and she clearly hasn’t said anything to Derek, because if she had, no way would Kenzie be here with him right now.
Derek still isn’t speaking, so she continues to think about Marin as she eats her French fries. Seeing his wife in person explains a lot. Everybody looks good in their Instagram photos, thanks to filters and Facetune. Seeing someone in real life, however, is different. Derek must think Kenzie is a hot mess most of the time, compared to his put-together wife. She’d rushed home after work to take a quick shower, and Derek had grimaced when he saw her.
“It can’t take that long to dry your hair,” he said.
“I air-dry most days.”
He reached into the back seat for his gym bag, rifling through it until he found a microfiber towel. “Lean forward,” he said, and when she did, he draped it over the leather seat.
“My hair is cleaner than your towel,” she said.
“My seats are worth more than your hair.”
She had no response for that. She’s betting a woman like Marin would never leave the house with wet hair, or with anything less than five cosmetic products on her face.
Derek doesn’t even come upstairs to the apartment when he picks her up. If she’s not at the curb when he arrives, he texts. He doesn’t even get out of the goddamned car to use the buzzer in the lobby. He once snapped, “I’m not a goddamned Uber driver,” which tells her that he’s never taken an Uber. Those guys don’t get out of the car, either.
They then sat beside each other in his uncomfortable, flashy car for a half hour until Kenzie suggested stopping for McDonald’s. As bougie as Derek can be, he grew up on fast food like she did, and she knows he never minds a mass-produced burger and fries. Also, he was in a terrible mood, and she thought the food might chill him out a bit. Instead, it’s having the opposite effect, since all they’re doing is sitting here in this sticky booth while he complains about the burger she bought him with her emergency money.
She notices his Big Mac is still untouched. “Derek, if it’s that big a deal, I can go ask them to change it.” She puts her chicken burger down and heaves a big, overly dramatic sigh.
Ladies and gentlemen, they’ve now reached the Who Can Be the Bigger Person? stage of the verbal sparring competition, where points are tallied mentally and passive aggressively until somebody wins. Who will it be? She wants it to be herself, because she likes to win as much as he does, but if they won’t replace the burger for free, that means she’ll have to buy another one with the only five bucks she has left to her name until she gets paid at the end of the week. Which means, in the end, she loses.
“It’s fine,” Derek says. Now they both have points on the board.
He takes a big bite of the burger he insists he didn’t order, which means another point for him for eating something he doesn’t want to eat. Then he grimaces to show he doesn’t like Big Macs, which means a point for her, because he said he was fine with it. But then he finishes chewing and swallows, which, shit, means another point for him because he’s actually going to digest the thing.
“Do you want my chicken burger? I can eat the Big Mac, I don’t mind.” Ding ding ding. She can hear the bell chiming in her head, tallying the score. An offer to switch burgers is surely worth three points, and just like that, Kenzie takes the lead. See, she’s good at this game, too.
“I said it was fine.”
Either she loses a point or he gains a point, she doesn’t know. They eat in moody silence, and nobody wins. Nobody ever wins. She doesn’t know why they play this game. She doesn’t know why he even wanted to see her tonight. If he really didn’t want to go home, he could have stayed in Portland.
Ten minutes later they’re back in the car. He jacks up the music, something he always does when he’s not in the mood to talk, which is more and more lately. Derek used to talk to her all the time. It’s how they started, after all. Conversation was their jam for those first couple of months, until they started having sex and discovered how much they enjoyed that even more.