I winced again, for two reasons. “Buddy, I don’t really get on your case about your language, but you might wanna scale down the fucks. Okay?”
He rolled his eyes. “All right.”
“I’ll talk to him,” I added reluctantly. “We have to sit down and discuss our plans for the summer anyway.”
He looked at me strangely. “Are we really doing another road trip together? Won’t that be weird?”
It would be more than weird—and uncomfortable and painful and… Whatever. “Mikey’s already struggling with my ‘working late’ so much now. We don’t want to tell him anything yet.”
Just yesterday, I’d come over to the house to see him crying in the kitchen window. He’d been waiting for me to show up.
It killed me.
Weekends were the worst, because I had to be around Nate more than I could handle. I showed up at a little before seven in the morning with bagels and resignation, and I changed into sweats and a tee in the bathroom under the stairs. Mikey and Lily would be up soon, and so would Nate.
I put on a fresh pot of coffee and tidied up in the kitchen. Not that there was much to tidy up. I just didn’t know what else to do. I hated this house nowadays. I hated the kitchen table. All the memories of fun mornings with the family had been tainted by the unraveling of my marriage, when Nate and I had sat there and he’d presented his “list of demands.”
Once the coffee was done, I poured a cup and wandered into the living room.
I took a slow sip and peered out on the patio.
Nate had shared his dream about having a house with a big backyard so many times that it’d become my fantasy too. Not this narrow duplex where everything was falling apart.
Okay, that was a stretch, but a lot still needed to get done before Nathan could sell.
It wasn’t long before I heard Nate coming down the stairs, and I glanced over toward the hallway and felt my eyebrows crawl up.
What the fresh fuck?
He tightened the drawstrings of his sweats, and all I saw were abs. I hadn’t seen those in well over ten years.
Jesus Christ.
“Good morning,” he said sleepily, disappearing into the kitchen.
Fucking kill me already. Like I wasn’t missing him enough as it was?
I hoped he’d slept like shit, ’cause that’s what I did every goddamn night.
It’d gotten so bad that I’d become the happy owner of a Xanax prescription.
Nate soon joined me, and he flicked on some lights along the way. He turned on the TV too, going straight for the cartoons Mikey and Lily liked.
“When the fuck did that happen?” I gestured at his torso.
“Huh?” He frowned and glanced down at himself. “Oh. I don’t know. I…needed a physical outlet, I suppose.”
He’d found it.
“Sexually frustrated or just pissed at your ex?”
He snorted. “Well, I’m not sexually frustrated. I’m pretty sure that part of me is dead.”
Good. That made two of us.
Well…
I could fuck him 365 days out of the year, but the thought of moving on with someone else made me wanna hurl.
