Five

“Well, what did you want me to say?” asked Abby. I considered going downstairs for some butter, to see if it would melt in her mouth, but I was too tired. Stephanie had left, and we were in our bedroom, getting ready for bed a good two hours later than we’d expected.

“I was hoping you’d come up with a reason I can’t write a story about something I can’t possibly know about for a editor I don’t know, whose arm is getting twisted to hire me, at a magazine I’ve never worked for before. That’s all.” We start getting ready for bed most nights by making the bed, since we almost never do that when we get up in the morning.

“I thought you’d want to write it,” Abby said. She pulled the sheet smooth on her side, and started straightening out the blanket. “For crying out loud, Aaron, they pay two dollars a word, and you’ve got to figure this is at least a 3,000-word piece. That’s a nice chunk of change.” She had me there, but she couldn’t stop, which is always a fatal error. “Besides, I figured you’d want to do anything you could to help Ms. Cleavage.”

I pulled the blanket up on my side and started to take off my jeans. “So that’s it,” I said. “You know, it’s funny. I’ve never actually seen you jealous before. I wouldn’t have expected it. I’d have quicker expected it of me.” I hung the jeans on a hook sticking out of the closet door. We live in a very classy house.

Abby satisfied herself that the bed was now acceptable, and slid off the gym shorts she had on, then started looking around the room for her pajamas. “I’m not jealous,” she said casually. “I just find it amusing how easily you can be played.”

“Played?” I stopped looking for a T-shirt disgusting enough to sleep in, and walked to her side of the bed. “What do you mean, played?”

“Oh, come on,” my wife chuckled. “She bats her eyes, hikes up her boobs, and does that, ‘oh Aaron, you’re the only one who can help me’ thing, and you go right for it.”

“She has no reason to ‘play me,’ as you so endearingly put it.”

“She wants you to investigate her husband’s death,” Abby said. “She wants you because she knows she can supervise the investigation as long as you’re watching her bust line instead of the facts.” Abby knelt down to look under the bed.

“Her bust line is a fact. Well, two facts actually. Besides, why does Steph need to supervise the investigation?”

“Steph is from D.C. All those people are control freaks.”

I sighed, which I don’t do often. “She’s not from D.C.—she’s from Bloomfield, New Jersey.”

“And you’ve wanted to hump her ever since she lived there.”

There are few things my wife does that seriously annoy me, but when she talks the way she thinks men talk, she can piss me off with the best of them. Mostly because I don’t talk like that, and I’m pretty sure I’m a man. She found her pajama bottoms under the bed, and when she stood up, holding them, I was standing within a foot of her, looking right into her eyes. Abby was a little startled, but she grinned, thinking she’d scored a withering blow.

“I’d like to point out that I was looking for a way not to help her when you volunteered me,” I told her, my breathing getting a little heavy. “Now, you listen to me. There is no one more beautiful, no one smarter, no one sexier, no one funnier, no one I’d rather be with on this planet, than you. You are the absolute center of my life, and I would gladly devote all my time on this earth to convincing you that nobody has ever loved anyone as much as I love you, but unfortunately, we need to sleep, eat, and pay the mortgage. So stop being a moron.”

She took a moment, smiled, and dropped her pajama bottoms on the floor.

“Come on,” Abby said. “Let’s mess up the bed again.”

And somehow, I forgot to ask whether she was familiar with People for American Values.