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“Fine,” I said. Then I sat up, “Why? Has she said anything to you?”
I hadn’t seen Nikki all day, she said she was going to go to the apartment to pack up their last things and start cleaning the place.
“I saw her this morning, she said everything went well.”
“Nothing else?”
“Like what?” Simone asked.
I didn’t want her catching on to my feelings for Nikki and had to play it down.
“It was a terrible week at work, I hardly saw her. Wondered how she was getting on?” I said.
“Jeez, dude, you live with the girl, just ask her!” Simone said.
But it wasn’t as easy as all that.
I ordered pizza for dinner and as I was waiting for the delivery guy, Nikki came in and fell down on the couch.
She looked exhausted.
I knew from my conversation with Simone that they had spent the day taking down curtains and washing windows and carpets.
“Do you want to have some pizza with us tonight?”
I could see her hesitating.
“You don’t have to, if you want to go out or something?”
“No, it’s fine,” she smiled. “I’m beat. Pizza sounds great.”
We ate in front of the TV. After the game, I fetched beers for Nikki and me and some soda for Zoë and we watched a movie about rabbits driving a poor farmer crazy by eating all his vegetables. I felt very sorry for the farmer, but I could tell that the mischievous rabbits were the intended heroes of the story.
Nikki got totally into the story with Zoë and the two of them were shocked when the farmer decided to get rid of the rabbits to protect his vegetables, a move I could totally sympathize with. In my head, I had a list of suggestions for him, most of them revolving around explosives and poisons, all of which were probably illegal. When I at some point mentioned some of my thinking out loud, accidentally, both Zoë and Nikki were horrified, pelting me with pillows to show their disgust at my thoughts.
“Rabbits are rodents,” I said to their cries of outrage.
“Rabbits are cute!” yelled Zoë.
“So cute,” emphasized Nikki. The two of them ganged up on me and I enjoyed watching them bond over their common enemy, me.
Even more than that, I liked the three of us watching TV together, having fun together, making jokes and laughing. It almost felt like a family. Or what I imagined families were like. My own family had not been like that. My dad walking out on us when Simone and I were little had resulted in my mother working hard and not being around a lot. She was a nurse and was always picking up double shifts, trying to make extra money while my father was out drinking and playing pool and pretending he didn’t have a family back home. They only got divorced when he wanted to marry a girl he’d picked up in a club. Our new stepmother was only a few years older than Simone and had no intention of playing happy families with us. They moved to Florida where her father had a car dealership and had offered my father a job. It was the kind of thing he’d be good at, my mother scoffed, bulshitting bullshitters about bullshit.
I used to watch other families in restaurants or at school events and I liked the banter and the teasing. My mother was usually too tired or too busy to go anywhere with us. I ended up burying myself in code and algorithms and math because it kept me distracted.
I enjoyed having Nikki around, though, but I knew she would probably be gone in a few months as soon as she had some exciting job lined up at a ski resort. I wondered what I could do to keep Nikki hanging around for longer, if I could make the job more exciting for her, more interesting.
At the end of the evening, I carried Zoë up to bed while Nikki tidied up the lounge.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said. “It is your day off, after all. Don’t want to work you too hard.”
Nikki smiled at me and stretched.
“How was the first week, by the way?” I asked her.
“I think all of us survived,” she said with a lazy smile and winked at me.
It must have been a joke, but I wasn’t entirely convinced.
