Page 18 of The Auction
“We’ve been living in this house alone together for over a week. You could have tried to get to know me.”
“Fuck you,” I said.
“You have freedom you didn’t have before. You have space you didn’t have before. You have someone who can do twice the amount of labor around this place, you didn’t have before. You have access to money to improve the quality of life you didn’t have before. All you have to do is ask for what you want. If you’re too dense to see that, I can’t help you.”
Instantly, his arms released me and I flew off his lap. I turned to face him and watched as he casually folded those beefy arms over his chest and looked at me with his stupid, ugly face like I was the unreasonable person in this situation.
“I don’t want to know you. You are nothing but a bad dream to me, and at some point, I will wake up.”
“Okay, well, if you’re going to be a bitch about it, can we go back to the silent treatment? I liked that version of you better. Nice to look at without much to say.”
I clamped my lips shut rather than retaliate. Because I knew he’d said that last thing to get a rise out of me.
This man, thisusurper, was like a fucking brick wall.
Unmovable. Impenetrable. Impossible.
With one final stomp of my Keds on the hardwood floor, I left the living room and went out to the truck to bring in the groceries. Angrily putting shit away into cabinets without seeing what I was doing.
I stopped when I felt his presence enter the kitchen.
“I’m probably poking a tiger, but figured I’d try anyway. When you shop, can you get Hellman’s instead of Miracle Whip? I hate that shit.”
Miracle Whip was my father’s choice. I hated that shit, too. I poked through the grocery bags and found what I was looking for. I pulled out a large jar of Miracle Whip and showed it to him.
“You mean this?”
“Yeah. Hellman’s is better.”
Then I did what any sane person would do in my situation, I threw the jar with all my strength directly at his head. He must have sensed it was coming, because with an easy move he sidestepped the jar and it broke against the wall behind him.
We both watched a trail of Miracle Whip drip down the kitchen wall to the linoleum floor.
“Glad we agree,” he said. “Your mess, you clean it.”
He left and I leaned back against the counter.
Instantly, I understood the error of my ways.
I’d opened our war with the silent treatment. Clearly, as a weapon, not nearly powerful enough. While it made things awkward, it wasn’t disruptive enough.
He needed to feel uncomfortable in this house. Uncertain.
He didn’t like Miracle Whip.
Okay, what else didn’t he like?
“What the fuck?!”
The shout came from the kitchen.
Meanwhile, I was tucked away in my bedroom snickering in silence.
After Creed had moved all of his shit into my father’s bedroom, (I would never think of it as Creed’s), I moved all my shit back into the upstairs bedroom, despite the fact that it was the smaller of the two empty rooms.
I wanted to be as far away from him as possible and this way we each had our own bathroom, so there was no chance of us running into each other unclothed.
It had been my turn to make dinner. Any time I butchered chicken, I would remove the liver and then freeze it with the other saved livers. Chicken liver in small doses could add a lot of flavor to stocks or stews.
