You Love Me

by Caroline Kepnes

  You sip the coffee. “You are a very bad man, Joe.”

  I smile. “Yes, I am.”

  If Nomi didn’t live here—just four days and three nights to go—I would pull your skirt off and bend you over the counter but Nomi does live here and she’s here now, rummaging in the fridge for a Red Bull. You nag her about her beverage choice—That will poison your brain—and she barks defensively—It’s no different than coffee—and I play my videogame, casually moving my position so that I am on the opposite side of the room from Nomi.

  You don’t know about my Centipede score. You haven’t noticed a change in my behavior since she touched my hair. But I am the top scorer in the game and I have not been alone or within touching distance of your daughter once in the past four days.

  When you yawn and say you have to go to bed, I follow.

  When the Centipede—not a Meerkat, not anymore—pops by the library and sees me packing up and asks if I want to walk home, I tell her that I have to go to Seattle to see about a book.

  When I am outside flipping steaks on the grill—no more lamb shanks for us—and you are inside chopping vegetables and the Centipede opens the door and asks if I need help, I smile—polite—and tell her I’m all set.

  The Meerkat has daddy issues and because I am such a good stepfather, I don’t want her to find another bug in my hair. I don’t want her to beat herself up for anything when she’s in New York, starting over.

  You peck me on the cheek and Nomi is in this house and you are leaving this house and I have to stop you.

  “Wait,” I say. “You’re leaving now?”

  Nomi laughs. “You guys are so gross.”

  You tell me that you have to get the ferry and the Centipede hops up on the counter and she is wearing shorts and her legs dangle and I tell you I want you to stay and Nomi groans again. “I can’t take this anymore,” she says. “I’m going to the beach with Anna and Jordan and please don’t bug me about dinner later!”

  That’s what happens in videogames sometimes. The enemy appears on-screen and you’re out of position, you can’t evade the bullets, but then it slips off-screen and you worried for nothing. You feel my forehead. Such a mother. “Are you okay? You look a little red.”

  I pull you in because I can do that now that the Centipede is outside—GAME OVER—stuffing a towel in her bag. “Bye, guys!” she calls from the driveway.

  “Come on,” I plead. “We have the whole house to ourselves. You can see the dee ziner any old day.”

  You kiss me but it’s a kiss goodbye. “Erin’s waiting for me, Buster. So come on, lemme go. In four days, this is how it’ll be every day.”

  “In four days a bomb might go off and we might all be dead.”

  You sling your purse over your shoulder. “And I think I’m the paranoid one.”

  I try once more. I put your hand on my dick. “Come on, Hannibal…”

  Your eyes are two foxes, they have teeth, sharper than mine. “No,” you say. “And honestly… can we cool it with the Hannibal stuff?”

  That hurts my feelings but in any relationship, there is growth and I’m not a fucking nickname person anyway. “Whatever you want, Mary Kay DiMarco.”

  You walk to the door and blow me a kiss. “Be good.”

  I blow you a kiss. “See you in twenty minutes when you change your mind?”

  Your eyes land on the sofa and you fight a horny smile and you love me but you leave me and I sit on our in-house Red Bed and I turn on the TV. Everything is fine. I’m catching up on Succession—you were right, it is good, and there’s a nickname that you do like: Ken Doll—but I can’t focus. I need to zone out so I turn on Family Feud. I’m not paranoid, but this is a challenge for me. Things are working out for the first time in my life and sometimes I think about New York or I think about L.A. and I hear Aimee Mann in Magnolia warning me that getting everything you want can be unbearable. I am so used to never getting what I want that I don’t quite know how to sit on my sofa and be a basic Bainbridge hubby in khaki shorts killing time while his almost-wife—it will be courthouse official on 8/8, you like that date—searches for curtains and my stepdaughter hits the beach with her friends.

  The door opens and I turn off the TV. You knew I needed you today and you’re here, kicking off your shoes in the foyer. “Did you miss me, Mary Kay soon-to-be-Goldberg?”

  I look up from the red pillow I just moved to make room for you and it isn’t you.

