by Megan Walker
“Hey,” I say. “Just because him and Felix are friends and are talking a lot lately, it doesn’t mean—”
“They’re talking a lot?” His glare darkens.
I’m not sure what else he thought they were doing. “Um, yeah. You know, because Josh is going through something right now, and—”
“I know.” Ben sits up straighter. “Because he talks to me, too.”
“I never said he didn’t! God.” Trying to reason with Ben when he’s in a bad mood is the worst. And today he’s a little wasted, to boot. “I’m not getting into this with you,” I say, deciding to leave him to his misery—or at least not stick around to witness the desecration of my suede furniture and favorite snacks.
“What do you think’s really going on with him anyway?” Ben says, just as I start to stand up.
“Felix?”
“Josh.” Ben gives me a significant look, like maybe he’s testing to see if Josh is talking to me.
Which he may have the other night, but the continuing tension of the last few days makes me think there’s still things he’s holding back. Because he’s scared to lose me, he said. But knowing that he’s keeping his thoughts and fears and insecurities from me just so he won’t lose me doesn’t make it hurt any less.
I realize I’ve paused long enough that Ben is back to looking concerned again. I swallow past a too-dry throat and sit back down.
“I don’t know. I don’t really get it. I mean, the infertility stuff has been stressful. For both of us. But this last week, since we had this fight, I just—”
“It must have been some fight.” Ben takes another drink, and then crams in some more chips. “Because now Josh is all ‘I’m a monster with no redeeming qualities.’ Like, what the hell is that about?”
“Did he actually say that?”
Ben rolls his eyes. “No. But, like, that was the gist.”
I remember the look on his face when he told me about being such a shitty husband—when yeah, it sounds like he did something wrong and hurtful, but not intentionally. I told him I understood, that I forgave him. But apparently nothing I said helped all that much.
Or, like I guessed, there’s even more he’s afraid to tell me.
“Yeah, well, you and I both know he’s not a monster,” I say. “He’s Josh.”
And I wish I could help Josh feel what that means to me, the kind of person I know he is, even when he doubts himself.
“Yeah,” Ben agrees, raising his beer like a toast. “He’s Josh.” He looks over at me again, his brow furrowed. “And he really does love you—”
“Oh my god, Ben, I know he—”
“—even if he’s having doubts or whatever about that right now.”
My heart stops. “What?”
Ben blinks. “Shit. I mean, I don’t know.”
I force myself to breathe evenly. Ben’s obviously drunk.
Is Josh having doubts about that? But the other night—
“What did he say to you?” My voice has a sharp edge to it.
Ben sits up straighter, fidgets a little. “I asked him if he would pick you over me in a life or death situation, and he didn’t know.”
I gape for moment. “What? Why did you even ask that?”
“I was just saying that I would pick Wyatt over him, if it came down to that—you know, because he’s my husband and I—” Ben squeezes his eyes shut, like the pain of that statement almost overwhelms him, and even in my own crazy cocktail of emotions I feel terrible for him, because god, will they really get divorced? Ben and Wyatt?
Ben shakes his head. “I don’t know. But I said it, and I think he was a little hurt, and like, I thought he’d get it, you know? Because I was sure he felt the same about you. But he didn’t know, and I think maybe he’s going through something, like you said and . . .” Ben cringes. “I don’t want you guys going through this, too.”
“We’re not,” I say, firmly. Maybe too firmly. “I’m sorry you are, Ben. I really am. But we’re not.”
“Okay, good,” he says. But he looks so doubtful, and that doubt—from the person who knows Josh better than anyone other than me, or so I would have said until this very moment—is like a punch in my gut.
“Pants,” I say, pointing at his boxers. Then I grab the bag of Doritos from him. “And stop eating in this room.” I storm out before he can respond.
I’ve changed out of my work clothes and into some comfortable-but-still-cute jeans and my favorite Firefly t-shirt—River in her post-Reaver-ass-kicking pose—when I hear the door to the guest room slam shut. Ben letting me know he’s pissed at me.
