We smile at each other like we’re two lovesick idiots. Well, one of us definitely is.
“Should we have our lunch here?”
“We have lunch?” She seems surprised.
I take off my backpack and gesture towards a flat slab of stone. “We have two sandwiches, a bag of potato chips, baby carrots, some more water, and two apples.”
“Thanks,” she says as I hand her a sandwich.
Marissa closes her eyes and turns her face to the sun as she chews.
“I have to admit that this is better than spiraling in my room,” she tells me.
“You’re welcome,” I reply casually, and she slaps my arm.
There is a new side to her in this moment, an unburdened quality that I haven’t had the chance to see before.
I briefly wonder what she was like when she was younger, before the tasks of adult life and motherhood.
Something tells me that she never had much freedom to just... be.
Chapter 21
Slim
Using the ungodly volume of the stereo playing “Ace of Spades” as a guide, I find Rebel sitting cross-legged on the couch downstairs, applying her makeup. She’s wearing one of my T-shirts and nothing else.
Normally, I’d be hypnotized by the steady, skilled strokes of the brush and how it transforms all of her features to somehow become more, but my eyeballs are pulsing painfully, and my mouth tastes like pickled vomit.
I’m hungover and irritable as fuck.
Sometimes it feels like I’ve been irritable ever since reading those damn emails. I’ve been having a hard time letting go of the burning anger I’ve been carrying around these past few weeks after seeing Marissa's side of our arguments.
It was jarring to get such an unfiltered window into her inner world. Who was the woman writing those? Smart and funny, and yet so soft and vulnerable. Why had she never talked to me like that?
I must have reread them a hundred times before forcing myself to log out of her account for my own sanity.
I grab a few of the takeout containers from last night off the coffee table and use my foot to shove them into the already overflowing trash can with more force than necessary.
“What’s crawled up your ass this morning?” My wife asks me as she turns her face left and right to examine the symmetry of her eyeliner in the little handheld mirror.
Her eyes are striking. The light from the window has caused her pupils to constrict, and the blue has taken over almost completely.
She could have been the queen of a drug empire, but instead, she chose to be here, with me. I take a deep, satisfied breath.
“How the fuck are you not hungover?” I clearly remember her knocking back as many drinks as Prez and I last night.
She winks at herself in the mirror. “I have a higher tolerance. Catch up, will ya?”
I stretch and rub my stomach absentmindedly. I have slowed down with the drinking in the last few years, that’s true.
“Did you have any breakfast?”
“Not yet, I’m still drinking my coffee,” she says as she points to the pile of her makeup on the couch cushion, where I detect a precariously positioned mug.
“Any left for me?”
“Nope. I made instant. Didn’t feel like brewing the whole thing.”
