To him, I’m a thoughtless slacker who doesn’t have enough ambitions to start with, and when Idoget an ambition under my skin, I lowball myself to take the sting out of the unavoidable letdown.Underachieving.It’s a mortal sin for a Rose and the root of all my problems. I’m sure they whisper it behind my back.
What he doesn’t know is that I do try, and then hide my failures. It’s one of the reasons why I can’t completely hate him when he makes digs about my not going to college: He doesn’t know I ever tried getting in. He wasn’t there when I shredded the rejection letters, proof that my parents were right and I should have focused more on studying than passing notes in class.
This was before I steeled myself and changed my attitude with the only coping mechanism available. Who wants a degree, anyway? Not me. I’m glad I didn’t go. Look at all these suckers with student loans, in debt up to their eyeballs and no one’s even hiring.
“Give me that!” I scream, kicking him in the back of the knee.
He holds the phone out of my reach. I hate it when he does that, using his height advantage against me. “I’m going to borrow it until I can get a new one. It’s only fair.”
“Give it back!” I jump up, grabbing ineffectively. “That’s mine!”
His mouth purses, suspicious eyes calculating my flushed face and high-pitched voice. “Why are you so scared to let me see your phone?”
“I’m not scared.” He hears the lie, I’m sure of it. “Give it back.” I scrabble desperately, but it’s no use. He’s too tall and I’m trapped in some sort of Benjamin Button cycle—I feel myself getting shorter with every jump. “I mean it, Nicholas. I’m sorry your screen got cracked. I’ll get you a new phone. I’m sorry, okay? Just give it back.”
His expression turns downright lethal. This close up, I see my own terrified face imprinted on each of his pupils, two black mirrors. I see what he’s seeing, and I know what this looks like.
“You just get a message from someone?” His voice is silky. The tip of it is so sharp, it could nick your artery without pressing.
“No. Why would you say that? Give me my phone.” I hold out my palm expectantly and infuse as much authority into the command as possible. “Now.”
His nostrils flare. “It’shim, isn’t it?”
“Who? What are you talking about?” I shake my head, snapping, “Hand it over! I’m serious. This is my personal property and keeping it from me is illegal.”
Nicholas’s gaze slides to my phone and his thumb moves, as if to tap the screen and bring my notifications to light. I freak out way more than the occasion calls for and next thing I know, I’m hanging off his back. My arms are around his neck, which gets me closer to my target, but he’s squirming to get me off. “Give it!” I shriek. “It’s mine!” I lose all sense of which words are coming out of my mouth and which ones are nonverbally exploding in my frantic brain. “Do what I say, or else!”
Nicholas backs up against a wall. He doesn’t do it softly, either. I yank his hair and he spins, falling backward onto the couch. It’s a move he shouldn’t have made, because I lock my arms and legs around him with an iron grip and he’s now a turtle on his back. I expend a burst of precious energy launching him off the couch, facedown on the floor, and revel in my moment of triumph before he starts fighting back.
“Get off!” He rolls us, but I’m scrappy and I’ve been storing up my energy all day with bonbons andReal Housewives. He’s stressed. His mother has called his office fifty times. I’ve got an edge on him.
I’m straddling him now and I’ve got my hands on his throat. “Give me my phone!”
He throws my phone at the armchair across the room. I consider diving for it but my elbow still hurts from where he squished me against the wall, so I pull his shirt up over his face like a fifth-grade bully and pinch his nipples. Nicholas shouts.
Eyes obscured, he fights for use of his arms and smacks his own glasses askew when I yank his shirt back down. “Lie still!” I command. “I deserve to win this.”
“You deserve tapeworms.” His face is red and he’s struggling more than he’d like to admit. I feel a rush of power to know that I’m actually a decent foe here.
“You bumped me into the wall on purpose.”
“I did not, you little goblin.” I bounce up and down, which makes him wince. “You’re not a goblin, actually. You’re a changeling. You’ve taken over the body of that nice girl I met.”
“Her name was Naomi, wasn’t it?” I say, tilting my head. “Too bad for her.”
“Yes. Too bad for us both.”
“You’ll never see her again.” I shift for better purchase on his squirming lap, and a jolt of surprise electrifies me when I discover he’s hard.
All the air punches from my lungs as I burst out laughing. “Oh my god,why?”
His cheekbones burn. “Your top is low and you’re writhing all over me. What do you expect?”
I expect him to be single-minded in his quest to end me, is what I expect. I’m amazed by man’s ability to think about vengeance and penis contact at the same time. What I’ve been regarding as a savage WrestleMania showdown has been more like foreplay for Nicholas. I should have known. Men are trash.
The harder I laugh, the more I unintentionally rub on him, and the further into darkness his eyes slip. He’s incredibly turned on and absolutely furious about it. At this moment, I have more control over his body than he does. The delicious power trip goes straight to my head.
His hands shoot out and catch me in the ribs. I have approximately one second to wonder if he’s going to kiss me or kill me when he draws a wild card and starts tickling me. My hands are still around his throat, but when he tickles all my weak spots it’s like pressing an eject button. I flop over onto my side, flailing uncontrollably.
