I chuckle hard because they used to bicker so much. It was like everything got on their nerves. I always wondered if it was because they had been together for so long.
“You need to march right up to him and tell him to stop his nonsense and tell you what’s wrong,” she snaps with a scoff.
Maybe Zayn outbursts are him bickering at me since we’ve been together for so long, too. But we haven’t been married nearly as long as my grandparents were married. Does it start this soon?
She squeezes my hand and shakes her head as if she knows what I’m thinking. Because both she and my grandpa would glare at me when I would laugh at them bickering back and forth. Their bickering was funny to me when I was younger. It’s not so funny now when I’m the one being bickered at.
Grandma knows best, or she should, with her long experience with marriage. She told me I had to keep at him, so I am. I square my shoulders as I walk into the house and through the mudroom. The sound of the TV echoes through the house. As I walk closer to him, the scent of his fresh-smelling body wash drifts toward my nose.
“Can we talk?” I ask firmly as I sit on the couch.
He reaches for the remote and turns the TV off. He leans his head toward me with a blank stare on his face.
“What’s been going on?” I ask with a calmer tone, trying to keep the situation light, even though, for me right now, it’s not.
“Where have you been?” he asks.
I squint at him, thrown off by his question. After all his little outbursts, he wants to ask me questions. I sit in silence waiting for him to answer but from the looks of it, he’s not going to answer my question. “My grandma’s. Now are you going to answer my questions?”
“Nothing,” he says and stares at the black screen on the TV.
“What do you mean, nothing?” I scoff. “You’ve been an asshole lately.”
Maybe asshole wasn't the right word to say if I'm trying to get answers. But I'm so infuriated right now. It came out without me thinking.
He rubs his head, his nose crinkling as if he’s uncomfortable. “We’ve already been through this,” he says, his voice laced with exhaustion.
I cross my legs on the couch and face him. “Yeah, and I told you to talk to me instead of acting like this.”
He leans his head against the couch and sighs. “Yeah. I know.”
Silence fills the air once again. I watch him, waiting for more to come from him.
“So why haven’t you?”
He leans his head up and faces me. “It’s nothing really. It’s just work,” he says quickly.
Again with the work, but he won’t tell me exactly what. Last time I drove by his truck was there. So, I don’t think he got fired. “Did you get fired?” I press anyway.
“No.” He huffs like he’s offended I would ask that.
“Then what?” I press again, refusing to give up until I get an answer that makes sense.
His head snaps toward me, his jaw tightening again. My eyes widen until he sighs again while loosening his jaw as if he’s realizing he’s about to have another outburst.
“It’s not that big of a deal. I don’t know why it’s bothering me so much to act like this,” he says. “Why do you have to keep asking?”
“You won’t talk to me, you’re barely here, and when you are, you’re rude. So can you blame me for asking more than once?”
He looks away, his hand rubbing the back of his neck. “I didn’t know I was being that rude.”
I laugh bitterly, shaking my head. “How can you not? You apologized for it once.”
He breaks eye contact with me and doesn’t respond right away. But then he looks back at me, his eyes softer. “It’s not you,” he says with a softer tone. “I don’t want you to think it’s you.”
“Then tell me what it is,” I say, leaning closer to him.
He reaches for my hand and pulls me to him, wrapping his arms around me. “I promise it’s nothing. Derek is on our asses a lot about our work performance, so I’ve been staying later and going in earlier.”
