“I saved money, Teal.”
Like that explains it. He’d have tomakethis kind of money to save it first, and I know for a fact that he spent many years using his paychecks to help with his mother’s, and later his sisters’, bills.
When he sees the look on my face, he adds, “You know Abraham Arellano? He’s really good at investing. He can turn a dollar into a fortune.” Carter shrugs. “He helped me a few years back, when Mami needed me to cover rent…the mentoring sort of all turned into this.” He lifts his hands and sighs, like this conversation is boring the shit out of him. “Come on, I’ll give you the tour.” His tone is flat, like he would rather be eating a bowl of nails, and it’s also dismissive. This conversation is over. Time to move on and see where I’ll be sleeping for the next year.
I fold my arms over my stomach and clench my own jaw as he points. “Living room, kitchen.” He leads me down a hallway next to the kitchen. “Workout room, bathroom, bedroom.” He moves fast, too fast for me to really see anything. Still, one detail about this house doesn’t escape me, and soon it may as well be a flashing red sign in my head.
“Carter. Why is there only one bed?”
He sighs and runs a hand over the stubble of his chin. He’s dressed really casual—gray sweatpants, an old shirt cut into a tank top, the arm holes so big I can see the sides of his chest and some of his abdomen. It’s working for me, unfortunately, so I force my gaze to the topic at hand—the bed. The onlyonebed.
“The living room couch turns into a pull-out. So if you’re really uncomfortable with—”
“With sharing a bed with my fake husband? Carter, I barely share beds with men I’m actually with.”
“You were with Johnny for six years. Didn’t you stay at his place all the time?”
“Well, yeah. But not in his bed.” Carter stares at me until I explain, “Johnny didn’t like how I looked first thing in the morning. I used to spend the night on his couch so I could wake up early and brush my hair and put on makeup.”
Carter’s fists clench and he closes his eyes briefly. “Please tell me that’s not true.”
I huff. Now he wants to act like he cares? “Fine. It’s a lie. I just lied my face off. Johnny used to love sharing the bed with me. He would just hold me all night. And I never woke up to him needing to have sex with me, whether I wanted to or not.”
Carter leans against the wall, his hands still fists. “Jesus. Teal. Is he still at that place on Broadway? I’m going to fucking go over there and—”
“Enough.” I can’t stand here and listen to Carter go all white knight on me, especially since he’s been treating me like shit in his own way since we got married. “I’ll sleep on the pull-out. Whatever.”
Carter pauses and then lets out a long sigh. “If that’s what you want.”
“If that’s whatIwant?” I can’t help but snap back. “I’mnot the one allergic to being in the same room as you, you know.”
Carter’s eyes widen in dismay. “What the hell are you talking about, Teal? I have no problem sharing a bed with you. You’re the one getting weird about it.”
“Hey. I don’t have any issues with bed sharing, or dancing, or having to touch and kiss each other for show. I’m perfectly fine with all kinds of affection! I’m Latina, for God’s sake!”
I don’t even realize I’m yelling until Carter raises his voice back to me. “Fine! So we’ll share the damn bed, then!”
“Fine!” I scream back. “We’ll sleep next to each other all night, every night.” I lower my voice. “But if you so much as wince in my direction if I accidentally get too close to you, I will move to the couch. And if you make a single comment about how my face looks in the morning, I will camp in your backyard. After carving upyourface with a syringe.”
He growls. Like, legit growls, and the hairs on my arms stand straight up, and not in an unpleasant way, either. “You can’t camp out there. There are rules about campfires.” He turns away, crossing his arms. “And how the hell do you carve someone’s face with a syringe, anyway?”
“Shut up.” The idiot’s trying not to laugh at me and he’s failing. I can tell by the way the side of his mouth is squished up like a dried apricot. Plus his shoulders are starting to shake. If I don’t leave now, I’m going to laugh next, and then he’ll think I’m not being serious about this. Not that I was serious about the syringe threat. I mean the whole rest of it. Because Iamserious. If Carter tells me any of the things Johnny ever did—how my lips were too dry to kiss, how awful I smelled everywhere, how my hair looked like it belonged to a homeless woman—I wouldn’t just sleep in the backyard, I’d legit move out there. Or back to Nadia’s. Whichever was more convenient at the time.
So I do the only thing I can think of. I grab my shoes and run.
13
Carter and I survive thatfirst night in his bed with me lining up pillows between us like a tall, squishy wall of fortification. No matter what Carter says, I know he doesn’t like to get close to me. Whether that’s out of fear, disgust, or straight-up hatred, or some combination of the three, that’s beyond me. Just, at this point, the last thing my self-esteem needs is my husband, fake or not, dry-heaving after I accidentally touch his calf with my foot.
In the morning, he gives me a Publix gift card and asks if I’d please have dinner ready when he gets home. My immediate first reaction is to laugh in his face. What am I, his fifties housewife now? Should I curl my hair and put on pearls and high heels, too? But then I realize that really, now that we’re married, he’s kind of got all the power here. This is his house. This whole thing is his agreement. And until I get a job, I’m kind of beholden to all that crap. So Ihmmin agreement, and he makes a face at me like he doesn’t believe I’ll do what he asks—I mean, come on, it’s dinner, not a request to build him a life-sized, functional sandcastle—which just makes me want to not only cook his dinner but put my whole-ass foot in it, too.
After I grab ingredients, I spend my day halfheartedly looking for jobs. It’s not that I don’t want a job. It’s that the whole process of filling out applications, writing cover letters, and sending résumés, in the hopes that some asshole will pluck it out of an enormous digital pile of other people’s paperwork and offer me an interview—the whole thing makes me kind of want to smash my head out the nearest window and scream.
I unpack my things, which doesn’t take all that long, and after that, I’m having a facedown with a crumpled piece of paper I’d placed in front of me at the kitchen table.
New Year’s Resolutions for Teal Flores
