“It means there’s water all over the floor! Again! How many times have I asked you to clean up after your shower? I’m not asking for much! I just want the water cleaned up off the floor so that when I go in there I don’t soak my socks every single time!”
“You’re going to take your socks off anyway! Why does it matter?” His long arms flew to his side as he paced the length of our bedroom.
I flopped back on the bed and the pillows depressed with the weight of my head. I felt like crying, but I wouldn’t let something this stupid bring me to tears. I wouldn’t.
Not again.
This whole argument wasn’t really about the water. He was right; I had been planning to take my socks off. But I was so sick of asking him to do something so simple. Why couldn’t he just listen to me? For once?
“Fine,” I relented. “I don’t care. Let’s just go to bed.”
“Typical,” I heard him mutter.
I peeled my fingers away from my face and propped myself up on my elbows. His back was to me as he stared unseeingly at our closed blinds. I could see the tension taut through his broad shoulders. His thin t-shirt pulled on the sculpted muscle he was so proud of.
It was so late and both of us had to work in the morning, which only proved to fuel my frustration. His run had lasted forever tonight. He left shortly after dinner and hadn’t come home until close to ten. I had started to think something had happened to him.
When I asked him where he was, he told me his running group had gone out for beers afterward. He’d gone out for beers and hadn’t bothered to text or call or let me know he was alive and not dead in the ditch somewhere.
I’d had a terrible day and my husband got to go out for beers at the end of an excessively long run while I did the dishes, cleaned up the kitchen, started his laundry and graded papers.
And then at the end of all of it, I’d walked into an inch of standing water on our bathroom floor because he couldn’t be bothered to clean up after himself.
And he wants to throw around the word “typical.”
“What was that?” My voice pitched low and measured, in complete opposition to the pounding of my heart and rushing of blood in my ears.
This was not the first time we’d had such a lengthy blow up. In fact, we fought more than we got along. If I were truly honest with myself, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d enjoyed being around him.
“It’s typical, Kate. Just when I finally get to the bottom of why you’re so pissed off, you decide to shut down and turn yourself off. You’re ready for bed and I just finally figured out what crawled up your ass. So what am I supposed to do with that now? Just forget it? Move on and pretend you didn’t keep me up all hours of the night yelling about it? God knows, you will.”
“I’m tired, Nick. It’s three o’clock in the morning. We both have to work tomorrow! What do you want me to do? I guess we could sit here and talk in circles until the sun comes up, but like you said, you finally get it!”
“God, you can be a bitch.”
His words hit me like a slap across the face. “And you can be a selfish asshole.”
I watched his face fall. It was that perfect kind of hit that took all of the wind right out of his sails. His entire body deflated and I knew I hurt him as badly as he hurt me. Except instead of making me feel better about myself, I realized I had never felt worse.
He slumped down at the edge of our bed and buried his face in his hands. His tousled, light brown hair fell over the tips of his fingers and reminded me of the times I used to brush it back, out of his eyes.
Even now, after seven years of marriage, he was still one of the most gorgeous men I had ever seen. His tall frame was packed with lean muscle and long limbs. His face was blessed with sharp angles and deep, soulful blue eyes, a square jaw hidden behind a closely cropped beard, like he’d forgotten to shave for a few days. His wild hair was a little longer on top than on the sides, but despite his unruly hair he had always been casually clean cut. No piercings. No tattoos. And his lips had always been dry, for as long as I could remember. But he had this way of dragging his tongue across them that used to make my mouth water.
I fell in love with him on our second date. We shared mutual friends that introduced us. My roommate Fiona was dating his track teammate, Austin, and one Saturday in October during our junior year of college, she finally hauled me along to one of their local meets.
We hit it off after he took first place in the thirty-two hundred and he was in a celebratory enough mood to not stop smiling. I couldn’t stop staring at his lonely dimple or his bright blue eyes. He had the keen insight to know he’d charmed me.
Or maybe he just read the very obvious signs. I was not good at hiding my feelings.
Our first date was an absolute disaster though. I was awkward and he was nervous. We didn’t find much to talk about and when he dropped me back at my dorm, I swore to Fiona that he would never call me again.
I never understood why he asked me out for our second date, but it was that next time, when he took me to my favorite Italian restaurant and then out for a drive that ended with trespassing and a moonlit walk through random fields in the middle of the country, that made me realize I would never find another man like him.
He had something I decided I couldn’t live without. His intentional questions and quick sense of humor held my attention and his big smile made my insides melty. I had never met anyone that made me feel that way… that made it seem as if I were the only person alive that had anything interesting to say.
If every night could be like that second date I would never doubt what was between us, not even for a second. But after struggling to put up with each other for all of these years and knowing that whatever chemistry we had with each other fizzled a long time ago, I was exhausted.
I was starting to realize, I was also broken. Or if not broken, then breaking.
I couldn’t keep doing this.
And while I was deciding these things I had started to collect reasons for why we weren’t right for each other… why he wasn’t right for me. I was organized by nature. I was a list-maker. I couldn’t help but compile all of the reasons we were wrong for each other.
Even if they broke me.
Even if they destroyed us.
“What are we doing?” he mumbled into his hands.
Hot tears slipped from the corners of my eyes, but I wiped them away before he could see them. “I don’t know,” I whispered. My hands fell to rest against my flat stomach. “We hate each other.”
He whipped his head around and glared at me over his shoulder. “Is that what you think? You think I hate you?”
“I think we’ve grown so far apart, we don’t even know each other anymore.”