“Yes,” he shouted, “it’s me! Nick! Your only client! The man who pays for this awful excuse for an apartment! The same man who you totally fucked over tonight!”
I cringed beneath my comforter, wishing it was just a dream after all.
“What are you...” The remnants of sleep began to fall away, and I started putting things together for the first time. Starting with the most important. “You came to my apartment?!”
“You moved a FUCKING LUNATIC into mine!”
Oh right...that.
“Okay, listen,” I sat up a little straighter, raising my hands peaceably between us, “I get that you’re mad, I really do, but...”
But mad didn’t begin to cover it. I had seen him mad. I had seen him unreasonably mad.
I had never seen anything like this.
In a single movement, he perched on the mattress beside me. An overwhelming and nonsensical array of scents followed like a dense fog, and it was all I could do to keep it together as he leaned in very close, speaking right into my face.
“Mad? You think this can be covered by mad?” A host of chills ran down the back of my spine. He sounded almost as frightening as his father. “I don’t know what’s been going on these last few days, Abigail, but you’re going to fix this—now!”
Then all at once, it clicked.
My face lightened in surprise, then dulled with a kind of abstract disappointment.
“Oh gosh...you slept with her, didn’t you?”
It was probably the only thing I could have said to make him pause. At first, he just stared at me blankly, like I was making some kind of ill-timed joke. Then he leaned back with a look of revulsion so real, it had no place darkening his handsome face.
“You think...you think I had sex with that woman?”
I didn’t say a word. Anything I said at this point would just dig me in that much deeper. I stared at the crushed strawberry still clinging to his hair.
His eyes tracked mine, before suddenly understanding. Then flashing with fresh rage.
“I didn’t fuck her, Abby!” He leapt to his feet and gestured to his filthy clothes like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “She set me on fire!”
Chapter 20
I STARED AT NICK. HE stared back at me. A glop of jelly fell off his face
Uh...twenty seconds, Abby. Go?
My mouth opened, but the words failed me. The longer he stood there, glaring, looking like some kind of Greek god who got pushed into a swamp—the harder it became. In the end, it was all I could do to clarify.
“Alright,” I tried to sound as pragmatic as I could, “so when you say fire—”
“It was a real fire, Abby.”
“Like...a fire kind of fire?”
“Yes.”
“Little flames and everything?”
His eyes narrowed, glittering dangerously in the dark.
“If you make a joke right now—I will smother you with your own pillow...which SUCKS, by the way.”
No, we wouldn’t want that.