Uh-oh. That sounds familiar. “What happened to her?”
I cross my fingers that the answer won’t be She’s serving a lifetime sentence at a nearby correctional facility for shaving off his hair while he was sleeping and tattooing “I’m a bad person” on his scalp. And yet, what UPS guy ends up saying is ten times more disturbing.
“They’re getting married next June.” He shakes his head and turns around with a wave of his hand. “Go figure.”
* * *
I’m dreaming of a concert—a bad one.
More noise than music, really. The kind of ’70s German electronic crap that Liam owns in vinyl form and will sometimes play when one of his friends comes over to play first-person shooter video games. It’s loud and obnoxious and irritating, and it goes on for what feels like hours. Until I wake up and realize three things:
First, I have a horrible headache.
Second, it’s the middle of the night.
Third, the noise-music is actually just regular noise, and it’s coming from downstairs.
Burglars, I think. They broke in. They’re not even trying to be quiet—they probably have weapons.
I have to get out. Call 911. I have to warn Liam and make sure that he—
I sit up with a frown. “Liam.” But of course.
I fling myself out of bed and stomp out of my room. I’m halfway down the stairs when it occurs to me: my curls are all over the place, I’m not wearing a bra, and my shorts were already too small fifteen years ago, when my middle school issued them free of charge as part of my lacrosse uniform. Well. Too bad. Liam’s going to have to deal with it, and with my “There Is No Planet B” T-shirt. It might teach him something.
By the time I reach the kitchen, I am considering one-clicking on a bullhorn to sneak up on him while he’s asleep every night for the next six months. “Liam, do you know what time it is?” I erupt. “What are you even . . .”
I’m not sure what I expected. Definitely not to find the contents of the fridge cluttering every inch of the counter; definitely not to see Liam intent on slaughtering a stalk of celery like it stole his parking spot; definitely not to see him naked, very naked, from the waist up. The plaid pajama bottoms he’s wearing have a low waist.
Very low.
“Could you please put something on? Like a baby-seal fur coat or something?”
He doesn’t stop chopping his celery. Doesn’t look up at me. “No.”
“No?”
“I’m not cold. And I live here.”
I live here, too. And I have every right not to look at that brick wall he calls a chest in my own kitchen, which is supposed to be a soothing environment where I can digest food without having to stare at random male nipples. Still, I decide to let the matter go and push it to the back of my mind. By the time I’m ready to move out, I’m going to need therapy, anyway. What’s one more trauma to deal with? Right now, I just want to go back to sleep. “What are you doing?” I ask.
“My tax return.”
I blink. “I—what?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
I stiffen. “I don’t know what it looks like, but it sounds like you’re just banging pans together.”
“The noise is an unfortunate by-product of me making dinner.” He must be done with the celery, because he moves to slicing a tomato—is that my tomato?—and back to ignoring me.
“Oh, and that’s totally normal, isn’t it? Cooking a five-course meal at one twenty-seven in the morning on a weeknight?”
Liam finally lifts his eyes to mine, and there is something unsettling about his gaze. He seems calm. He looks calm, but I know he’s not. He is furious, I tell myself. He is really, really furious. Get out of here. “Did you need anything?” His tone is deceptively polite, and my self-preservation is clearly still asleep in bed.
“Yes. I need you to keep it down. And that better not be my tomato.”
He pops half of it in his mouth. “You know,” he says evenly while chewing, managing to talk with his mouth full and yet still look like the aristocratic product of several generations of wealth, “I’m usually not in the habit of being awake at one twenty-eight in the morning.”
“What a coincidence. Neither was I, before meeting you.”
“But today—that is, yesterday—the entire legal team I run ended up having to work past midnight. Because of some very important missing documents.”
I tense. He cannot mean—
“Don’t worry, the documents were found. Eventually. After my boss tore me and my team a new one. Sounds like something went wrong when they were delivered.” If he could incinerate people with eye lasers, I’d be long cremated. Clearly he knows everything about my little afternoon spite-attack.
“Listen.” I take a deep breath. “It wasn’t my proudest moment, but I’m not your PA. And I don’t see how it justifies you banging all the pots in the house in the middle of the night. I have a long day tomorrow, so—”
“So do I. And as you can imagine, I’ve had a long day today. And I’m hungry. Which means that I’m not going to keep it down. At least not until I’ve had dinner.”
Until about ten seconds ago I was angry in a cool, reasonable way. All of a sudden, I am ready to wrestle the knife out of Liam’s hand and slice his jugular. Just a tiny bit. Just to make him bleed. I won’t, because I don’t think I’d flourish in jail, but I’m also not going to let this go. I’ve tried to have measured responses when he refused to let me install solar panels, when he threw away my broccoli stir-fry because it smelled “swampy,” when he locked me out of the house while I was on my run. But this is the final straw. I’m done. The back of my camel is broken in two. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Liam pours olive oil in a pan, cracks an egg in it, and seems to revert to his default state: forgetting that I exist.
“Liam, whether you like it or not, I. Live. Here. You can’t do whatever the hell you want!”
“Interesting. You seem to be doing exactly that.”
“What are you talking about? You are making an omelet at two in the damn morning, and I am asking you not to.”
“True. Although there is the fact that if you had done your dishes this week I wouldn’t need to wash them so noisily—”
“Oh, shut up. It’s not like you don’t leave your stuff around the house all the time.”
“At least I don’t stack garbage on top of the trash can like it’s a Dadaist sculpture.”
The sound that comes out of my mouth—it almost scares me. “God. You are impossible to have around!”
“That’s just too bad, since I’m here.”
“Then just move the fuck out!”
Silence falls. An absolute, heavy, very uncomfortable silence. Just what we both need to replay my words over and over in our heads. Then Liam speaks. Slowly. Carefully. Angry in a scary, icy way. “Excuse me?”
I regret it immediately. What I said and how I said it. Loud. Vehement. I am many things, but cruel is not one of them. It doesn’t matter that Liam Harding has displayed the emotional range of a walnut; I said something hurtful and I owe him an apology. Not that I particularly want to offer him one, but I should. The problem is, I just can’t stop myself from continuing. “Why are you even here, Liam? People like you live in mansions with uncomfortable beige furniture and seven bathrooms and overpriced art they don’t understand.”