“Presents?” I wheedled after the last pot had been scrubbed.
“Yeah. It’ll help settle the food since I plan on fuckin’ you like crazy later on.”
“Who said romance was dead?” I joked.
Settling on the couch, he handed me my presents while stacking his next to him. He watched as I tore open my brand-new cell phone.
“You got a new number,” he informed me as I pulled it out of the box, finding it already programmed and charged. “All the people in the phone contacts have it, so if there are others who need it, you can send it to them. I didn’t have all your contacts, so…your old phone number will be canceled at the end of the month to give you time.”
“Is this because you insist on paying my bills?” I asked snippily.
“Maybe. Plus, it’s a fuckin’ badass phone.”
I’d discovered a couple of days after Thanksgiving that Phil had been sneaking my bills out of my mail and paying them. When that had happened, I’d naturally became infuriated, yelling at him and telling him he wasn’t going to get laid until I was paying my own way again.
He had straight up fucking laughed in my face. Then, he had whipped off his belt, grabbed and bound my wrists, ripped off my pants, and fucked my brains out. All the while, he’d told me he was going to continue paying my bills, demanded I surrender over my phone bill, which was automatically paid each month from my account, and give him my credit cards, so he could give me a black Amex that would be paid directly from his account.
“You’re my fuckin’ woman, Kenna,” he had growled in my ear, grinding into me from behind, my hair fisted in his hand. “I get to take care of you. I get to give you everything. Fuckin’ stop fightin’ it because I ain’t gonna let you win this one.”
And I hadn’t won. Ass.
“Yeah, it is.” I grinned.
“I got myself one, too,” he confessed.
Turning it on, I saw the screensaver was a picture Lili had taken of Phil and me with her digital camera in LA. His arms were wrapped around me, and his face was pressed up to mine, reminding me of another photo taken twenty-three years earlier. I smiled and felt the ring box pressing into my thigh.
I knew then what I was going to do.
Phil unwrapped the wicked shirt I’d bought him. Holding it up, he inspected the short-sleeved black button-down with skull and crossbones stitched onto the pockets in white thread.
“Cool!”
My next gift was a laptop computer. “Shit, Phil! How can I even try to compete with your gifts?”
He laughed. “It ain’t a competition. Since you’re so retarded with computers, I figured we’d get you somethin’ to practice on. You can write your band reviews and hoard it in your secret archives.”
I scowled at him. “I never should have shown you those.”
“You’re a brilliant writer, Kenna. You never should’ve become a doctor,” he responded, lifting up another present.
Over the years, I had taken to writing my own reviews and thoughts about the music I’d heard coming from the local bands. It was a small pleasure I had, for no one else other than myself. I had shared the notebooks filled with my writings with Phil after we started going to Bougainvillea regularly.
His next gift was a heavy pewter frame decorated with skulls. The real gift was the photo inside. Lili had taken it at the music festival in ’96 before NOLA’s Junk had made it big. I was in the foreground, and I was holding up my hand, so when she snapped the photo, it looked as though a doll-sized Phil was standing in my palm with me blowing him a kiss.
Phil’s eyes sparkled with delight as he turned them on me. “This is fuckin’ badass!”
I smiled. “I thought you might like that.”
Opening up my next gift, I discovered a massive box full of different types of hats in all colors, textures, and patterns.
“Yes!” I cried, pulling them out. “I’ll never have to do anything with my hair again!”
“Don’t you fuckin’ dare!” warned Phil. “I will take these back if you cover your head with them all the time.”
I found a huge dark brown cabby hat and shoved it on my head, tucking my hair up into it.
Phil’s hands tore open a handsome hand-tooled leather-bound book with thick handmade paper that had a brass clasp to keep it closed.