“I…s-swear I wasn’t trying to kill youorburn down your house.”
She suddenly rushes off, but she only goes to the cleaning closet in the kitchen and basically thrusts a bottle at me.
“This is what I used,” she murmurs.
I glance down at the thing. The wordsclean, shine,andpolishstand out alongsidebright, restore,andsparkle,but so do the wordswoodandfurniture.
“Yeah…that’s furniture wax,” I tell her softly, though I almost don’t have the heart to do it.
Her wail of straight despair makes me wish I’d kept my mouth shut.
I close the gap between me and the stove instead. I’m going to have to throw out both the frying pan and the pot, but the water on the floor and the mess on the stove can be scrubbed up.
“Hey, it’s alright. The kitchen didn’t burn down, the stove is fine, the food can be replaced, and a fall is nothing major. Everything is fine,” I soothe. Or rather try to.
“It’s not fine!” she sob-screams.
“It really is all good.”
“Not until I clean up this mess, it’s not! You shouldn’t have to come home to this. Oh my god, I’m so, so stupid. Everyone always said so, and it’s true. Who uses furniture wax on a shower? Only someone with two brain cells would be that dumb.”
There’s beating yourself up in the heat of the moment, and then there’s whatever Amalphia is doing right now. Whatever is bubbling up feels like a long, ingrained nastiness that’s been festering for years.
And I don’t like it.
I don’t like it one fucking bit.
Is it wrong that I want to hunt down anyone and everyone who has ever made her feel like the things she just said are true and then turn my man cave into a real dungeon?
Okay, yeah, it’s wrong, but the intrusive thoughts infiltrate my brain and refuse to let up. I won’t kill anyone. I’ll just lock them down in what is actually a very nice, finished spot of the house and force them to watch really bad movies on rerun while making them eat overripe bananas. Is there anything worse? Wait, liver. Brussel sprouts. The weird tinned fish that’s not tuna or salmon.
I shove all that aside and do the one thing I can think of doing in order to stop the meltdown that’s in full swing.
I might not even know what I’m doing. I might be bad at it. I might have thought I had zero space in my life for letting someone in, but here I am, closing the distance between me and Amalphia and wrapping my arms around her. I draw her into my body. Soft presses against hard, and just like the first time we hugged, one of us is stiff.
Fuck, I mean…
I mean, she’s the rigid one this time.
She’s the one who doesn’t know what to do.
But then, slowly, as the seconds tick by, her sobs turn into hiccups, and she melts against me. My chest feels like I’ve been rammed by an angry porcupine, the quills digging into all my soft spots. I want to bend my head and brush my lips over the crown of her head, inhale against those soft-looking curls, and see if she still smells like green tea. I can’t really tell, what with the smell of furniture polish and burned meat in my nose.
All I can think of before my brain short circuits is that maybe this was a bad idea. A very, very bad idea because I’m losing it here, and it doesn’t feel like a bad thing the way it should.
She’s the one who pulls away and stumbles back. Her face is pink, but I don’t know if it’s due to proximity or the force of all that hard crying.
She gives me a brave but watery smile. “Let me clean this up properly.”
“I’ll help.”
“No way. It’s my job. You just sit tight while I fix everything. I know you might be sitting for a while, but I’ll take care of it. I’ll degrease your bathroom and—”
“I’ll order us something to eat. Do you like stir fry?”
She swipes at her eyes and sniffles. “Are you, sir, implying that I’m a monster? Who doesn’t like stir fry? The baby corns are the best!”
Oof. Gag. But also, how literally perfect is it to find someone who will eat the dreaded tiny baby corns to save you from having to waste them? Usually, I just ask for the meal without, but not tonight.
