Page 117 of Just (Fake) Married
Eli: I’ll be home. Maybe the fall.
Seth: Holy fucking shit, he lives!
Eli has left the group chat.
Something was off.We were off. Harmony and I. I wasn’t sure when it happened exactly, but as the weather got warmer and the days ticked down to the festival, things between us got tense when we were alone in the house.
Except in the bedroom. Never in the bedroom.
Every night she knocked, every night I answered.
Last night, I’d been particularly…demanding? Harsh?
But it felt like she was trying to pull away from me and the more she pulled away the more I wanted from her.
“You can’t say no to this, can you?”
I’d asked, fucking her across the bed until she’d had to brace herself against the headboard.
“Kiss me.”
I’d had my hand under her head, cradling her skull in my palm. I’d bent down to take her mouth, but she’d turned her head at the last second.
“Kiss me!”
“No, fuck me!”
And I had. I’d teased her until she’d begged. Until I’d made her come until she flopped against the bed in total surrender.
It wasn’t enough anymore.
I wasn’t sure when I started to realize that, but it was fast becoming the only thing I could think about. How did this end? How did we end?
What if we didn’t end?
“Dr. McGraw? Did you hear me?”
I snapped my head out of my confusing love life, back into my very simple professional life. In front of me was an anxious mother and a four-year-old who’d stuck a dried chickpea up hernose. I wore my glasses so I could attempt to get a clearer view up the little girl’s nose.
“Yes,” I said. “Sorry, just thinking how to best get this bean out of your daughter’s nose.”
Bullshit, I was thinking about the way I felt compelled to fuck Harmony like I was punishing her for attempting to keep up boundaries between us.
When really it was the smart thing to do for both of us.
I snapped on plastic gloves and tried a pair of hemostatic tweezers. But, that only made the chickpea, reconstituted by the little girl’s tears and snot, spin around in her nostril.
She wailed, her little face going pink, and it tugged at my heart that I couldn’t save her from this situation more quickly.
I used my straight wasp needles. But all that did was push it up her nose.
“Honey,” I said, looking her right in her red, teary eyes. “Breathe with me, okay? In through the mouth, out through the nose.”
We took a couple of long, slow breaths like this until she wasn’t crying anymore. Her serious eyes were locked on mine. They said quite unequivocally:
Solve this.
“Okay, this time, when you blow out, I want you to blow as hard as you can. See if you can just get snot all over the place.”