Which, fine. As long as his ass, barely-covered balls, and cheese-powder-stained fingers are off my nice furniture.
I head downstairs, trying to keep the image of the doubt on Ben’s face out of my mind. Ben is overreacting because he’s hurt. Josh may be going through something, but he wouldn’t doubt that.
I find myself gripping the decorative finial at the end of the banister so hard that if I had slayer strength—or maybe even River strength—the thing would snap right off. I kind of wish it would.
I figure I might as well channel this into something less destructive, and get some dishrags and soap and head back to our front room, which still smells like beer. I check the armchair cushion for any more cans—or scripts—stuffed back there, but Ben must have taken the rest of his stash with him, because all I find are about a million crumbs. Which I brush off as best as I can without further smearing food on the fabric.
Then I get down to tackling the pizza sauce stain.
I shouldn’t be doing this. I don’t have the faintest clue how to remove marinara from suede, and I don’t have the patience to Google it. We have a housekeeper who comes twice a month, and we’re probably not going to be doing any entertaining before then, so I should let her handle this.
But I find myself scrubbing it anyway. Because I need this stupid stain to go away, and I need to do it now.
Unfortunately, my scrubbing seems to only make the red spread across the beige fabric. By the time I hear the garage door open and close, and the rustle of grocery bags being set on the counter, I have only succeeded in making a quarter-sized red stain into a slightly less red stain the size of my closed fist.
I keep scrubbing, even as I hear footsteps down the hall.
“Hey, what’s going on?” Josh sounds confused. Which makes sense, given how often he has come home to find me surrounded by cleaning products, scrubbing upholstery. Which is to say, never.
“Our couch is stained.” I barely look over at him. Afraid that if I do, I’ll somehow read on his face that what Ben said is true.
“Yeah, I know,” Josh says, a little too evenly. “I was going to call a service to clean it.”
And now I can’t help but look over, if only to glare. “Maybe instead of paying someone to clean up his mess, Ben could just not eat pizza and chips and get wasted on our nice couch.”
Josh rolls his eyes to the ceiling. “Yeah, try telling him that.”
“I did. But maybe it would help if you did. And while you’re at it, tell him to wear pants when he’s out of his room. I really don’t need to see Ben in his underwear constantly.” The more the words tumble out of my mouth, the more the I can hear the pissy tone behind them.
And the less capable I am of holding it back.
“That’s just Ben,” Josh says. “If you have a problem with him being here, I can have him stay with my parents.”
“I don’t want to kick him out.” I stand up, the damp dishrag clenched tight in my fist, and dripping. “I just want you to tell him to respect our rules.”
“Well, if you figure out how to get him to do that, I’d like to know,” Josh says.
I groan and turn back to the stain. “Of course. God forbid you should stand up to Ben.”
“What are you so pissed about?” Josh’s face is starting to look as red as the stain, and I’m sure mine’s not much better. “Not that I’m supposed to fix it, whatever it is.”
This mess, I want to say. Everything. This stain I can’t clean, the baby my body won’t make, the problems between us that I don’t understand.
Instead what comes out of my mouth, like an accusation, is “Ben says you don’t know if you would choose him or me in a life or death situation.”
Josh’s mouth drops open, his expression incredulous. “Are you serious?”
There’s a hurt look in his eyes that makes me want to take it back. To say I’m not. But really, selfishly, I just want him to say that he’d always choose me, over anyone. That maybe he’s doubting some things, but loving me isn’t one of them.
So we just stare at each other, the tension so thick between us it’s this physical thing.
“Oh my god, I give up,” Josh mutters under his breath, and now he’s the one turning and leaving the room, and I’m left standing there, the damp rag drip-drip-dripping on the floor.
