Page 81 of Fox
Christ on a crutch!
Week four, things get worse.
And that’s because Fox doesn’t leave. He stops going home.
It starts one day when he comes up to the apartment, sits on the couch with me while I read a book, like we’re back at our place, where I would read a book and he watched a game, and then, depending upon how we were feeling, we ended up making love on the couch or the floor and then again in bed.
We can’t do that because Dina is at home, and I think that’s the only thing that’s stopping me from climbing my husband like a tree, like Annie would like to do.
“I don’t feel like driving home. I’ll sleep here,” he announces.
“No way.”
“Dina, you okay with me sleeping here?” he calls out.
My traitorous bitch of a friend, who is in her bedroom, pops her head out. “I don’t care.”
“You’re not sleeping in my bed,” I assert because I want him to sleep in my bed, make love with me, and hold me.
I think again about Dina’s question:why am I being such a hardass about this?
I don’t really know, but it feels wrong to give in.
How can he go from saying he can’t love me to saying he loves me?
It makes no sense, and it’s hard for me to believe it, and then I get afraid that if I do believe him, I’m going to get my heart broken again.
I can’t go through that again—the devastation was so enormous and crushing.
“Fox can take the couch. It’ll be fine.” Dina sounds a bit too cheerful as she stands in her doorway, watching us with the same fondness she shows pheasants I order during hunting season.
“It’s not going to be fine,” I retort.
“The couch is fine,” Fox assures me, from the other side of this conversation, where I have a feeling he has been invited by Dina without consulting me, because Dina has fully defected. “I’ve slept on worse.”
“You have not slept on worse,” I grit out. “You grew up in Belle Meade.”
He gives a careless shrug. “There were camping trips with the Bennett men. I slept in a lot of terrible conditions in the service of masculine tradition.”
“That’s not?—“
Dina walks out of her bedroom and heads straight to the front door.
“Lucy.” Dina picks up her keys. “I am going to Annie’s to watch a movie. The apartment is yours. Figure it out.”
She goes out the door and down the string-light staircase.
Fox and I look at each other.
“She’s very decisive. I like her,” he says.
“She’s a traitor,” I retort.
“She loves you, “ he insists.
I sleep in my bed.
He sleeps on the couch.
