It was bad.
No, it was worse than that.
It was real bad.
"Jack for breakfast, how original." I should have kept it to myself, but it'd been a month of the same and I couldn't help it.
"Oh look, a giant fucking dork with a mommy complex, how original," Alice shot back, cradling her half-empty bottle of bourbon.
I let the quip slide. It hadn't been worth picking fights with her for several weeks already.
"You gonna put some pants on today, chief?" I asked. I paid for the mistake instantly.
"Chief? Fucking CHIEF? What am I, your brother? Call me fucking chief again and see what happens you gigantic fucking...dork!" She spat viperously from our living room sofa.
"You already called me a dork," I pointed out, rifling through the fridge for something to take to work.
"Shut up," she replied sullenly. I busied myself with making a terrible little sandwich with my back turned to her. Abruptly, a wadded-up sock hit me squarely in the back of the head.
I took a breath to steady myself, not daring to turn towards her. "Do you need something?"
She said nothing. I could feel her eyes burrowing drunkenly into my back. Her other sock sailed past my head and careened off the microwave. She was obviously trying to bait my attention. It would have been a little pathetic if it wasn't so cute.
I turned to look.
"Eat my pussy? Please?" She put on a needy little pout and beat her mascara-laden eyelashes dramatically. I blinked away my patient disbelief at her swinging mood.
"I thought I was a dork?"
"You are!" She returned playfully with a small hiccup.
"You want a dork going down on you?"
"You were still a dork last night and that didn't stop you!"
"You pulled your pants down and sat on my face while I was sleeping in my own bed, that's not the same thing; you can't plant your ass on someone's face and say they 'went down on you.'"
She blinked at me in slow-dawning comprehension. "Yeah, well...you still did it! I felt some tongue down there!"
I sighed softly and returned to my turkey BLT, pursing my lips to keep myself silent as I heard Alice tip the 40 to her lips again. Unemployment definitely did not suit her.
It had been the same all month. The pouty fits, the misdirected bratty insolence, the little tantrums over nothing that resulted in slammed doors and blaring death metal. I don't even think she'd tugged so much as a pair of sweatpants over her fat, pale ass in the last two weeks. I knew that bartending had been a good gig for her, but I didn't expect her to take it so hard when the well dried up.
That said, the sex was still...unhinged.
"I'm thinking of going out with the guys after work," I announced into the pregnant quiet of the room while stuffing my sandwich into a baggie. Alice said nothing. "Did you hear me? I might be late getting..."
The face that I turned back to was abject misery.
"Alice, it's not..."
"You hate me!" she accused.
"You know I don't."
"You're embarrassed of me!"
"Not in the slightest."
"Well! You- why won't you come home to me then?"
"It's just a few beers after work; it's not like I'm moving out."
"Moving out! Why would you even say that?"
"Al, come on," I plead, running low on patience for these uncharacteristic outbursts. For a woman ten years my senior, this was all starting to feel a little childish.
"I hate when you call me 'Al', it makes me feel like a trucker," she pouted.
"A trucker? I mean, you do love to carry my loads." The joke was corny, but they usually worked. A small grin that she fought to conceal told me I'd succeeded. "What? Did I say something?"
"Shut up," she said, clutching a pillow to her heavy chest. "You're stupid."
"Yeah," I sighed affectionately, "I guess I am."
The whiskey-glazed look she gave me was enough to convince me she'd be okay as long as I kept coming home to her.
"But no girls!" she spat abruptly as I collected my bag to leave.
"Eh?"
"No girls, got it? Or I'll go out and meet some...some boys!"
"Some boys? What are you, twelve?" I laughed, leaning over to give her a kiss before I left. The fumes of her breath could have stripped paint off a lead boiler.
"Try twice that," she laughed, turning her face up to meet me.
"Try almost three times that; you're terrible at math," I laughed as I pecked her forehead.
"Oh. Right," she said sheepishly. "But I could though."
I scooped my keys off the stand by the door, not willing to let myself walk into another nothing-tiff. "Could what?"
"Meet someone."
It wasn't bait. I didn't think it was anyway. She'd been fragile since losing her job, which felt wrong on someone like her. This was just another part of her midlife crisis, part of the coping. "I suppose you could, if you wanted." It stung to hear, but she didn't mean it. It was just the truth.
She didn't like the answer but bit back a retort in favor of more self-deprecation. "Ah well, who'd have me, hey? Imagine, a washed-up goth-turned-housewife. Ha! Wouldn't that be something!"