Fourteen
Josh
By the time Felix drops off Ty, I’m already pretty rattled. Between things going so badly with Ben, and then Ben somehow managing to sabotage my tenuous peace with Anna-Marie, I feel like having a hard drink and then pulling out all of my hair.
I should have handled that conversation with Anna-Marie better. I feel like that could be said about every conversation we’ve had over the last year, but that one especially. But there’s a small but petty part of me that’s pissed at her for even thinking I love Ben more than I love her, for thinking for a minute that she isn’t my number one priority in virtually every situation, let alone life or death.
Clearly we need to talk more about it, and at a lower decibel. But I’m not going to cancel on Felix. He and Jenna need to talk about what’s going on with them, and I hope for both their sakes that it goes better this time. I may not be able to talk to anyone I love in a way that helps, but hopefully he can. And at least watching his kid isn’t something I’m likely to royally screw up. Last I saw Ty, he was weirdly precocious. It’ll be fine.
The doorbell rings, and I answer it to see Felix and Ty standing there in the porchlight. It’s already dusk, and the sky is rapidly darkening behind them.
“Hey,” I say, forcing a smile.
“You okay?” Felix asks. I’m more than a little unnerved that he can tell I’m not just by looking at me.
“We can talk later,” I say. “You need to get home.”
He looks concerned, but he doesn’t argue with me. “Ty, you’re going to be good for them, right? And not climb into any tight spaces.”
“Dad,” Ty says. “I haven’t done that in years.” He sounds like a responsible kid, but part of that may be that he seems to always be wearing a sweater vest and loafers and looking like he’s about to show me his investment portfolio.
“Not much,” Felix says.
“Besides,” I add, “you’re going to be too busy playing with my minis, right? You can set them up however you want, as long as you’re careful with them. And don’t put Harry in bed with Hermione.”
I bite my lip, worried that last comment might have been too racy for a kid his age, but Felix looks amused and Ty wrinkles his nose at me.
“Ew,” he says. “Do your miniatures snog? Because my mom told me what that means and it’s gross.”
Felix laughs. “You guys have fun,” he says. He catches my eye. “And thanks.”
“Yeah, no problem,” I tell him. And even after the day I’ve had, I mean it.
Ty and I head up to the loft where he immediately begins rearranging all the characters in Hogwarts. He’s deliberately careful with them, so I don’t mind when he goes combing over the diorama for every character I have and sets up a battle with Voldemort in the great hall. I take some satisfaction when he picks up Quirrell and his turban falls off. Ty looks up at me in horror, like he broke my mini, and then realizes that beneath it is a tiny replica of Voldemort that I had to sculpt myself.
“This is so cool,” Ty says. “Can you show me how you made it?”
“Sure,” I tell him. “I’m working on this demon over here, so I can show you how it works.”
I’m halfway through pulling out my putty and tools and gathering the pieces of the hellmouth creature when Anna-Marie screams from downstairs. It’s not a slightly startled scream, but a piercing, terrified shriek, like a sound effect of a woman being murdered.
I’m down the loft stairs before I even know what I’m doing, and I find Anna-Marie standing on top of the couch in the den, where we hang out sometimes when we have people over who aren’t clients or people we feel the need to impress.
She gestures at the floor, her hands making a flapping motion. “Snake!”
At first, I think she might be hallucinating, but then the motley brown pattern of our carpet seems to ripple.
I relax, let myself breathe again. “God, I thought you’d been eviscerated.”
“That means gutted,” Ty says from the loft stairs behind me.
I turn around and look at him. “Yeah, it does.”
Anna-Marie flaps her hands in my general direction. “Get the snake!” she shouts. “Get it out!”
I hold up my hands, about to tell her I have no better idea how to catch a snake than she does, when Ty pipes up. “I’ll get it!” he says, and dodges around me.
“No!” Anna-Marie and I both say together.
Ty looks at us both like we’re crazy. “I pick up snakes all the time.”
