Page 47 of We Could Be So Good
“I hope—I hope you—I hope it’s good,” Nick says stupidly.
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry I put pepper in the eggs,” Nick blurts out, apologizing for the one thing he can apologize for without making everything worse. Andy’s Presbyterian; he can barely handle a shake of black pepper and Nick knows better. “Do you want me to make you something else? A fried egg, maybe?”
Andy’s expression softens, and it’s only then that Nick realizes Andy’s been looking—not annoyed, but agitated. Anxious. “No,” Andy says. “I really wasn’t hungry. The eggs were fine.”
“Okay.” Nick isn’t convinced. Andy does the dishes—that’s his job, because Nick cooks—and Nick takes a shower. He turns the tap until the water is as hot as he can stand it, then shampoos the hell out of his hair.
When he gets out, Andy is on the couch watching television.
“What’re you watching?” Nick asks as he sits on the couch beside Andy.
“Alfred Hitchcock Presentsis about to come on,” Andy answers without turning his head.
Something isn’t right. Andy is sitting upright, instead of turning to stick his feet under Nick’s thigh or putting his legs over the arm of the sofa or otherwise abusing both the furniture and his spine.
“I really am sorry about the eggs,” Nick says.
Andy clenches his jaw. “I told you that I don’t care about the eggs. Can we just watch the show?”
Nick wants to say that no, they cannot watch the show, not when things are weird and Andy seems mad at him. But he isn’t going to get anywhere by pestering Andy.
“You hate this show,” Nick points out after about thirty seconds. Andy likes sitcoms and shows about dogs, not this creepy shit.
Andy rubs his temple. “But you like it. Watch the fucking show, Nick!”
Nick’s heart is racing. That’s maybe the second time he’s ever heard Andy swear. What he needs to do is act normal and just wait this out. He can do that.
This episode is about a reporter who’s investigating a wax museum. “How come we never get sent to report on haunted museums?” Nick asks. “Just crime scenes and fires and building collapses. Never a haunting.”
“First of all, we don’t know that it’s haunted.”
“Come on, why would you have a show about a non-haunted wax museum?”
“Second, I’m pretty sure that if you find a haunted museum in the tristate area, Jorgensen will let you stay overnight and—oh.” They both stop talking as a wax figure comes to life.
“Never mind. I love crime scenes and fires and building collapses.”
“Me too. They’re the best.”
By the time they go to bed, things are maybe normal? Or almostnormal? Nick can’t tell. He’s too anxious to do anything but call out a hasty good-night and shut his bedroom door.
***
Nick wakes to an empty apartment. It’s quiet. Peaceful, even, without Andy dropping cans of shaving cream and begging for more coffee.
Nick hates it.
He checks the sink and it’s totally empty, not even a coffee cup in there, which means Andy somehow managed to leave the apartment without coffee and without waking Nick up.
Nick hates that, too. If Andy mentioned needing to wake up early, Nick would have gotten up along with him, would have put on a pot of coffee.
But that’s probably the sort of thing Nick shouldn’t do. He needs to try to be a normal friend, not an overly clingy basket case who tries to put the moves on his best friend.
It was smart for Andy to leave. Nick made things weird, and Andy got some distance so that when he returns, they can forget about it. This is Andy being smart about people, as usual. Nick tells himself that he ought to be grateful that Andy knows how to handle this gracefully.
He hasn’t lost anything. He isn’t any worse off than he was yesterday morning, and he tells himself this very sternly as he gets dressed. If he’s disappointed, that’s on him, not on Andy. His feelings are his own problem, and he has plenty of practice keeping his feelings to himself.
