19
Igot to my feet and began to pace around the apartment. I was exhausted already, and the day had only just begun. I always ended up feeling the same way when I worked from home, antsy and as though there was a fly up my ass keeping me from getting settled.
Stretching, I headed over to the window. Maybe I was just missing Amaya. I was used to having her around the apartment, but since I had started ducking work to avoid my sister, I’d been around the house a lot more by myself, and I was missing the hell out of her.
I had been ducking out of the office as much as I could recently, hoping Cleo wouldn’t catch on to my game and figure out she was the reason I had barely spent a minute in there the last week or so. She had been haranguing me about getting Amaya out for a trip together, and the last thing I needed was my new wife heading out on the town with my sister and her friends. Cleo had given me a lot of talk about taking her out to a club, and I had a feeling she wasn’t talking about the local golf club. I saw the pictures. I knew what she and her friends got up to when they were around town, and the last thing I needed was for Amaya to get caught up in the midst of that. She had just made a good impression on my family, and given that they always disapproved of what Cleo was up to, it was best I kept them apart for now.
I knew she wouldn’t hunt me down to the apartment, but she might have followed me down to the office to annoy me there. She was curious about Amaya, that much was for sure, but I wanted to keep them apart for now. If anyone was going to pick away that façade we had worked so hard to keep up, it would be Cleo. She had a habit of squirming into my life and getting the measure of things before even I could, and that was the last thing I needed right then and there.
“Hmm,” I sighed as I paused in front of one of the pictures Amaya had hung up for me. It really did look so much better in here now that she had tried her hand at decorating it. My nonna had always told me a wife would turn this place around in no time, and she had been right. Even if Amaya was only playing the part, she was doing everything she needed to.
I knew she’d only asked me to lend her a car, but I had managed to pay off a local garage to fix up her car. And not just the damages that would get it back on the road. No, I didn’t want her driving around a deathtrap a moment longer, so I’d pretty much handed over as much cash as it would take to get the thing redone from top to bottom. She would barely recognize it when it was done, but that was kind of the point. I wasn’t sure why I’d felt such an urge to help her. Maybe I was starting to see the good she was doing on my own life and was paying that back the only way I knew how, by throwing money at whatever issues she had going on.
It was arriving back today, and I was looking forward to surprising her with it. Though she had picked out a seriously nice car from my collection to drive in the meantime. Maybe she wouldn’t want to go back to her old vehicle. I had considered having it set up to fit her sister in the back when she wanted to take her out, but I could suggest that to her later. I wanted to show her I was in this for the long haul, the whole year. If we were going to be married, then we were going to do it as properly as we could.
I still found myself thinking about that first night with her sometimes, what I couldn’t remember. I had assumed something would start coming back to me over the weeks, but I still couldn’t remember a damn thing. It would have bothered the hell out of me if I didn’t think she was going to find her way into bed with me once again. She had been far from resistant. That evening in the cinema, she had practically melded herself into my shoulder, so reluctant was she to let go. I caught her looking at me once in a while, when I strolled past her casually topless and fresh out of the shower, and I recognized that look on her face any day of the week. I had been with enough women to know what lust looked like, and I was hoping she would come to terms with it sooner rather than later. When we had been putting up pictures in that bedroom together, it had taken all I had in me not to push her on to the bed and push my tongue into her mouth and see what memories we could bring back together.
I realized I was still just standing there, staring out of the window like an idiot. She had this kind of impact on me, where the logical part of my brain dropped out the back of my head completely. I shook my head and went to turn back to my office, but before I could, my cell rang, and I answered it at once. Probably someone from the office wondering where the hell I had been these last few days.
“Hello?”
“Hi, this is Kristo Balaban,” I replied smoothly. Even though I had been working in a pair of sweats all day, the person on the other end of the line didn’t have to know I’d been anything other than professional.
“Yes, we have the car you sent to the shop ready,” the voice replied. “Do you want us to drop it off? If you’re home now—”
“Yes, please do,” I said. “How long will you be?”
“Ten minutes?”
“Perfect, see you soon,” I replied and hung up the phone. I stretched and stepped away from the window, wondering how long I’d just been standing there thinking about her. Best not to linger on it. Any longer, at least.
I waited outside for the car to arrive and tipped my face up to the sun. The warm light on my face made me feel the way I did in her presence, soothed, comfortable, at peace. She seemed to ground me in a way no other person had in my entire life to date, to bring me back down to Earth when I needed it. To remind me there was a world outside the office, outside my family.
The car arrived, and it looked way better than it had when I’d sent it off. I paid the guy who dropped it off, and he leaned on it for a moment and glanced up at my building.
“I gotta say, if I had your kind of money, I don’t think I’d be driving something like this,” he remarked. I shook my head.
“It’s not mine,” I replied. “It’s my wife’s.”
“Well, she’s lucky.” The guy grinned. “Got you to take care of it for her.“
“Yeah, guess she is,” I replied, and he chuckled and went on his way. I pulled the car into the garage and then headed back upstairs, intending to get back to work but instead finding my cell buzzing on the table when I came back through the door. I picked it up at once.
“Hey.” Amaya’s voice came down the line, and I wondered if I had manifested her by thinking hard enough.
“Amaya, hi,” I greeted her. “Everything all right?”
“No,” she sighed heavily. Her voice was imbued with annoyance, and it was clear something had pissed her off, and for a split second, I wondered if it was something I had done. Could she know about the car? But she hadn’t even seen it yet, so it couldn’t be that.
“I’m going to head back soon,” she continued. “If you’re home, could you order in some pizza and, like, all the beer? I could really use it.”
“Sure, I can,” I assured her. “When will you be back?”
“An hour or so,” she replied. “I’ll see you soon.”
“See you,” I responded, and the line went dead. I felt a little shiver of anger at whoever had pissed her off that badly, but I would deal with that when she came back. Right now, she needed me to step up and help her out, and I would do everything I could to make sure she ended the night feeling better than she started it.
I made my way to the fridge to check if we had all the beer we needed. I had been drinking a little more since I met her, but I didn’t mind. I liked the way the booze loosened my tongue when she was around, lifted some of those inhibitions that had been put in place as soon as I turned eighteen and had to step up and be the adult of the family. She made me feel safe enough to share myself in ways I hadn’t before, not with anyone. But she was my wife, after all. Maybe we were both playing parts.
As I got the apartment ready, I flicked back to what Amaya had said on the phone. She had called this place home. She had told me she would be home soon, referred to this place as her own. And that warmed me in ways I hadn’t thought possible before.
I called up the pizza place and ordered a large, split down the middle with her favorite toppings alongside mine. In fact, maybe that was the perfect metaphor for the ways things were between us right now, side by side, part of a whole, but still fundamentally different in ways we couldn’t quite put together yet.
But perhaps we would. I stood there, surveying the kitchen, a few beers out on the table and the pizza on its way, and grinned. It might not be what I had imagined life with my wife to be like, but it was something. More than something. More than I’d ever let myself think it might become. And that was working pretty well for me for the time being.