Black Friday

"Rise and shine, asshole."
The voice and even the affectionate insult were familiar, and John's subconscious subsequently identified them as belonging to Carrie before he'd even opened his eyes, but upon opening them it took a second for him to straighten out the incongruity of hearing them from the couch in the apartment she shared with Chloe. As he sat up, the blanket he did not remember acquiring for himself the night before slid down his bare chest; the sudden chill that resulted made him instinctively check if he was wearing anything at all. He found to his mild surprise that he had on a pair of boxer shorts. The remainder of his clothes lay crumpled up on the floor near the couch. As he stretched, he tried to summon the memory of how he had gotten into this state: he vividly remembered the previous night, right up until he fell asleep with Chloe on top of him.
He was about to chalk up the appearance of his undergarment to a late night trip to the toilet, which he could not be sure was not a misremembered dream, when Carrie interrupted his thoughts, "You get lost on the way home or something?" She stood at the dividing line between the kitchen and common living room area of the apartment, dressed, typically for her in late November, in a hoodie and unseasonable shorts that showed off her gorgeous legs. A puffy vest thrown over the hoodie and the presence of a small, wheeled suitcase next to her indicated that she had just gotten in.
"Give him a break," Chloe answered for John, her voice coming from an unseen location, which only added confusion to John's already foggy mind. She popped out from around the corner which led to the toilet. "He was exhausted from the drive, practically fell asleep the minute he walked in the door."
Not the exact minute, John thought as he rubbed the last of the sleep out of his eyes. Unless I dreamed that part, too. He glanced over at her to find her already fully dressed, save her bare feet, her yoga pants probably doing far more for keeping their wearer warm than Carrie's shorts, though approximately the same at hiding the form of her shapely lower half. She, like Carrie, had on a hoodie, though one that was at least a size too large for her.
"Uh huh," Carrie replied, glancing briefly at John before returning her attention to her roommate. "Now our couch is going to smell like boy for a month."
"Hey, I smell alright," John said as he grabbed his jeans from the floor. The girls' eyes remained on him while he slid them on.
"Whatever," Carrie replied, once more turning her attention to her roommate only after, John noted, he had covered his lower half. "I don't care. I was just kind of surprised. I thought you were going to be stranded out there in the sticks all weekend. Your dad kick John's ass out or something?"
Chloe smiled at this. "No," she said, moving over to the couch. "He was..." she paused to look at him for a moment as she took a seat to his left, "...the platonic ideal of a boyfriend. Nobody got kicked out. But I was not going to make him suffer through Thanksgiving and Black Friday and...Is there a name for the Saturday after Thanksgiving?"
"Platonic ideal, huh?" Carrie's tone was amused, but the look she gave John included more than a hint of curiosity. She made her way over to the couch, leaving her suitcase and taking up a position on John's right, which forced him to scooch over slightly towards Chloe. "Anyway there's cyber Monday now but I don't think there's an anything Saturday."
Chloe's mouth twisted up in a way that John had learned indicated she was considering something, then she said, "Well, then, I propose we make our own something Saturday."
"Something Saturday?" John questioned. "Nothing more specific?"
She pretended to be annoyed by his response for a moment before answering, "I don't mean we actually call it 'something Saturday'. I mean we do something. Fill-in-the-blank Saturday. I don't know, like a Friendsgiving. But, like, after Thanksgiving. Friendsgiving after party."
Carrie answered John. "Then I propose we make it Blackout Friday. My stupid ass forgot a whole box of wine before I left. We, or at least I, am definitely in need of it after enduring my bitch sister-in-law 100% sober."
"That bad, huh?" Chloe asked. John leaned back against the couch, judging from experience that the girls would soon shift into simultaneous talking mode, leaving him out of the loop in any case, and took the opportunity to consider his present state of affairs.
I have to tell Carrie about Chloe and me, right?
Yes, the little voice in his head agreed, but first you should probably figure out what exactly you mean by "Chloe and me". Are you, that is, me, getting back together with her? Or to borrow a phrase from Carrie herself, was this just "a one time thing"?
You know, at the time I thought, if nothing else, breaking up with Carrie would at least make my life simpler. What a fool I was.
