Chapter Seventeen #2
“I cast you right out of here, D-Money!” he yells at the top of his lungs, and I.
Completely. Lose it. I can’t breathe. Neither can Nicholas, who breaks down in the middle of his banishment chant and is laughing so hysterically that no sound escapes save for little gasping sobs. Tears stream down our faces.
“Look what you’ve done!” Deborah screams, shaking a finger at me. “You’ve corrupted my sweet boy! I know this is your fault, Naomi!”
I take a bow.
The spell is a success. Deborah gives up and stomps back to her car. Her tires squeal ominously when she tears off into the night, which is probably pretty close to the same sound she’s making twelve inches from Harold’s face right now.
I wipe the tears from my eyes and give him a high five. “Holy shit, dude!”
“I know!” He’s got a crazed grin, chest heaving deeply.
“Unhinged” is my new favorite look on him.
I think back to the conversation we had in the car after my stop-and-run fiasco at the traffic light in Beaufort, and how he said that messing with his parents could be fun as long as he was in on the joke, too. He really meant it.
I slide my palm over his cheek, matching his grin. “I’m proud of you. I wish I could see your mom’s face right now.”
“She’s going to kill me.” His smile freezes as he realizes what just happened.
“Oh my god, she’s going to literally kill me.
” He leans over, hands on his knees, breathing in through his nose and out his mouth like a woman in labor.
I pat his back and a few anxious honking noises thump right out of him.
“Did I seriously say all that? To my mom? Can we run off to an uninhabited island?”
“I like islands. Let’s go. We’ll have coconut pie every day.”
“I can’t believe I did that.” More honking. “I got a little carried away, didn’t I?”
“I want to see you get carried away all the time.” I get a zap of inspiration and tap the windowsill. “Hey, can you go down there and stand where your mom was standing? Just for a sec? I want to check something.”
He arches a brow at me but obliges. While he heads downstairs, I dash into my bedroom and fish a package of balloons out from under my bed, which I’d purchased when he and I were still sabotaging each other. I race into the bathroom, fill one up with water, and return to the window.
“Okay, I’m down here,” he says, voice drifting up with a coil of white breath. “What did you need to check?”
“This,” I say, letting the bomb drop. It doesn’t land on his head as planned, but splatters all over his shoes.
Nicholas jumps back, arms out, staring at the dark spots on his pants. A thrill chases up my spine. Slowly, slowly, he lifts his head and growls, “I’d run if I were you.”
With a gleeful scream, off I go.
–
I spend the weekend getting entirely too used to being on friendly terms with Nicholas.
He teaches me how to drive Frankencar, which I’m initially resistant to out of nerves.
But I get the hang of it pretty quickly and drive us to Beaufort to buy a canoe, which we strap to the roof of my car.
We buy three oars and paddle out to rescue his wayward canoe.
We spend Saturday on the pond, stabbing our oars at chunks of ice and playing bumper cars.
Then we sit on the sofa in the drawing room, side by side, and watch the snow fall while we drink hot chocolate.
He plays Nightjar (on my account, so that he can play God with my trident and exclaim, “Hey, you have to come look at this! I’m a unicorn!
Look, Naomi, I have a horn!”) while I read Riverdale fan fiction on Tumblr, and it’s mellow and ordinary and achingly perfect.
It makes me so sad that all the good parts in the story of us are rolling in right at the end.
An evil twist of fate: I don’t think I want it to be the end. Not anymore. But while we seem to be learning how to treat each other’s feelings with more care and making better choices, we’re not what an engaged couple ought to be.
When he comes home on Monday all I want to do is gather up all my failures into a pile and sweep them under the rug, but instead I make myself share the parts of myself I’m not so proud of.
I make myself say, “Today sucked. I spent half an hour on an online application before it got to the last page and they said a minimum of five years’ experience in the food industry was required. ”
“What sort of position?”
“Assistant manager. It was the only opening they were hiring for.”
He looks down at the rug as he toes off his shoes, and I wonder if he’s thinking about Eaten Alive. Mr. and Mrs. Howard wouldn’t even make me sit for an interview; if I said I could move to Tenmouth, they’d give me a job without hesitating.
“I’m sorry. Demanding a minimum of five years’ experience is stupid.