  It’s the Centipede and this is a new level in the game—a dangerous level—and she pulls a can of spiked seltzer out of the fridge and she’s eighteen years old and it’s 11:00 A.M. She closes the fridge with one hip and shakes the can before she pops it. She giggles. “Finally, right? My God, I was going crazy.”

  I clutch my pillow. My armor. “Nomi, you shouldn’t be drinking.”

  She jumps on the couch and I get off the couch and she is the Centipede, on her side now, legs for days and who knew she had legs and what is she doing? She’s sipping her spiked soda—spikes on a dark road at night, spikes that flatten tires—and she’s propping her head on a red pillow. “Whatever,” she says. “These things have like no alcohol. Don’t worry. I won’t be drunk or anything.”

  I hold my Red Bed red pillow and the Centipede isn’t moving with her body but she is moving in other ways. Running her hand over her collarbone and the collarbone isn’t yours but it is. It came from inside your body. “Joe,” she says. “Relax. She’s gone.”

  She takes a sip and fuck you, Woody Allen. You did this. You. She’s a virgin—isn’t she?—she isn’t old enough to know what she wants but she says that I know what she wants and she licks her lips. “Seriously. She and Erin… they live for stuff like this, shopping for curtains.” She sighs.

  “Nomi, you shouldn’t be drinking.”

  “And you shouldn’t be getting married. Jesus, Joe. We were set.”

  The Centipede broadsides me from afar and I lose a life and stutter. “There is no we.”

  She laughs and did she always laugh that way? “I get it,” she says. “You do things the hard way. We were so close…” Close as in the Centipede is winning. “Mom was all set to be a brother-fucker and go off with Ivan…” No you were not. “But you go and bring him down…” No I didn’t. “And then you go hunting with my ex-boyfriend… He told me he was gonna ‘teach you a lesson’ for trying to steal me away, like it’s not my choice. Such a jerk.”

  The game table flies into the air and I duck for cover. She said ex-boyfriend and it was her in the woods with Seamus. Not you.

  Nomi.

  He wasn’t pining for you and he was a pedophile and he thought I was a pedophile same way RIP Melanda thought I was a pedophile and I AM NOT A PEDOPHILE. The Centipede isn’t alone anymore. There are bombs falling from the top of the screen and my control panel is stuck—does she know about the bunnies and the buckets of fucking blood?—and I want to punch the console and scream. “You… and Seamus…?”

  She shakes like her body is covered in ants and she screeches. “Don’t remind me. I know. He wasn’t exactly smart. He barely read. But don’t be a dick about it. I was young.”

  “You are young.”

  She blinks and I wish she still wore those unflattering little round glasses. “He could be sweet, though, like driving to Seattle to pick me up from Peggy and Don’s to take me to his cabin. I don’t think I would have gotten through high school without those weekends.”

  The cabin. The girls weren’t twenty-fucking-two like you said, Mary Kay. The girls were Nomi and I beg her to stop and she sighs. “Don’t be that way, Joe. Don’t be jealous. The cabin was freaking boring and it’s not like I was ever in love with him.”

  “Nomi, please. Stop it.”

  “But kids here… they’re like kids everywhere. They suck. Seamus was just, I mean one day I was bored hanging out by the creek near my old middle school and… there he was.”

  CrossFit is across the street from that fucking middle school and I snap. “He
’s a rapist.”

  Now she sits up. “You stop it. Nobody raped me, Joe.”

  “It’s called statutory rape. And it’s wrong.”

  She crosses her arms. All one hundred of them. “Oh really, Mr. Morals? Mr. Hiding in the woods watching me…”

  “I was not watching you.”

  “Right,” she says. “You just happened to be there with all the time in the world to take this long, leisurely walk to the grocery store with me…”

  The screen turns from orange to green and I am dying. I did that. But I didn’t. “Nomi, please, that’s not what that was about.”

  “Now you’re gonna tell me that you didn’t push me to watch your favorite movie…”

  I hate that this is true—I did that, I pushed a teenage girl on Woody Fucking Allen—and I am one soldier and she is a reptile on fire.

