ALL THE RAGE (writer: T.M. Frazier)(21)

Rage broke her awkward smile and with a straight face, she said, “I’m his wife. Nolan will be back in a little bit, though, if you want to come inside and wait. He just ran out to get me tampons. He’s so helpful that way.”

Talia took another step back. “I uh,” she said, now standing completely off the ramp where it met the shell driveway.

“I assume you’re here for the nanny position?” Rage asked, patting her flat her stomach, taking her lie a step further. Talia’s eyes widened in complete horror. “I know I’m not even showing yet, but it’s never too early to start looking for good help.”

“I thought you said he was out buying you tampons?” Talia asked, crossing her arms over her chest and jutting out a hip.

“I did,” Rage said, not correcting the lie she’d been caught in. She pointed to Talia’s equally flat stomach. “Wow, you’re expecting too? We should go baby shopping together. I don’t know many people around here and…”

In a huff, Talia turned and jogged off. She was already on the sidewalk and halfway down the street before Rage finished her sentence. I expected the girl I now knew as Rage to be laughing at her own joke, or doing some sort of victory dance for getting rid of my guest, but there she stood, staring at the door. Her face completely unreadable.

“Are you going to open the door or just stare at me through the window all day?” She asked with a sigh. She met my eyes through the lace curtain.

Shit.

My afternoon had just gotten a whole lot more interesting.

Rage

Of course the second I decide to actually make contact with my target, a girl with cans the size of Lake Okeechobee came bouncing up the ramp to Nolan’s house.

The entire time I was trying to get rid of Boobs McGee, I felt his eyes on me through the window. Yet, I kept going on with my lies, even though I knew he could hear me. A part of me wished he’d open the door and call me out. Although we hadn’t officially met, I was still beyond irritated at the cesspool incident from the day before and liked that I was potentially provoking his anger the way he’d provoked mine.

“Are you going to open the door or just stare at me through the window all day?” I asked after I’d successfully run the girl off. I turned to where I’d sensed him watching me through the window.

“It’s open,” Nolan said. “Come the f*ck on in.”

I stepped inside and leaned back on the door, clicking it shut behind me. I scanned the room and gnashed my teeth together.

This is where dust came to die.

“You wanna tell me what the f*ck that was all about?” Nolan snapped, jerking his chin to the door. His hands were wrapped around the armrests of his chair as if he were about to snap them off at any second.

Even sitting down in a wheelchair the man was massive, commanding. If I were the type of person who could be intimidated, I might have even described him as such.

I wasn’t.

Shrugging I decided to try my hand at the whole truth thing Smoke had been so gung-ho about. “I didn’t want her here, so I made her go away,” I admitted.

Nolan laughed, although I couldn’t tell if he really thought what I’d done was funny or if he was just laughing because he couldn’t believe it. His unruly hair was long enough to push behind his ears, which was exactly what he did. It fell over his jaw-full of stubble, revealing the even more prominent dimple on his left cheek he’d had in his school picture.

“I saved you yesterday,” I blurted, growing uncomfortable under both his gaze and the silence.

Nolan huffed. “Yeah, then you ran the f*ck off.”

“You pissed me off,” I admitted, clutching my bag tighter to my chest. “On a scale of one to ten, it wasn’t the most pissed off I’d ever been. But I’d give it a strong six.” Nolan’s eyes followed my movement and landed on my cleavage. I moved my bag again until it was covering my chest completely.

Nolan cleared his throat. “How exactly did my drowning piss you off?” he asked. It was dark inside the house. Musty. The only light was coming through the living room sliders, which had no covering. Everything from the faded and chipped white wicker furniture, to the small TV on a stand in the corner, was old and dusty. A wayward beam of sunlight illuminated the massive amount dust as it cycloned around in mid-air. I felt my throat closing. I waited for whatever was mutating in that house to trigger some unknown allergic reaction in me and for a second wished I had one of those pen needles I could stab into my thigh when the anaphylactic shock took hold.

My chest grew tight. A pit in my stomach grew. I had the urge to clear my throat. Or cough. Or breathe into a bag. Great. The house was old. Asbestos poisoning was a good possibility. So was lead.

I steadied my eyes on Nolan and tried to focus on his dimple instead of death by dust microbials. “Your pool is disgusting.”

“My pool?” Nolan’s forehead creased and he rubbed the bridge of his nose between two of his fingers. “You were on the phone. You were talking to someone and letting me drown and then you saved me. What the f*ck was all that about?”

I shifted from one foot to the other. “Ummm… I was trying to call for help but couldn’t get a signal…”

I was calling Smoke to see if I should just let you drown. You’re alive, so obviously my end of the argument didn’t hold up.