“I knew it! I knew you were lying! But . . . what’s she doing here?”
“I live here!” I snapped at her.
“You live here?”
“Yes!”
Janice said to Bryce, “She’s not the girl you’ve been fucking in Connecticut?”
“No!” he said.
“You’ve got a girl in Connecticut?” I cried.
“No!” he said.
“Of course he does,” said Janice. “Do you honestly think he goes up there every weekend to see his parents?”
“You’ve been going up there every weekend to cheat on me?” I asked Bryce, wounded anew.
“No,” said Janice, “he’s been going up there to cheat on me.”
“Would you let it go?” Bryce said to her. “It was just that one time, and I told you already—she means nothing to me.”
“What?” I said.
“It was more than once,” Janice insisted coldly.
“Is she telling the truth?” I asked Bryce.
“It was just a guy thing, Cathy,” he said. “Men have needs.”
“What?” I said.
Janice gestured to me, which caused the sheet to slip a little. “So who is the, uh, warrior princess?”
“I’m his girlfriend!”
“I’m his girlfriend.”
“I live here!” I flung out my sword arm in a gesture that encompassed the room—and hit a lamp that crashed noisily to the floor.
“Whoa! Take it easy!” Bryce exclaimed.
“You live here?” Janice said shrilly. “You live with him?”
“Let’s all take a deep breath and try to calm down,” said Bryce.
“She lives with you?”
“The closet’s full of my clothes,” I pointed out testily. “My cosmetics are in the bathroom. How did you not notice before now that a woman lives with him?”
“This is the first time I’ve ever been here,” she said. “We always go to my place.”
“Oh.” Of course. Bryce knew I’d soon notice something if he fooled around with her in the room where I slept every night.
“But now I know why he never spends the night at my place,” Janice said bitterly. “And why he’s never brought me here before.”
I wondered why he’d brought her here this time. Even though he couldn’t have known I’d come home early tonight, it seemed reckless. Feeling the wound deepen, I supposed he’d stopped even caring if I found out about her.
“You bastard.” Janice threw aside the sheet and headed for the chair in the corner, where she started putting on her clothes with rough, clumsy movements, fuming with anger. “When we started dating, you didn’t think it might be worth mentioning to me that you live with someone?”
“It’s really just a roommate arrangement,” he told her. “Cathy’s a student. I let her live here rent-free in exchange for cooking and housekeeping.”
“You what?” I blurted.
“This place is rent-controlled,” Bryce said to Janice. “So I can afford to be a little kind.”
“Kind?” I repeated.
Janice paused for a moment, looking at him as she considered this explanation. “Where does she sleep?”
“Uh . . . ”
“Here!” I hit the bed with my sword, making them both flinch. “It’s a one-bedroom apartment. Or didn’t you have time to notice?”
“And there’s only one bed.” Her gaze met mine. “Got it.” She turned her back on Bryce and continued dressing.
“Okay, yeah, she sleeps here,” Bryce said to her posterior, “but it’s not what you think. We hardly ever have sex.”
“That’s the first true thing you’ve said so far,” I said in disgust. “And now I know why we haven’t had sex in weeks. With a girlfriend at the law firm and another one in Connecticut—”
“She’s not my girlfriend. It’s just a sex thing.”
Janice whirled around. “What?”
“Not you,” he said. “The one in Connecticut.”
“Oh.” She continued dressing.
“With such a busy love life,” I said, “it’s perfectly understandable that you had no time or energy for sex with the girlfriend who lives with you!”
“Look, if you’d just try to see this from my perspective, Cath, you’d underst—”
“Your perspective?” I hit our bed with the sword again, mostly so I wouldn’t hit Bryce with it and wind up going to prison. “Are you kidding me?”
“And I thought he was self-centered before this,” Janice said with a shake of her head.
“Do you know, I painted this whole damn apartment for him,” I told her.
“Oh, don’t exaggerate,” said Bryce. “You didn’t do the bathroom, Cath, even though I asked you to—”
“I loaned him my car for two weekends,” Janice told me. “Before I realized he was going up to Connecticut to pork some other woman, not to visit his dear old mother.”
“I learned to cook gluten-free for him!”
“I wrote his last two briefs for him and let him take the credit!”
“I do his laundry and ironing,” I grumbled. “The jerk.”
Janice finished dressing and picked up her purse.