Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 75289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 376(@200wpm)___ 301(@250wpm)___ 251(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 376(@200wpm)___ 301(@250wpm)___ 251(@300wpm)
Thank fuckkkk for the towel mountain.
She sticks her index finger into her mouth and bites nervously at the nail. “I swear I wasn’t trying to kill you. Death by housekeeping. I just…grabbed the wrong stuff. I’ll show it to you downstairs.” I didn’t think it was possible for her face to screw up further, but her frown lines get frown lines on top of frown lines, and her eyes both twitch at the same time. Her jaw pretty much bangs down to her chest. “Fuck! Downstairs! The meatballs!”
She’s gone in a blur of auburn curls, denim, and water droplets.
I drag myself out of the shower with extra care, throw the towels down on the bathroom floor, and get my sore ass into the bedroom. I think I’m going to have bruised butt cheeks, but it could be so much worse. I could have cracked my skull open, broken my wrist or ankle, snapped something, twisted something, or pulled this or that. I’ll take a few bruises over surgery and months in a cast.
I dry off, throw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and hobble downstairs, trying not to wince at the shooting pains from my gluteus maximus becoming a maximus pain in the assimus with every step.
The shower scene upstairs, which was not nearly as sexy as the way that sentence sounds in my head, is nothing compared to the disaster in the kitchen.
Amalphia is standing by the stove and bawling over the blackened, smoking, charred remains of what looks to have been meatballs. There’s a puddle of water on the floor from a pot that’s boiled over, and two of the dish towels are singed. I’m guessing she had to smother flames.
Her huge, tear-stained eyes and puffy cheeks hit me straight in the gut after she rips her hands away at the sound of my footsteps entering the kitchen.
“I…I…don’t even know w-what t-to s-say,” she sobs. The tears keep coming, washing down her face at an alarming rate.
I didn’t even know it was possible to cry that hard.
I hold up a hand, but it just makes her sob harder. The instinct to take her in my arms and comfort her slams into me with brute force, but I can’t do that. Lines. Boundaries. They’re there for a reason.
Her small shoulders wrench up and down, her chest puffs in and out, and the sounds wrenched from her throat are like something close to a dying goose, and they can’t be anything less than painful. When she rubs her hands over her face, she smears tears and snot together.
“I…s-swear I wasn’t trying to kill you or burn down your house.”
She suddenly rushes off, but she only goes to the cleaning closet in the kitchen and basically thrusts a bottle at me.
“This is what I used,” she murmurs.
I glance down at the thing. The words clean, shine, and polish stand out alongside bright, restore, and sparkle, but so do the words wood and furniture.
“Yeah…that’s furniture wax,” I tell her softly, though I almost don’t have the heart to do it.
Her wail of straight despair makes me wish I’d kept my mouth shut.
I close the gap between me and the stove instead. I’m going to have to throw out both the frying pan and the pot, but the water on the floor and the mess on the stove can be scrubbed up.
“Hey, it’s alright. The kitchen didn’t burn down, the stove is fine, the food can be replaced, and a fall is nothing major. Everything is fine,” I soothe. Or rather try to.
“It’s not fine!” she sob-screams.
“It really is all good.”
“Not until I clean up this mess, it’s not! You shouldn’t have to come home to this. Oh my god, I’m so, so stupid. Everyone always said so, and it’s true. Who uses furniture wax on a shower? Only someone with two brain cells would be that dumb.”
There’s beating yourself up in the heat of the moment, and then there’s whatever Amalphia is doing right now. Whatever is bubbling up feels like a long, ingrained nastiness that’s been festering for years.
And I don’t like it.
I don’t like it one fucking bit.
Is it wrong that I want to hunt down anyone and everyone who has ever made her feel like the things she just said are true and then turn my man cave into a real dungeon?
Okay, yeah, it’s wrong, but the intrusive thoughts infiltrate my brain and refuse to let up. I won’t kill anyone. I’ll just lock them down in what is actually a very nice, finished spot of the house and force them to watch really bad movies on rerun while making them eat overripe bananas. Is there anything worse? Wait, liver. Brussel sprouts. The weird tinned fish that’s not tuna or salmon.
I shove all that aside and do the one thing I can think of doing in order to stop the meltdown that’s in full swing.