Marital Bitch(29)

CHAPTER TWELVE

(Colleen)





Game on, Patrick.





EARLIER IN THE week I had promised myself that I would try in mine and Brad’s marriage. Every morning when he wakes up for work, before he puts his suit on, Brad makes us both a cup of coffee. It tastes like crap, but it’s the thought that counts. By the time he leaves, I’m just barely stirring in bed. Normal husbands would kiss their wife goodbye. Mine tells me to get out of bed and then smacks my ass. Four mornings in a row and I have yet to learn to get out of bed before I hear his footsteps trudging up the stairs.

Every night I make sure Brad has dinner. Some nights I just order from some place I know he likes; pizza or hot wings or something like that. Other nights I try to actually cook. My skills are limited, though. His schedule is hectic. I never know if he’s going to come home in time for dinner or not. The nights he doesn’t, I fix him a plate and put it in the microwave before I head up to his bedroom that I’m slowly, but purposefully, taking over. When Brad finally gets home and crawls into bed, I curl up against him.

I think we’re working on some sort of record because we haven’t fought since the day Thomas made me sign that stupid performance contract and that was nearly a week ago. When Brad found out about it, first he chastised me for not being smarter.

I thought all you Harvard grads were supposed to be smart, Colleen!

This shit ain’t legal. What’d you let that prick boss ya around for, huh?

You want me to talk to him? I’m gonna talk to him. This is bullshit.

I didn’t want to hear it. Signing the paper, accepting Thomas’s words as gospel, and showing him that I have no backbone had been eating away at me since I told Brad. Oh, he was livid. I swear, if you’re not from the neighborhood, you can’t understand a damn thing Brad says when he gets mad.

After questioning my intelligence, he went about swearing in Gaelic and kicking things. He asked why I signed the contract. Through streaming tears I managed to tell him that I was scared of losing my job and not being able to pay the mortgage on my condo, thus losing that, too. I did, however, leave out the paralyzing fear of my inability to pay back my two hundred grand of student loan debt. Brad knows it’s high, but he doesn’t know it’s that high. If he found out, he would have told me that nothing is worth that kind of debt, but I digress.

So, it’s Saturday morning and I woke up to a hard smack on my ass at an ungodly hour. The sun wasn’t even up yet. The only positive thing about Brad having to be at work so early is that unless something happens on one of his cases, he comes home early, too.

I formulate a plan for the day. I want to clean up some and get the husband’s laundry done and his suits to the cleaners. I’m sucking up, I totally am. I’m trying to seduce my husband through starched shirts and clean dishes. We’ve been so busy this week that the sex issue hasn’t come up again. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself because if I don’t wholeheartedly believe that Brad is too busy to rub himself against me then I’m going to feel rejected. It’s one thing to be rejected by a guy you just met, it’s quite another to be rejected by your best friend.

As it turns out, Brad isn’t very messy; but every room I’ve been in looks like a tornado has hit it. I never really noticed how tidy he is in comparison. I’m hit with a sense of guilt for always looking at him like he’s some sort of pig.

I take the time to unpack as much of my stuff as I can. There’s extra space on the bookshelves in the living room, so I fill that up. With some creative reorganization I manage to fit all of my cooking utensils in the cramped galley kitchen. My pots and pans happily cohabitate with his and I’m not the least concerned with ever having to figure out what belongs to whom. When Brad left for work today, the house was his. When he comes home tonight, it will be ours. I sound like an idiot, I’m sure, but I don’t care. I’m staking my claim.

After the kitchen, I find myself even enjoying finding room for my clothes in his tiny closets and already full drawers. I shove everything over in his sock and boxer-briefs’ drawer to make room for my socks. I can’t bring myself to put my panties or bras in there just yet—not before Brad actually gets in my panties, anyway.

Unpacking doesn’t take very long and before I know it I’m on to the very last box, which just has DVDs in it. It turns out, I don’t have very much stuff; and I’m grateful that whoever packed it up was methodical and organized about it. I’m guessing it was the husband. Thinking over how neat he organizes everything—something I hadn’t realized about him before—I wonder what else I don’t know about him.