You Deserve Each Other (You Deserve Each Other, #1)

by Sarah Hogle

His wicked laugh shivers against my neck. “There is no Secret Santa.” I rip away to study him, my fingers curling around his collar. “What?” He doesn’t reply, so I tap his shoulder with the back of my hand. “No, seriously. What?”

Skittles. A pen and notepad from a Holiday Inn, top sheet containing a smiley face I drew. I pick up a disposable straw wrapper and am about to drop it when I see that the ends are tied together. And I remember.

And he’d kept it. He easily could have thrown it out when we moved, but here it sits. Nicholas’s secret sentimentality.

I root through the cabinets and come up with a bag of cough drops, so I leave those on the table for him, too. “Just had to get that canoe, didn’t you,” I murmur to myself, padding into the drawing room. I sneak behind his desk to look outside and almost gasp.

No way in hell. There’s only one way to stop him, so that’s the way I’ve got to go. I reach for my coat and hat in the closet but see his coveralls and raise an eyebrow in consideration. It might not be a bad idea to wear something a little more heavy-duty. After I tug my Ghostbuster gear on and roll up the pant legs about a mile until the cuffs no longer drag, I decide to go the whole hog and grab his hideous earflap hat, too. It smells like him, which is oddly comforting

Once I’m all bundled up, I grab the keys to his Jeep and throw three different shovels into the back. Three shovels, because they’re different sizes and I’m ashamed to say I’ve never shoveled snow before so I don’t know which I’ll want to use. Nicholas does all our shoveling. I don’t think that’s a fact I’ve appreciated until now: he always shoveled a pathway from our porch to my car when we lived at the old house. He never asked me to do it instead, not even once. As a matter of fact, he scraped ice off my doors and windshields, too. He did it before he left for work, before I woke up.

I drive very, very slowly to Mr. and Mrs. Rose’s house on Sycamore Lane. Only the main road has been visited by a salt truck, but the Jeep is a total champ and never slides. I am behind the wheel of Nicholas’s Jeep that he bought without telling me and have entirely too much time alone with the disturbing revelation that I’m an asshole.

Not today, dickheads! Today you’re getting a substitute who’s incompetent at best when it comes to manual labor, and you can just deal.

Their driveway is personally cruel to me right away, a crust of ice eating one of my shovels. I dig back in, nose dripping like a faucet, face a frozen block of “Why, god, why” while the rest of my body melts like a candle in these coveralls. This is the pits. This is some goddamn bullshit. I call my present situation every curse word I can come up with. Sometimes Nicholas is over here well before he has to go to work, and I mentally run through that timeline. In order to shower and get to Rise and Smile at seven, that means he’s doing this in the dark. I’m so pissed on his behalf that I shovel faster.

There’s so much snow to clear, I’m too daunted to be methodical about it and scoop at random, flinging it over my shoulder. Deborah and Harold aren’t getting neat borders of snow on either side of the drive. They’re getting carnage. It occurs to me that if I come back again next time it snows and do another piss-poor job, Nicholas will be off the hook. Mr. and Mrs. Rose will beg me to stop. They’ll hire a snowplow guy.

The rest of the driveway practically shovels itself as I zone out, thinking about Nicholas. Next time he comes over here to shovel, I should tag along to help out. We’ll get it done in half the time. Whatever muscles aren’t numb are aching when I climb into the Jeep. I’ve been here for two hours. I’m positive it doesn’t take Nicholas longer than an hour to achieve the same, if not better, results. When I pull out of the driveway, I honk twice for good-bye because I imagine that’s what Nicholas probably does.

When the Jeep shivers up the driveway, I can see Nicholas waiting for me behind the screen door. As I start to carry in the food and medicine, he runs out in his slippers. “Get back inside!” I order. “You need help.” “You need to sit down. You’re sick.”