I’m not sure where he finds snakes “all the time” in Felix’s suburban neighborhood, but regardless, I don’t want him picking up this one in my house. There may not be very many ways to screw up babysitting a ten-year-old, but letting him get bit by a snake in my den is top on the list.
I step over to the snake, and Anna-Marie shrieks again. Ben must really be in a drunken stupor if he hasn’t heard any of this.
“What?” I say to her.
“Don’t go near it!” she says. “I don’t want you to get bit.”
“What do you expect me to do? I have to go near it to catch it.”
“Not with your hands!”
If I weren’t so flustered by the rest of the day, the sight of my normally independent and feminist wife standing on a couch shrieking about snakes might have been humorous.
“I could catch it in that pizza box,” Ty says, pointing. Sure enough, Ben has left his empty pizza box sitting by the back door instead of in the garbage can three feet outside.
That’s not a terrible idea.
“I’ll do it,” I say, picking up the pizza box. I look back at the floor, but I don’t see anything. “Where’s the snake?”
“There!” Ty says, walking over and stooping next to the coffee table. Sure enough, the carpet under the table leg is wriggling.
I crouch down, ignoring nervous whimpers from Anna-Marie. The snake is tiny, no more than six inches long, and as thin as a shoelace. Ty kneels beside me, and I shift so I can hold him back if necessary, but I’m not terribly concerned that the snake is going to launch itself at him.
Now that I get a better look at the thing, though, there’s something familiar to the pattern of the diamonds down its back.
Oh no. I hold up an arm and push Ty back. “Um, Anna-Marie,” I say. “Could you Google something for me?”
“What?” she says. “How to catch a snake?”
I look up at her. She’s got her phone, which is good, because after I say this, I’ll be surprised if she ever leaves the couch. “Baby rattlesnake.”
“Seriously?”
“Cool!” Ty shouts. “Is that really what it is?”
“Stand back,” I say to him, and remarkably, he does. I put the corner of the pizza box in fron
t of the snake, which coils as if it’s about to strike. “It doesn’t have a rattle,” I say. “So it’s probably something else.”
“No, baby rattlesnakes don’t have rattles,” Ty says.
He knows this. Of course he does.
“Okay, okay,” Anna-Marie says. “I have a video.”
“Stand back and watch the snake,” I say to Ty. He bends over, but keeps his feet far away from the snake, watching it intently.
Good enough. I join Anna-Marie on the couch, where she shows me the video.
I’m no snake expert, but this damn well looks like a baby rattlesnake.
“Okay,” I say. “What do we do?”
“What do you mean, what do we do?” Anna-Marie says. “You need to get rid of it.”
“I need to get rid of it? I don’t know any more about catching snakes than you do. I grew up in Bel Air.”
Anna-Marie gives me a death look. “So you expect me to kill it, because I was born in Wyoming? What, you’d not only save Ben before me, but you’d also rather save yourself?”
I stare at her. That stings, but I don’t want to get into it right now. We have a snake to deal with.
“Ty, come with me,” I say. I don’t know that Anna-Marie is going to be able to bring herself to climb down off the couch, and I don’t want to leave the kid behind where he might get ideas about getting up close and personal with a rattlesnake.
I stalk out to the garage, where theoretically we have some gloves. Not that either of us ever garden, and it’s rarely glove-wearing weather in Los Angeles, but my mother gave me a pair of leather driving gloves that I think are still in my car, even though I’ve hardly worn them. They make me feel pretentious, but if they make me feel less bitten by a rattlesnake, they’ll have been worth the money.
Ty trots along after me, babbling happily. “—And people think they’re more poisonous than adult rattlesnakes,” he says, “because they don’t have any control over how much poison they put in you like adult rattlesnakes do. But it’s not true, because they also have less poison than the adult rattlesnakes, so it really works out to about the same amount of poison that you get, even though they give you all of it. But the babies don’t have rattles, so they can’t warn you, but—”