I rolled the stress of the day from my shoulders and stretched out my aching arm, leaning my forehead against the wet wall beside me and taking deep breaths. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to leave the cocoon of the shower, even though the water was now cold. Did we just have our first fight? Like a real fight?
I had never been in a relationship long enough to care about fighting or arguing with anyone. Nothing had been important enough for me to care to argue. Unfortunately, that also meant that I had no idea how to fix it, and though I could understand why Sadie was upset, it didn’t mean that I knew how to make it any better. I wasn’t stupid enough to not see her side of it. If it had been Sadie pushing me out of the way to take a bullet in my place, I was pretty sure that I would be angry at her too. More than angry, even.
I turned off the water with a quick flick of my hand, stepping out of the shower and pulling my pants back on after I dried off with Sadie’s damp towel. I ran my hands through my shower-slick blonde hair, shaking off droplets of water from my head with a quick twist. The mirror was fogged with steam and I swiped the towel over the glass, watching my own face in the reflection. I left the bathroom and felt the chill of the main room fall over me after the steaming warmth of the shower.
Sadie was sitting on the couch wrapped in a blanket and looking overly sour, flicking through movies on the flatscreen with the little remote control and determinedly not looking at me. Her phone went off over and over again, vibrating across the surface of the coffee table, and she was in no hurry as she reached for it. She must have known who it would be before she saw the name on the screen. Sadie let out a breath, looking as if answering the phone was the last thing she wanted to do. Soon enough, I could hear Oliver’s voice yelling and asking her if she was okay through the tinny speaker of the phone. She held the phone away far away from her ear, wincing at the volume of his voice. I turned and headed to my bedroom to sit on my bed and think while she talked. I turned up the heat as I went, worried that Sadie might be cold because I was. From my room, I could hear Sadie’s brother talking over the phone, sounding panicked,
“Well, what about Connor? Is he okay too?”
I heard Sadie sigh. “He’s okay, Oli. Thank everything, he’s okay.”
There was a nearly forgotten memory floating near the surface of my current thoughts. I had been very young, too small to remember much else. My mother was stomping around the house, mad at my father over this or that, and stuck solid in her anger. My father had gathered me close and told me we were going to make my mom happy again, just you watch this, son. A beautifully wrapped box of chocolate-covered strawberries arrived at our door a little while later and I watched my mother deflate, letting my father hold her close in the moments after. It had been that easy back then to make her happy, it seemed. We all sat in front of the fireplace, licking chocolate from our fingers, and laughing at the happiness that encompassed us all. It was a better time and I had learned a valuable lesson, one of the few that I ever retained from my father. No, I didn’t think Sadie was anything at all like my erstwhile mother. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. Clearly, even the most lavish gifts had not actually kept her around, but the basis of the whole idea was still a sound one.
With that thought in mind, I grabbed my phone from the side table and found the number on their website, listening as a familiar voice answered on the first ring with a bright and jolly, Hello, there!
“Maureen hi, it’s Connor Lennox here. Can I place an order for delivery to my apartment?”
I walked out of my room after a few more minutes, shuffling over the floor in my socks. In the quiet of the sitting room after my phone call, I watched Sadie where she still sat on the couch, watching some TV show about teenage vampires. Without speaking, I pressed a pair of socks into her hand too, making sure her feet wouldn’t be cold against the floor. She took them without saying anything at all, pulling them over her feet and then wiggling her toes. I was leaning against the counter and she still wouldn’t look at me, pretending that I didn’t exist while sitting on my couch in my apartment. It would have almost been funny if it hadn’t been so entirely frustrating.