  “Come on, you were worried that I was one of Melanda’s little pawns, so freaking cute, you actually believed that I never saw a Woody Allen movie. I mean, I live on a rock, but I don’t live under a rock. And I know when someone is watching me.”

  “I was not watching you.”

  “Right,” she says. “Same way you didn’t literally go to my house in the middle of the day when I was cutting school.”

  “I was dropping off a book.”

  It is true and it isn’t and the Centipede moves swiftly. “Nope,” she says. “You were waiting for me. And you didn’t rat me out to my mom, which is how I really knew we were in this for the long haul.”

  “Nomi, I am sorry that you misinterpreted things but you are dead wrong.”

  “One word,” she says. “Budussy.”

  Budussy: the only word worse than Centipede, and I shoot her down. “No.”

  “That whole time you helped me at the library you were making eyes at me all nervous about getting caught and you keep looking to see if my mom noticed. You were so cute, Joe. So cute.”

  “Nomi, I wasn’t making eyes at you. I was making eye contact, and there is a difference.”

  “Aw, come on. You can be real with me now. Don’t fight it.”

  “Nomi, I’m not fighting anything. You misread things.”

  “Ooh, I thought of another one of our little ‘moments,’ that day you almost ran away… I saw that box in your car, Joe. I knew you were gonna leave… But then you saw me.” No. “And you were so cute, worried that I thought of you as one of those old people in the library.” No. “I had no idea that you were so self-conscious about your age and I promised to be more sensitive…” No. That is not how that went down. “And you stayed.” She clutches her heart. “The absolute sweetest.”

  The bomb almost hit me that time and the game is rigged. “Nomi, this is all a big misunderstanding and you’ve been through a lot and I’m really… sorry isn’t the word… I’m horrified by what Seamus did to you but I am not like that.”

  She shrugs. “He didn’t ‘do’ anything to me. I like older guys. You and Seamus like younger girls. Almost all guys like younger girls. There’s nothing wrong with that. That girl in New York you went out with… the dead one…”

  This time the bomb hits me. The game is over. How the hell does she know about that? I put another quarter in the machine in my mind and I will fucking win. I tell Nomi that she has PTSD. She lost her father. She isn’t thinking clearly. I remind her that I know where she’s coming from. I had a rough childhood. I know how hard it is when your parents are fighting and you don’t know who you can count on and I tell her that we can get her someone to talk to, someone who can help her sort through this mess.

  But she just smiles. A centipede with eyes. “You remind me of him, you know.” Don’t say Woody Allen. “Dylan,” she says. “Dylan Klebold.” Dylan Klebold is a mass murderer and I am your common-law husband—why didn’t we go to the courthouse today? “You don’t just say things. You actually do things. I mean the way you gave me that Bukowski…”

  “Your mom gave you that.”

  She smiles. “I know. Well done there.”

  “Nomi, I am not Seamus.”

  She looks at me and laughs. “Oh come on, Joe. The way you both hung around my house after my dad died… I mean it was unbelievable. He wouldn’t let me go and you wouldn’t just freaking go for it… and my mom…ugh…” You resented your mother and she resents you and a nipple appears under her shirt. “You don’t have to be jealous, Joe. I didn’t break it off the day I met you but I mean… he’s gone. We’re here. Plus, honestly, when I started up with him, I was a whole other person. I was young so it doesn’t even count.”

  “Nomi, you are young,” I say again.

  She grins. “I know.”

  I missed it. The man was abusing your daughter and I hear Oliver in my head. There is such a thing as too soft, my friend. Cedar Cove rotted my brain and broke my radar and the Meerkat was never a fucking Meerkat and kids grow up faster—fucking Instagram—and they know how to be four different people at once and I took her little round glasses at face value. I thought she was innocent and she was just playing innocent but she is innocent because HE WAS A FUCKING PEDOPHILE. I said the word out loud—someone has to make this right—and she throws a pillow at me. “Don’t use that word.”

  “Nomi, that’s the only word there is right now.”

