Quadruple Duty

It was a strange thing to say. I knew what the word meant, what it implied, but I had to ask anyway. “Covets me? In what way?”

“In every way,” Briggs said. “She’s ‘liked’ you from the beginning. Only you never liked her back. You never showed her any interest, and eventually she got jealous. And when you moved in here…”

“She got really jealous,” I breathed.

Briggs nodded. “Especially since there were a few of us.”

I must have looked like a lunatic, holding my hands over my mouth in disbelief. And yet that part made sense too. In the beginning, Dawn had showered me with praise, gifts, even affection. She’d even kissed me once at a client’s Christmas party, but I’d figured she was just drunk and overly happy and—

She

likes you.

It was a tribute to my own cluelessness that I hadn’t seen it before. Dawn was single. She’d never had a boyfriend. But she had lots of girlfriends she went out with, and—

“Oh my God, I’m such a blind asshole!”

Briggs let me stew for a while, as everything sunk in. It was a lot to process. He twisted the cap off a cold beer and handed it to me.

“I’m so mad!” I screamed across the lake. “I can’t believe she’d do this to me! She took everything I owned!” I kicked at the ground. “And why? Because I didn’t like her? Because she thinks I snubbed her? I didn’t even realize what the hell was—”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

The question snapped me suddenly back to the present. I realized I’d been staring at Briggs the whole time.

“About what?”

“About Dawn robbing you,” Briggs said. “Taking all your stuff.”

I shook the question off dismissively, as if it annoyed me. “There’s nothing I can do. I can’t afford a lawyer. I can’t even prove what’s mine. No court is going to sit there and sift through everything we co-own and decide what’s mine and what’s hers. It would take months. Years.”

“So that’s it?”

The question had a sardonic edge. He was asking it mockingly. As if intentionally trying to piss me off.

“I guess,” I shrugged. “It’s not like there’s any other—”

“If you’re this angry, this outraged,” Briggs said, “why don’t you just go and take your stuff back?”

I stared back at him like he was crazy. Like he was asking me to do something impossible, like drive my jeep to the moon.

“You mean—”

“I mean go. Get your stuff. Take it back.”

He talked like it was so simple. So uncomplicated. Like it was something anyone could do, on any given day.

But isn’t it?

“I… I don’t even know where she’s keeping it.”

“You’re making excuses,” he told me, “without even trying.”

I went silent. A big part of me knew he was right. I’d given up pretty easily — almost immediately in fact — and the realization stung. It just wasn’t like me, to abandon something so important, so quickly. I felt suddenly embarrassed, even shamed for it.

“Speaking of last night,” I said, shifting gears, “what about you?”

He smirked. “What about me?”