I’m amused at the way he keeps gaping at me, completely boggled. Deborah must have called him already with a full report. Hills of snow all over the yard now, she just tossed it anywhere. And then she drank all your hot chocolate! The good kind! “You didn’t have to do that,” he tells me when we get inside. “Shovel my parents’ driveway. Why did you?”

“If nobody showed up to shovel their driveway, your mom might be forced to do it herself. Deborah’s Gucci pantsuits? In this snow?” I chuckle dryly. “What a catastrophe. So I said, ‘Not on my watch, snow.’”

When I heave my sore body downstairs, Nicholas cries from another room, “Not yet! Hold on.” He clamps his hands over my eyes and nudges me into the kitchen, where I’m forced to wait in stupefied silence for ten minutes until he shouts hoarsely, “Okay! You can come in now.” “You need to save your voice,” I say as I walk toward the sound of his shuffling. I stop dead in the doorway of the drawing room. He’s rearranged it: taken out the TV and relocated his desk to a different wall. My desk is in here, too, flush with his rather than squashed into a drafty living room corner.

My shoes stacked beside his. My candles. His model train. His filing cabinet. My bookshelf, with a blend of my fiction and his non, his collection of fountain pens and my menagerie of Junk Yard curiosities. A marriage of personalities.

His eyes track me, absorbing every intricate change of my expression, so he notices when my gaze lands on the fireplace and my throat closes up. I feel a pressure in my sinuses, a punch...

What a silly thing to tear up over, a nutcracker. But I do.

Nicholas is feeling much better by the time evening rolls around, but he decides he doesn’t want to push his luck by going out in this weather, so we cancel dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Rose. I make grilled cheese, he heats up tomato soup, and we sit side by side on the couch to eat and watch The Office. It’s the best meal I’ve ever tasted.

He usually goes all out with big, homemade displays, but he’s spent all of November turning himself into the man on packages of Brawny paper towels and forgot.

I’m sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast when Nicholas comes through the back door. He’s in his coveralls, which I have a newfound respect for because I know how warm they keep you. He takes my favorite blue-green drinking glass down from the cupboard and fills it with two inches of water, then sets it beside my mug of tea. Inside it drops a wildflower. It’s a little worse for wear, having endured several frosts and a snowfall, but most of its petals are still intact. “Aww.” I smile in surprise. “It was growing inside the barn, up in the loft. Had to get a ladder to reach it.”

“Thanks. You shouldn’t have.” “Yeah, well. Thought it’d be nice.” “I really don’t need flowers.” His stare is a death sentence. “Never mind,” I’m quick to add. “I still want them sometimes, probably.”

The gesture of Nicholas seeing the flower, thinking about me, and going and getting a ladder in order to pick it is going to stay with me. Watching him drop it into my favorite blue-green drinking glass is going to stay with me.

“I thought we’d just go to Walmart in Beaufort.” He shoots me a strange look. “Haven’t you been badgering me to shop more locally? Going to Walmart for everything is the reason why all our stores in Morris have closed down.”

I’m a traitor to my principles when I reply, “Yeah, but the smaller stores are probably more expensive.” “It’ll be fine.” I’m grasping at straws. “We’re on a one-person income now.” “Relax, Naomi.” He parks and squeezes my hand, then slides out of the car.

“Should we use real vegetables instead? I thought plastic would be less wasteful. We could reuse them.” “For what?” “Maybe a diorama at the office.” Right. Eat your veggies, kids! Quite rich, coming from this man. His breath is a Twizzler.

“I want to look at everything they’ve got here first.” His eyes are round and marveling as they take in way too many options. He’s Martha Stewart now. I’ve lost him to the nuances between basket cornucopias and ones made of wire and we’ll be in here for two hours deliberating.

Twenty years later and with zero help from me, Nicholas has filled a basket with supplies to build our own birdhouse in the spring, which I can’t wait to see him never touch, plus a bunch of random bits and bobs marked down to fifty percent off. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do with it all, but he’s a sucker for those neon green discount stickers. “You never know,”

He needs an intervention.

