“I don’t know, but since you fucking hit me, can you answer my question?”
I instantly stopped feeling bad for him. “Don’t talk to me that way. Now I need to shower. If you really have something to discuss, you can wait for me out here.”
I didn’t think he’d do it, so I took my time, soaped up twice, washed my hair, used conditioner. I emerged a good while later with a towel wrapped around me, and there was Jack, sitting in the hallway, arms crossed, legs outstretched, looking like a sulky child.
“You done yet?” he asked impatiently.
“No.”
I went to get my pajamas and shut myself up in the bathroom again. I took my time on purpose, getting dressed, putting on my glasses, combing my hair. Then I came out. He was in the same position but looked even angrier than before.
“Are you finally finished?”
I didn’t answer. Instead I walked past him toward the kitchen and saw that in the living room, everybody had stayed where they were sitting. They were staring at me attentively. I walked to the fridge and grabbed a beer, but Jack, who had followed me, took it from my hand and slammed it on the counter.
When I protested, he told me he had done his part and waited, and now I had to talk to him.
“Has it occurred to you that maybe I don’t feel like it?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. He was hung up on that worddate. He wanted to know who I had one with and when. I tried to dance around the subject, not because there was someone else, but because it was my right to live my own life, especially given how he was treating me. At one point, Will burst in and the two of us snapped at him, and he said, “You’re both basically screaming at each other. The neighbors can even hear you.”
“Screw the neighbors,” Jack said.
“Ross!” Naya butted in. “It’s not a date. She’s just going to hang out with a guy from her class.”
“Oh, just a guy from class?” he said sarcastically.
“Yeah,” I shot back. “Is there a problem with it?”
“Do you like him?” Jack asked. Of course that was what he wanted to know. I hesitated. I didn’t like Curtis. He was a friend, that was all. I wondered whether I should tell Jack that, but before I had the chance to, he had to get a dig in at me. “Are you going to tell him you love him too and then disappear for a year?”
Here we go. I was surprised it had taken him that long to get around to it. I looked away, ashamed, as he leaned in close. My fingers were tingling, and I clenched my fists.
He added, “Or are you just going to fuck him so you’ll have a new place to live?”
“Ross, take that back!” Naya called out.
Looking at him, seeing how anxiously he was waiting for a response, I could tell what he wanted was for me to lose my cool. Maybe that’s what I wanted, too, because all the concern I’d felt the night before, all my hopes that we could get along, had gone out the window. Our noses were practically touching, and I could see his dilated pupils and his bloodshot eyes. Everything about him made me angry. Without thinking, I told him, “You’re a pig.”
The whole thing was so weird. I almost wanted to punch him in the face. At the same time, having him so close did something to me. I was leaning against the counter then, and he reached around me, one hand on either side of my hips. “A pig?” he said. “Well, at least I’m not a liar.”
“When the hell did I lie to you?” I asked. We were talking softer now, soft enough that our friends in the living room couldn’t hear us, not that I cared. I could feel my hands slightly grazing his. I had to arch my back to keep away from him as I played the last card up my sleeve: “If you hate me so much, I wonder why you’re so jealous.”
“Fuck your date,” he said. “I couldn’t care less. I just thought somebody should warn the poor guy.”
Those words broke the spell, and realizing I was letting Jack push me around and intimidate me, I shoved him with both hands in the middle of his chest, surprising him. “Warn him of what?”
“Of who you really are!”
“Oh sure! Like you’re some saint!”
It was at that moment that Mike opened the door and walked in with a smile, shouting, “Hey, everyone!”
Jack and I went on arguing. This was the same guy who had confessed over beers one night to sleeping with God knew how many women, and he was seriously freaking out because I was friends with another guy? He kept saying that was different, that was the past, and so on, and I called him a creep, asking, “What kind of guy barges into the bathroom when someone’s taking a shower?”
I could see Sue across the counter motioning for Mike to join her on the couch. “This is the best view,” she said. Not wanting to be a spectacle, I grabbed my beer, getting ready to go to the bedroom, but Jack snatched it away and held it up in the air over my head. I told him to quit acting like a child. “You’re the child,” he said. And I jumped up in the air as best I could before finally giving up and telling him, “Fuck you.”
I had admitted defeat and wouldn’t have my drink, but at least I’d gotten under his skin, and that gave me some consolation. I walked past him and sat in the living room next to Mike, crossing my arms and legs. Jack followed me soon after, and I felt the sofa sinking as he grunted, “Move.”
