Every Wrong Reason(12)

I hadn’t seen him in four months and now he was here. I had to brace myself before I could look at him.

“Nick! God!” My hand landed on my chest and I pushed down, trying to slow my racing heart. “You scared the hell out of me!”

He leaned over the white-tiled island and stared at me with listless eyes. “I thought you heard me come in.”

I pressed my lips together and tried to ignore the pang of pain that hit me low in the gut. His eyes used to be his most expressive feature. They could glisten with humor or darken with lust in the span of three seconds. They were what had pulled me so deeply into him so quickly. All he had to do was look at me and I had been his.

Until now. Now they stared at me as if I were the most uninteresting thing on the planet. They didn’t light up when I walked into the room. They didn’t dance with some sarcastic thought spinning around in his sharp mind. They didn’t heat with desire or harden with frustration.

They just barely glanced at me, shuttered and apathetic.

“I didn’t,” I snapped. My heart hadn’t found its normal beat yet and my voice sounded frustratingly breathless.

He moved around the island and held out his hand to me. I reluctantly took it and tried to be civil.

We had promised each other a peaceful divorce. This was something we both wanted. We had no reason to be anything but nice to each other.

Once I was standing, he looked me over again but refrained from speaking his opinion. I tried to swallow back my annoyance. After living with him for seven years and hearing every little insignificant thought that came out of his mouth, it bothered me that he had suddenly learned restraint.

What did he think about my outfit? Did he notice I’d lost weight? Could he see the dark bags beneath my eyes?

Did he think I was losing sleep because of him?

Habits, I reminded myself. These were just familiar patterns from our marriage. I was used to being able to ask him his thoughts, which he always gave freely.

Now we acted like strangers, even though we knew each other more intimately than I knew any other person.

“What are you doing here?” I finally asked when it didn’t seem he wanted to explain his presence.

“I didn’t think you were going to be here.”

His casual words lit a fire inside of me that I couldn’t ignore. My polite words tasted bitter and acrid in my mouth. “Teacher’s meeting was canceled tonight. Mr. Kellar had a family emergency.”

“Is everything alright?” Finally, some kind of sympathy flared in his blue eyes, but it wasn’t meant for me.

My principal got his compassion, but not his wife.

“His eight-year-old broke his leg. It’s nothing serious.” My words came out clipped and short. Nick noticed immediately. His gaze sharpened and his lips parted as if to defend himself.

I braced myself for fighting words, the ones that would spiral us into a never-ending argument. He would set me off and I would retaliate with something blade-sharp and cutting. He would return by nagging me to death until I explained every last one of my emotions, at which point I would shut down and the barrier around my heart would thicken and expand.

Sometime in the last seven years, I had started to pay attention to our fights. We fought in phases, each argument trying to outdo the last. What was worse was that we had developed this toxic cycle that could not be broken.

“Huh,” was Nick’s intelligent reply.

“So why are you here?”

His gaze drifted to the dog. “I need to grab a few things of mine.”

Righteous anger spread from the fire in my belly, snaking through my veins and reaching my fingertips and toes. “You should have called me first. You can’t just walk in here unannounced. This isn’t your house anymore.”

Nick took an aggressive step forward. “This isn’t my house? Are you kidding me? This is our house. As far as I know, my name is still on the mortgage. I can come and go as I please.”

“I’m a single female, living alone. Don’t you think I deserve privacy? I thought you were a murderer!”

“You’re a single female, huh? Just like that? I’m gone for a couple months and suddenly you’re living the high life?”

“That’s not at all what I meant! And you know it!” I took another step forward and swallowed down the bitterness that bubbled up my throat. I wanted to claw at my itchy skin and burst into hysterical tears. How did we get like this?

Why couldn’t we have just one decent conversation?

Nick’s face heated with his matching anger. “I don’t know what you mean, Kate. I’m starting to wonder if I ever knew what you meant. You kicked me out.”

“Oh, that’s nice. That’s really lovely.” I spun around and threw my hands out. “I love how I’m the bad guy in this thing. How it’s all my fault.” I turned back to face him and let my words punctuate the air with every ounce of resentment and exhaustion I felt. “We came to this decision together, Nick. Don’t you dare put the blame on me. I’ve been the villain for seven goddamn years, but I refuse to this time. We did this together.”

He rocked back on his heels and his shoulders deflated like the anger had leaked from his body. He was a puffed-up balloon with a quarter-sized hole. But he wasn’t any less worked up. This was the quiet rage that cut deeper, sliced in jagged, unhealable ways.