“There will be no more attacks on Nicholas, you got me? I don’t want to hear this shit ever again.”

I invoke my inner Deborah Rose and scare myself to the core.

Nicholas decides to not be the bigger person and takes a penny from the take-a-penny, leave-a-penny station as we walk away. I’m in awe of his cattiness. “Enjoy your Thanksgiving!” he calls over his shoulder. “You two are assholes!” she calls back. “You deserve each other.” I send her a thumbs-up. “Thanks!”

“Whatever you want to do about Seth is your choice,” I say, “but if you ever need backup, I’m your girl. Say the word and I’ll scare him so bad, he’ll never step out of line again.”

Deborah eyes me curiously. “Doing what? Addressing the invitations?”

“Fishing,” I improvise. “In our canoe.”

I don’t blame him. The green beans suck.

She’s not addressing me, thirsting for a reaction from her son. I’m right about my hunch: this man’s in need of a rescue. It requires a different strategy than him rescuing me in Let’s Get Crafty. Mrs. Rose isn’t Melissa. I don’t give a single solitary shit what this woman thinks of me anymore, but Nicholas does, so I have to approach it with finesse. It’s going to cost pride points.

“For canoeing in, of course,” I tell her without a hint, even a whisper, of insincerity. Tonight, I am Shakespeare. “There’s all sorts of studies that say canoeing is good for you mentally and physically. They call it a ‘meditative sport.’” I don’t know if I’ve made up that terminology myself or if I’ve heard it somewhere and kept it around subconsciously, but either way I’m proud of myself for producing it on the spot. Meditative sport. Sounds legitimate as hell.

“I agree. Love is so important.” I’m not going to leave her alone for a second. I’m going to occupy every square inch of space in this conversation and for once in his life, Nicholas will be able to finish his food while it’s still warm. He won’t be squirting honey into his tea tonight to soothe his throat after two solid hours of talking, talking, talking. “It’s a shame Heather couldn’t be here. I’d love to finally meet her.”

I don’t dare look at Nicholas because I know if I do, whatever I see on his face is going to make me laugh.

Nicholas’s eyes are resting on me. They’re warm with gratitude, and that gratitude makes my exhaustion worth it. I’ll go ten more rounds with Mrs. Rose if it means I get another look like that at the end.

“She’s not drinking that crap,” Nicholas interjects. “Let her have a piece of cake.”

“I agree!” Harold pipes up. Her cheekbones flush with high color. “Shut up, Harold.” “Don’t you ‘Shut up, Harold’ me. I pay the salary of the woman who made this cake. I get to eat it.” He reaches out.

“Apologize to Naomi right now.” Deborah can’t close her mouth. Her face is the same color as her raspberry blouse, a seamless match.

“The dress is made to fit Naomi,” he snaps. “She isn’t made to fit the dress. She’s my fiancée, she’s beautiful and perfect, and I won’t have her spoken to like this by anyone, much less a member of my own damn family.”

“Pathetic,” Nicholas snarls. “You can’t treat my fiancée that way and expect to still be invited to the wedding.” I’m not sure whose gasp is loudest—mine, hers, or Harold’s.

He takes my face between his palms and says, “Don’t listen to my mother. You are perfect.” I look away, swallowing. “Thank you.” I offer him a small smile. “We made a good team back there.” “That’s the way it’s supposed to be,” he says.

I’ve got my face in my hands, so when a pair of arms wraps around me I’m not expecting it. His touch tugs all my threads loose, and I start crying into his shoulder. “It’s stupid to cry over this. I’m sorry.” “Hey,” he murmurs, nuzzling my temple. “It’s not stupid. You have nothing to be sorry for. These places are stupid.” “They’re not,” I sob.

“They are if they turn you down. I want to get into my car and go throw eggs at all of them.” My sob turns into a laugh, and the cheek he has resting against my hairline tightens, telling me he’s smiling.

“And I’d want to be here for you. Support you and make you feel better. I want you to tell me when you get bad news so that you’re not going through it alone.”