She nuzzled his neck, trailing her nose along the stubbly curve of his cheek. Then she pulled back and smiled up at him, tucking her chin and widening her eyes. Cute.
“But when I’m cute you get me things.”
Then she grinned, all goofy eyes and bottom teeth, definitely not cute. He laughed and lifted her legs up and off him, heading to the kitchen.
She moved into the warm spot he left on the couch, flopping around like a stroppy teenager. She felt like a stroppy teenager most of the time. She was always sighing and rolling her eyes and whining and flopping. She wondered when she would stop feeling like a teenager.
She was restless. It was raining, it was always raining. The grey sky was relieving and oppressive. Oppressive because it made her feel trapped inside, relieving because she knew she didn’t really want to leave the house anyway. She just wanted to want to leave the house.
He was talking to her from the kitchen. Chatting. She was not listening. She could feel herself getting crankier by the second. Irritation began as an itchy feeling around her ankles. Then she was hot and then too cold and then she couldn’t stop chewing the dry skin off of her bottom lip. He was still chatting away in the kitchen, brewing coffee and recapping some Conan interview, blind to her deteriorating mood. He was like a lone kayaker adrift in a still lake, oblivious to the small uptick in the wind, the sudden drop in temperature, the rolling clouds.
He never saw the warning signs. Then, neither did she. It just happened. One moment she was fine, and then the fine ballooned into a kind of fine plus. Then that became sort of not fine, sort of too fine. She felt like a match that was about to go out, that moment right before it burns your fingers: bright, bright, too bright, gone.
She rose from the couch and slunk over to the kitchen, opening and closing the fridge, raking her hands up and into her messy bun. He was quiet now. Maybe he read her better than she thought. The whole room felt deflated, worse somehow, it felt like all the air had been sucked out, like the walls, the fridge, the floor and him were all flattening out around her. He said something else she didn’t listen to. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the fridge, trying to count to ten, trying to self- regulate. But it was like bottling up a storm, she did not know how to be anything else than this. She didn’t know how to be better.
