“Gucci loafers? So tacky! You take that back.”
He said it again and I threw a fry.
He put his palms in the air. “Don’t blame the weatherman for the forecast. I know how these things go. People pair off with their opposite shoe.”
“What?”
“Someone opposite, but not foundationally different. Caroline and Chase are opposites. He’s got a silver spoon stuck up his ass?—”
“I think you’re mixing metaphors.”
He shrugged this off. “—and she’s a messy flirt. But they’re not different. They both love when Caroline is the center of attention, they like the energy of a big city, and they love their jobs, and bossing other people around. They’re opposite, but they’re still the same. A right shoe and a left shoe.”
“That’s … actually quite profound.”
“On the other hand, you and me”—he swung his index finger between us—“are not that. We’re two left shoes. We’re too similar in the wrong ways. Both loud and intense and reckless. But different in the important ways. You like fashionable people, cities with rats the size of dogs, and sharing every detail of your life with strangers—which I think is fucking bananas, by the way. I like my small town, and my animals, and being here for my dad. And getting laid. I love getting laid. So, if I have an opposite shoe—and I’m not sure I do—but if; then she’s probably a children’s party princess. And I’ll have to make my peace with that.”
I didn’t know what to say. The passion simmering behind his words was unexpected. I had no idea that he’d given so much thought to the relationships around him or his hypothetical compatibility with other people. I thought he was just a good-time guy. He said he was a good-time guy.
And just like that, I viscerally hated Elsa. This wasn’t very girl’s girl of me, but I couldn’t help it. I hated all party princesses now, and probably would for life.
“Anyway,” he shrugged, unaware of the lifelong grudge he’d just awoken in me. “It’s getting dark.”
Mike crumpled up the fish and chip paper and tucked it under his arm, brushing loose grass off his knees as he stood. He said nothing more about his shoe theory.
Inside, Mike rinsed the plates that were left in the sink—I realized they were mine from this morning, and I probably should have done that. Guiltily, I cast my mind around for something to do, to show I was trying to help and that maybe we weren’t bad-same after all.
My eyes landed on a mug on the windowsill, and I remembered there was another on the coffee table in the lounge … and one from this morning that he’d left in the bathroom. I made him wait as I went around the house and collected every mug, jostling them until they fit in the already full dishwasher. He smiled in thanks, and as the dishwasher gurgled in the background, he boiled the kettle to make another cup of lemon tea—in a mug that would no doubt spend days sitting where it was discarded. I resolved that mug-watch would be my responsibility while I was here. It was something he clearly sucked at which wasn’t hard for me, so I would fill the gap.
It was unusual for Mike to be silent for so long. Unusual for me too. The weight of every half-formed thought I had was like a marching beat on the inside walls of my brain.
Eventually, I screwed my courage to the sticking place.
“Mike, about what happened in the car?—”
“Let’s not, Lyssa.”
I was going to press, but his expression was closed, and he wasn’t meeting my eyes. He finished making us tea and wished me a good night. He smiled as he said it, but he couldn’t hide the subdued air that had settled over him.
Alone in his turquoise kitchen, I slumped down at the table and laid my head in my arms, blinking at the dark sky visible through his curtainless sliding door. The space really needed some nice floor-to-ceiling drapes—maybe in a nice butter yellow. I shook my head, trying not to let the decor distract me.
Getting physical with Mike had been my plan to unlock my sexuality and reinvent my public persona. It couldn’t have gone worse—instead of Mike fixing me, I felt like I’d broken him.
CHAPTER 11
MIKE
Lyssa didn’t keep trying to bring up what happened. At breakfast, she ate the eggs I fixed us one-handed while editing a video on her laptop—hopefully not the porno she’d filmed in my ute, although I couldn’t see her screen to confirm. After breakfast, she surprised the hell out of me by collecting up all the dishes, even disappearing from the kitchen and reappearing with the mug of water I’d taken to the bedroom last night.
To reduce the risk of saying anything else about shoes or subway rats, I went and took refuge in my shed, where I was building an oversized dog kennel for Mini Mike.
I wasn’t hiding.
I was working.
I hammered some stuff and drilled some other stuff. Honestly, I wasn’t a very good builder—measuring was annoying, so I eyeballed it. The more time I spent on the project, the less the timber resembled an actual structure. But I kept working. When it stood—admittedly with a Tower of Pisa kind of slant—I cracked a tin of red paint and started slathering it on.
This situation with Lyssa was cooking me.