They miss out on so much talent by limiting themselves that way.
It really is their loss.” I can’t help tearing up a bit at hearing such strong support from him.
“If it cheers you up any, I stopped at the supermarket and saw a couple help wanted ads on the bulletin board.” He hands me two flyers.
They’re for small, local businesses I’ve driven past but never patronized.
Their parking spaces are always empty. They’re the sort of workplaces I know Nicholas thinks are set up to fail because they can’t compete against today’s big retailers, but he still took the time to bring them home to me.
I start to drift off toward the couch, wanting nothing more than to escape into a television show until my eyelids are so heavy I can’t keep them open, but he takes my hand.
“What are you doing?”
“Going to go make dinner. Come with me?”
I raise a mystified eyebrow at him. “Sure?”
He sends me a little smile that I return and doesn’t drop my hand, lacing his fingers through mine.
What world am I living in, that now I’m holding hands with Nicholas to walk from one room into another?
His grasp is confident and sure, the sort you’d want leading you through a crowd.
“You’re a pretty good hand-holder, you know,” I tell him.
“Just reminding you of all the things your Dr. Claw could never do.”
Ahh, Dr. Claw. Evil villain of my dreams. With a limo, red suspenders, and a face like that (in the movie, at least), he could still get it even if he had two pirate hooks. “He’s still got his other hand.”
“Shh. I win.”
“Yes, Nicholas, you are much better than an Inspector Gadget character.”
Nicholas lifts his chin, mollified. In the kitchen, he tugs a chain that activates a strand of globe lights that run the perimeter of our ceiling, which casts a cheery ambiance.
Then he taps a radio app on his phone and music infuses the room while he sifts through pans in the cabinet.
“Where’s the—oh, here it is.” He twirls a frying pan and winks at me.
“What are we making?”
“Pecan pancakes.”
It’s barely dinnertime and the sky’s already black.
If it weren’t for the glowing bulbs overhead that throw our reflections back at us in the windowpane, we’d be able to see the star-sprinkled forest. Familiar music wafts from his phone.
Generationals. Our band. The song playing now is “Turning the Screw,” which I haven’t cued up lately because it reminds me of everything lovely that’s disappeared from our relationship.
It’s been a while since we’ve listened to their music together.
I wonder if he’s favorited this song before, or if he’s got it on a playlist. The thought of him listening to our band all by himself in recent times hurts my heart.
“Naomi.”
His voice is velvet. I don’t have to wonder if the choice of music is a coincidence, because I hear it in his deepened timbre. I see it in the feathering muscle in his cheek. I feel his atoms vibrating.
He looks sideways at me and my stomach drops. “Come here,” he says, extending a hand.
I walk over so slowly that he laughs. I marvel at the impossible softness of the sound, coming from him, directed at me; the quirk of his lips, the warm fire in his eyes.
When my hand slides into his, I’ve never been so aware of another person’s physicality.
All of my senses spike, picking out his details, the way he feels, smells, his body heat. He takes up the entire room.
Breathing becomes an effort.
The hand he doesn’t have laced through my fingers lightly grips my waist. The top of my head rests perfectly beneath his jaw, which makes leaning against his chest irresistible.
I didn’t think we were the kind of couple that danced in a kitchen in the middle of the woods, but it turns out that’s exactly the kind of couple we are.
Two months ago, we would have done something like this only if other people were watching. Putting on a show.
I never want this dance to end. He won’t let me press myself against him so that I can hide my face, gently tugging back every time I try to disappear.
He tilts my head up and gazes right on through me to what lies inside.
His eyes are bluer than a lake and they’re gleaming with happiness.
It dawns on me that I haven’t seen him genuinely happy in forever.
I’ve been so concentrated on my own unhappiness that I haven’t noticed his.
I’ve been fooling myself by thinking he’s been content all along.
How arrogant, to assume he was content with me when I so obviously wasn’t content with him.
Our past is a string of disconnected memories I can teleport across.
All of the golden, feel-good, light-as-air memories have been going dark, which has allowed the bitter poison ones to dominate the spotlight.
But when Nicholas stares into my eyes like this, a few of those positive memories twinkle back to life and take the stage.
When his palm slides over my cheek, fingers disappearing into my hair, it cauterizes a wound on my heart that’s been festering untended.