the water all over the bathroom floor, Nick. God, honestly! It’s about the principal of the water all over the bathroom floor!”
“Are you kidding me? What the hell does that even mean?” His handsome face contorted with frustration. He wouldn’t even look at me.
I thought back and tried to remember the last time he looked at me, really looked at me, and couldn’t remember. When was the last time he saw me? When was the last time we hadn’t been fighting long enough for his clear blue eyes to look into mine and make a real connection?
It had been years.
Maybe he had never seen me.
“It means there’s water all over the floor! Again! How many times have I asked you to clean up after your shower? I’m not asking for much! I just want the full inch of water cleaned up off the floor so that when I go in there I don’t soak my socks every single time!”
“You’re going to take your socks off anyway! Why does it matter?” His long arms flew to his side as he paced the length of our bedroom.
I flopped back on the bed and the pillows depressed with the weight of my head. I felt like crying, but I wouldn’t let something this stupid bring me to tears. I wouldn’t.
Not again.
This whole argument wasn’t really about the water. He was right; I had been planning to take my socks off. But I was so sick of asking him to do something so simple. Why couldn’t he just listen to me? For once?
“Fine,” I relented. “I don’t care. Let’s just go to bed.”
“Typical,” I heard him mutter.
I peeled my fingers away from my face and propped myself up on my elbows. His back was to me as he stared unseeingly at our closed blinds. I could see the tension taut through his broad shoulders. His thin t-shirt pulled on the sculpted muscle he was so proud of.
It was so late and both of us had to work in the morning, which only proved to fuel my frustration. His run had lasted forever tonight. He left shortly after dinner and hadn’t come home until close to ten. I had started to think something had happened to him.
When I asked him where he was, he told me his running group had gone out for beers afterward. He’d gone out for beers and hadn’t bothered to text or call or let me know he was alive and not dead in the ditch somewhere.
I’d had a terrible day and my husband got to go out for beers at the end of an excessively long run while I did the dishes, cleaned up the kitchen, started his laundry and graded papers.
And then at the end of all of it, I’d walked into an inch of standing water on our bathroom floor because he couldn’t be bothered to clean up after himself.
And he wants to throw around the word “typical.”
Okay, maybe it wasn’t a full inch. That might have been a tiny exaggeration.
At least Nick was smart enough not to point that out.
Smart enough or he valued his life. And by life, I meant balls.
“What was that?” My voice pitched low and measured, in complete opposition to the pounding of my heart and rushing of blood in my ears.
This was not the first time we’d had such a lengthy blow-up. In fact, we fought more than we got along. If I were truly honest with myself, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d enjoyed being around him.
“It’s typical, Kate. Just when I finally get to the bottom of why you’re so pissed off, you decide to shut down and turn yourself off. You’re ready for bed and I just finally figured out what crawled up your ass. So what am I supposed to do with that now? Just forget it? Move on and pretend you didn’t keep me up all hours of the night yelling about it? God knows, you will.”
“I’m tired, Nick. It’s three o’clock in the morning. We both have to work tomorrow! What do you want me to do? I guess we could sit here and talk in circles until the sun comes up, but like you said, you finally get it!”
“God, you can be a bitch.”
His words hit me like a slap across the face. “And you can be a selfish *.”
I watched his face fall. It was that perfect kind of hit that took all of the wind right out of his sails. His entire body deflated and I knew I hurt him as badly as he hurt me. Except instead of making me feel better about myself, I realized I had never felt worse.
He slumped down at the edge of our bed and buried his face in his hands. His tousled, light brown hair fell over the tips of his fingers and reminded me of the times I used to brush it back, out of his eyes.