But by the time I’m walking down the hall with the door of 2A in sight, a switch flips and the slow simmer of anger begins.
When I knock, louder than I intended, the anger is a steady, rolling boil.
Alice answers, draped in an oversized gray sweatshirt over the infamous blue and white striped boxers.
Before she can say anything, I barge in conversationally, “I lied, Alice.” It’s poorly executed and rushed, lacking in context and grace, because I’m seething as I watch Taber walk out of one of the bedrooms in his underwear with his sights set on the kitchen. He looks like he just woke up. So does Alice.
“Toby?” she asks sleepily.
“There was no freezer, I lied,” I divulge, more softly than I thought my anger would allow. But as I watch Taber pour himself a glass of orange juice through the kitchen doorway, I can’t contain the rage, and everything starts to blur and tilt on its axis. Etiquette, rules, right, wrong—it all flies out the goddamn window.
Alice asks, “Why?” She sounds hurt like she did last night.
I say, “Excuse me,” and squeeze past her into the apartment; my body in control and my mind unable to stop it, I head for Taber.
Who, conveniently, is heading for me.
Three things happen at once to stir this shitstorm up into a monumental clusterfuck.
Taber says, “Hey, Toby. How’s it going?” without a care in the world.
A surge of rage-fueled adrenaline drives my knuckles into his face.
And a white blonde head pokes out from Taber’s bedroom and asks, “Where are your clean towels, babe?”
The trio of simultaneous events feels like a concussive joke. That I’m the butt of.
The pause to process what just happened should be longer, more dramatic, but it’s not. There’s an immediate rapid-fire succession of questions, one followed up by another so quickly that answers have to wait until they’re all out in the open to sort through and prioritize.
Taber folds in half, holding his cheek in stunned surprise. “Son of a bitch. What the hell, man?” I’d expect to hear fury from him, but it sounds, oddly, like this has happened before.
“Are you okay?” The pale blonde runs to him, while tossing deadly daggers at me with her murderous eyes.
“Who are you?” I ask the blonde.
And somewhere behind us, in a voice that’s controlled and practiced in chaos, Alice demands, “Somebody tell me what’s going on.” She needs a play-by-play to catch up.
The answers flood in out of order. Or maybe they only sound out of order because I’ve lost my mind. I’ve never punched anyone in my life and my knuckles are throbbing.
“I punched Taber because he’s cheating on you.”
“I’m fine. Nothing’s broken.”
“I’m Taber’s girlfriend.”
Followed by a fresh speed round of questions:
“Cheating onwho?”
“Your nose isbleeding, are yousure?”
“Taber’sgirlfriend?”
Alice is still quiet, I’m sure this is a lot to process when you can’t see the debacle.
More tumbling answers to the previous questions:
“Alice.”
