“Ouch!”
“Sorry.”
“Put your arm over here—”
“It doesn’t bend that way!”
They spent a few minutes twisting and turning, trying to find a position that would allow them to function, but it was no use. They were stuck.
“We’re just wasting time!” Olivia finally blurted when he tried to spin her in another useless dance move. “Stop!”
Chuck held still and huffed a tight breath, already frustrated. “We need a plan.”
“You’re right.” She twisted around in front of him, her back to his front, and her arm yanked around backward, so that she could see the boxes. “Which of these do we want the most because we’re probably only going to have time for one: couch, chair, or table?”
“Couch. Definitely couch.”
“Agreed. Let’s do the couch.”
“Great. Where do we start?”
“Well, I assume we need to open the box,” she said drolly.
“An attitude isn’t going to help anything right now,” he said, and set off for the kitchen to find a sharp object.
Olivia stumbled backward in his wake. “No, and neither is you yanking me around like a rag doll! Stop it!” She yanked on his arm with a sharp pull. “We areattached, Chuck!”
“Sorry. I’m not used to having to account forsomeone else,” he said, and yanked back. He pulled open a kitchen drawer to a useless pile of tea towels.
She scoffed. “That’s symbolic.”
“What does that mean?”
“Itmeansthat you often forget there areother peoplein the world beside yourself. Like ones who invite you to birthday parties for their grandmothers that you don’t show up for.”
“Oh, are youevergoing to let that go?” He pulled open another drawer and found pot holders and oven mitts. He moved to the drawers in the island and dragged Olivia behind him.
“I’ll let it go when you apologize andmean it.”
“Ididmean it! I apologized a hundred different ways, and you still refuse to forgive me. I swear, Olivia, sometimes I think you don’twantto forgive me.”
She gasped, offended. “What doesthatmean?”
He reached for yet another drawer, this one full of rubber bands and an array of plastic takeout silverware and chopsticks. Olivia wondered who’d put it all there and what this house had previously been used for. “It means that sometimes I think youliketo be mad at me. It gives you an excuse to push me away—and to run away from our problems.”
Growing tired of his search and their conversation, she tugged him back over near the fridge to the drawer where she’d found the lighter the night before. She pulled out the box cutter she’d seen and flipped up the blade. The overhead lights glinted off the sharp razor where she held it up between them. “Well, a lot of good running did me this time because look where we ended up.”
His eyes bounced from the blade to her. His chest pumped from shouting, and his nostrils flared. She could see the vein in his forehead that throbbed when they fought. She could have painted a portrait of him from memory.Angry Man during Fight with Girlfriend.Except this time, as he stared at her fuming, something soft cracked open in his eyes. Something fragile thatlooked almost…hopeful. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “Look where we ended up. Nowhere to go this time.”
Olivia wasn’t sure what he meant by it, but she saw the clock in the living room. They were down to fifty minutes. “Come on,” she said, and spun around to pull him in that direction.
She handed over the box cutter and let Chuck do the honors. When he cut open the couch’s box, dragging her hand along with his, the longest side of the cardboard fell forward like a drawbridge and set a flurry of Styrofoam beads broken off from the inner padding fluttering. The parts were efficiently packed inside like a jigsaw puzzle. They both stared at it, him facing forward, her from over her shoulder.
“This is going to take forever,” Chuck said.
“Forty-nine minutes!” TJ sang out from where he was gleefully watching the whole scene unfold.
Olivia spun around and dug the instruction manual out of the box. Of course, it was a dozen pages of uninterpretable diagrams and nothing more.