  She’s quoting RIP Melanda—It’s not history. It’s HERstory—and she talks about Seamus like he was her equal—He did the salmon egg thing too when he was a kid and he could be sweet—and I tell her that’s impossible. “He was a grown man, Nomi. He had all the power and what he did was wrong. He should be in fucking jail.”

  She snaps her fingers. “That’s why Melanda hated you. I thought she was just jealous as usual but you’re better than this. You can’t tell me how I feel. I know you know that.”

  I tell her she needs to stop and she balks as if we are lovers at war. “Don’t tell me what I need, Mr. Woody Allen’s number one fan. Even Seamus knew better than to talk down to me like that.”

  Seamus was a pervert who tried to kill me and I am the adult. The stepfather. “Nomi, what he did was wrong.”

  She tells me that in a lot of cultures, girls her age have babies and that I don’t get to sit here and take it all back when I’ve been leading her on since the day we met. “It sucked when you disappeared. But I get it. I know it was too painful for you with me so close but so far away…” No. “And it doesn’t matter because you came back. You waited for me in the parking lot of the library and once again, I told you to stay. I told you not to give up.” She looks at me and the Centipede burns me alive. “And you didn’t give up,” she says. “Yeah, the wedding was a little icky, but we both know that you’re not going through with my mom’s little eight-eight plan. You’re not even really married.”

  I am down to one life now and she laughs. “Stop being so freaked out. It’s me, Joe. It’s me.” But then she stops laughing, like the Centipede she’s become. “I almost forgot,” she says. “You should have seen your face when I told you Melanda texted me. Another classic.”

  This is the part of the game where you kill the enemy and the screen changes colors and the enemy is reborn stronger, faster. She says she’s not stupid. She knows Melanda’s gone for good and I tell her it’s not like that. “You’ve been through a lot and if your mother knew… if she knew that Seamus… that he raped you.”

  “Jesus, will you let it go? We broke up. It’s over. And then the idiot went and got himself killed hunting. Honestly, it’s not the biggest surprise in the world… He was so depressed about being dumped, he was in no state of mind to be off in the woods, going off about what he was gonna do to you…”

  The Centipede is staring at me, slowing down and daring me to move into defensive mode. I am not stupid. I am quiet. Does she know what he did to me? Does she know what Oliver did to him?

  She crosses her arms again. “Don’t look at me like that. I know he was spiraling. And he got so pissy about you…”

  He didn’t get pissy. He tried to murder
me. She’s on her feet—the Centipede has feet—and she pulls at my pillow and I hold on to my pillow and she picks up her bottomless can of spiked seltzer, a drink designed to appeal to children, to make them feel older than they are.

  I tell her she has the wrong idea and this game isn’t for me because even when I win, I lose. The game gets harder. She appreciates me for holding out, waiting for her to graduate, buying time for us and I can’t beat the Centipede, can I? She takes the pillow out of my hands and hugs me and I am numb. Game Over. I think fast. Hard.

  Let her hug me. She won’t tell you about this. In four days, she’ll get on a plane and go to New York and become obsessed with some Dr. Nicky professor type and you don’t need to know about this Feud. Shortus is dead. Revenge is impossible and Cedar Cove damaged your brain too. You didn’t see it either—you were worried about your husband and there are only so many worries a heart can bear—and I would never judge you for that. I have to let her say what she needs to say so that she can move the fuck on, so that we can move the fuck on.

  I grab her shoulders. We are close now, so close that I can actually see the innocence in her eyes—she really does love me—and I have been where she is. I have loved people who didn’t love me back and I tell her this will hurt—Jude Law in Closer—and my voice is firm.

  “I don’t love you, Nomi. And that’s okay because you don’t love me.”

  Her teeth chatter inside of her mouth and her shoulders tremble beneath my hands and the hardest thing about a Centipede is that a Centipede is always moving. That’s the nightmare of the game. I stay with her as I fire my bullets because I wish any woman who broke my heart had been so kind with me, willing to be here for me as I realize that I am not loved. My hands are still on her shoulders when you burst into the room. You kick off your shoes and slip into your cozy socks. “All right,” you say. “You win, Buster. I’m home.”