Page 80 of The Auction
“Please, if I smell Angie’s lingering perfume on these sheets, I will vomit. On your side,” I replied.
I crawled into the bed and tucked myself into the smallest ball I could make of myself.
He laid back down, too.
“Don’t try to touch me, I’m still mad at you,” I reminded him.
“You don’t try to touch me,” he said back, and I could feel him twisting in the covers away from me.
A few minutes later I could hear him softly snoring and I felt myself drift off to sleep.
TWENTY
JULIETTE
“What the hell is this?”
I glanced up from my spot on the couch where I was having my morning cup of coffee, to see Creed standing in the hallway entry to the living room holding up a blue box of light days maxi pads.
We’d settled into a relatively peaceful pattern over the last few days. He still made coffee in the morning, but he didn’t hand me my mug with a kiss anymore. When I cooked, I still made sure dinner was on the table at six, but I didn’t wait for him to start eating.
No more make out sessions. Hard stop on that.
And I started spending my early morning hours sitting on our new massive couch, enjoying my first coffee of the day.
He could have it in the evenings when we were watching TV.
Yes, I was still going to his room every night because it felt like if we were going to put this thing back together that’s where we were going to need to start. So this morning,I’d made the final commitment to move the rest of my stuff into his space.
“Wow. I wouldn’t think a man of your age…okay, well, biologically speaking, every month a woman’s inner uterine lining evacuates the body through her vagina.”
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered.
“But to hear Herb tell it, the ill humors and emotional instability of a woman are expelled by the force of the moon to restore order to the soul. Something like that. Imagine my teenage Google search results of what I needed to do to protect my panties against my monthly ill humors.”
“Don’t make me laugh, Jules. Why is this in my bathroom?”
“I think you mean our bathroom,” I corrected him, and watched his face grimace. “Oh, no, you lobbied for weeks and weeks to get me to move into your bedroom. No take-backsies even if you are still mad at me.”
“Why now?”
“Because I didn’t leave once you fixed my truck. And if I didn’t do that, there had to be a reason. So we’re in it now.”
“In what?” he pressed.
I considered that. “An exploration of a committed partnership wherein both parties are mutually emotionally, sexually and financially satisfied?”
“Fuck me, Jules,” he huffed. “You’re so fucking stubborn.”
“You married me,” I reminded him.
“I’m serious. What the fuck are we doing?”
I sat up and put my mug down on the coffee table. “You can’t ask me to commit my whole life. Not like this. I get how this all seems so simple for you. Wife. Farm. Future. But it’s not the same for me, because I didn’t have a choice.”
“You showed up at the courtroom,” he said. “You had a choice.”
“Not a real one. Do you know what happens to broke twenty-somethings out there in the cruel, cruel world?”
