You Deserve Each Other

by Sarah Hogle

I’ve been stewing in all the ways I’ve been wronged for so long now that my simmering resentment has outgrown itself to taint everything about him, even the innocent parts. In spite of everything, I’m such a caring person that I bottle up my negative feelings and don’t share them with him.

After a break of two minutes, he adds: If it HAD been oleander, burning it would’ve been a really stupid idea. JSYK. Oleander’s toxic. He’s Googled it, too. There’s no way he knew that off the top of his head. Nicholas is fond of researching things and pretending that whatever obscure trivia he unearths is common knowledge. He watches Jeopardy! to show off (and because he’s an eighty-year-old man trapped in the body of a Disney prince), getting a high every time he delivers the correct answer before a contestant does. Then he glances sideways at me to make sure I’m impressed. If I get up to leave the room, he pauses the show until I return so that I don’t miss a moment of his genius.

He’s in the trees.

It feels so lovely to be good to each other.