She had never participated in a more excruciating conversation. They didn’t know how to fight with each other. Because they never really did. They exchanged pissy remarks now and again, sure. And there had been relationship calibration type things when they first moved in together: Corbin needed to learn to put the lid down on the toilet seat. (She’d framed it in the form of a logic question: “It’s a lid, Corbin. When things have lids, typically you put them back after you use them, right? You know, like jam and shampoo.”) For some reason she never closed cupboards all the way; it maddened him. So she’d learned to do it.
“It’s not the same, is it?” Corbin was struggling with words that weren’t glib, and that’s when she realized the two of them just didn’t have a vocabulary for this disaster. “Wanking to porn. We’re both so busy. We only ever talk about work lately. I felt like... we were growing apart. I waslonely.”
And that faintly bewildered yet entitled tone in which he issued the wordlonely... that summed Corbin up right there. It was somehow inconceivable to him that any need he had wouldn’t be comfortably met.
“Lonely? We saw each other every freaking day!”
“But we were both just so busy... it was all work. We’d just fall into bed at night and get up and do it again. I was lonely and I have my needs, for God’s sake. I just—”
She closed her eyes. “OH MY GOD. Corbin. STOP. Just STOP. STOP. Saying. Stupid. Things. STOP.”
The tone made him wary, clearly, because he did shut up for a second or two.
“And by stupid, could you be more spec—”
“Your stupid answer to my question and stupid to useourbed and stupid, stupid,stupidto do our intern. Stupid and boring and careless—and—and—lazy! It’s like that time you just stood there in front of the refrigerator and ate three pickles out of the jar because you couldn’t be bothered to peel back the plastic on one of the Lean Cuisines and put it in the microwave. She isliterallythe first woman you see every day. After me, of course.”
“I was horny and lonely andshecame on to me, Ava. You should have seen how aggressi—”
“ARRRRRRRRRRGH!”
She roared right into the phone. She hoped his eardrum shriveled at that onslaught.
She couldn’t bear to hear him blame Grace because that just made him an even bigger chickenshit. And what did that say about her and her judgment to align her fates with such a feckless chickenshit? And sure, Grace was appallingly feckless, too, natch, but she was only twenty-two and was clearly about to learn the hard way about life and men and jobs and that whole lot. She had a few decades of big mistakes ahead of her, probably. Avalon did not give one crap about Grace.
Well, except:
“She wasn’t hurt, was she? When she fell off the bed?”
“No,” he said sullenly. “You were right about the rug pad.”
They did have a pretty thick carpet in there.
Stupid, but that little thing right there: the carpet pad. Romance was all well and good, but lives were knit together by little things, decisions about whether to put extra padding under the rugs.
“Corbin, you literally almostneverstop talking unless you’re sleeping, and you couldn’t have said something,anythingto me about feeling horny or unhappy or lonely? Seriously, is that what you’re telling me? This is the whole of your rationale? Your first impulse was to betray me in the biggest, most cliché way possible, because, and I quote, you were ‘lonely’?”
The wordbetrayfelt melodramatic in her mouth. Formal, almost medieval, likecuckold.
Corbin had his Dartmouth degree. But he’d been a spoiled child and Avalon had always been a better arguer. If you had siblings, especially wily, smart ones like she had, you learned how to fight and fight hard.
Corbin apparently didn’t know how to respond. There was just more of that breathing, this time a little halting.
He was trying not to cry.
She had never once witnessed him crying.
Oh, hell. Despite it all, she couldn’t bear the idea of making him cry.
“Nothing is the same without you,” he said finally. His voice was frayed and hollow.
“DUH.”
Somehow it was the perfect word: infantile, monosyllabic.
But her voice broke.
Corbin misinterpreted the crack as an opening for him.