"So, John takes me to mecidiyeköy escort the grocery store, and you catch the bus over later? Or he should pick you up?" Carrie's voice cut into John's musings.
"I could take the bus, I guess," Chloe responded hesitantly.
Carrie hesitated for a second before responding, "What am I saying? You don't want to carry mac and cheese on the bus. We can come get you when we're done."
John attempted to replay the last few minutes of girl conversation in his mind, but it was fragmentary and jumbled, the two girls speaking at the same time. "Right, mac and cheese," he said.
"You weren't listening at all, were you?" Carrie eyed him suspiciously.
"No, I was listening," John lied.
"Ok, so what's the plan, then?" she asked.
He instinctively turned to Chloe, only to find her wearing a look of amused interest.
"Uh, you know, wine and mac and cheese and, uh, my house. You know, friendsgiving." Chloe's expression remained unchanged, so he turned back to Carrie.
"Asshole," she responded immediately. "We just had a whole conversation about what to have. I said all I want is wine and NOT Thanksgiving, and Chloe agreed, so we're each going to make something, me and Chloe and you, asshole. You're making something."
"So I said I could make my mom's baked mac and cheese because that's easy," Chloe started speaking in a way that was less like cutting in than simply picking up where Carrie had left off, drawing John's attention back her way, "and because, you know, not spaghetti. So Carrie said mac and cheese is definitely Thanksgiving food, but I was like, 'no way, it's not', but I guess it's like a whole cultural thing. So like, it's not for white people, right?"
"I guess," John managed.
"Right, but whatever," Carrie said, twisting John's head back around the other way, "I don't care, my stupid bitch sister-in-law would never stoop to have anything as low-class as macaroni on her perfect Thanksgiving table, anyway."
"So anyway I am making mac and cheese but it's baked mac and cheese so I need the oven here," Chloe continued the explanation, "so I'll be here while you take Carrie to get what she needs to make cobbler for dessert, which she will need the oven at your house for."
"Since when do you know how to make cobbler?" John asked, turning back to Carrie.
"Since always, asshole, it's not hard," she answered. "But I need stuff so we need to go to the grocery store and you have a car and an oven so you're driving. Also you need to get stuff for a salad because we need something to balance out the heavy stuff and even you can cut up some vegetables or whatever."
John couldn't help smiling at Carrie. This somehow ended the ping-ponging explanation. "As I recall, I cooked..." he stopped and shook his head. "Actually, that sounds like a great plan. Can I maybe take a shower first, though?"
"You can shower at home," Carrie said. "You smell alright." After a second, she added, "And anyway we don't have time for that if we're going to start drinking by this afternoon, which is a hard deadline. Putting my foot down here."
He turned to Chloe just to receive her confirmation, which came in the form of a cute little nod. "Alright," he said, "just let me get my shirt on."
***
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John smiled at the text from Carrie. It would probably have been easier to have simply asked him his preference on the way over to the grocery store, but there had not been time, as it had evidently been more important for her to relay all the details of her quite trying single day of Thanksgiving activities. He had mostly followed, he thought, the various slights and indignities that her brother's "gold-digging bitch of a cunt wife" had inflicted on her in the less than 24 hours she had managed to endure before hopping an early bus while feigning an "all hands on deck emergency at work," but he was certain he'd missed some of the details. In the entire time she spent talking, he'd barely managed to get a word in edgewise, let alone bring up Chloe.
Not that the car would have been an ideal setting for such a conversation, he reasoned, but it certainly would not be helpful to put it off. In any case I should probably figure out what is going on first.
You mean figure out who you'd rather be with, that little voice in his head interrupted.
Whom, he thought back, more than a little annoyed.
Grammar Nazis are not exempt from painful introspection or difficult life decisions, the voice responded.
John picked up a head of lettuce and began examining it, hoping that scouring the details would distract him. It did not work. It's not really up to me, John thought. I don't even know if Chloe wants to get back together. And I sure as hell don't know what Carrie wants. She'd probably be happy to be rid of me.
You're really going to try to make me believe that?
"Hey, beşiktaş escort asshole, your phone broken or something?" Carrie interrupted John's inner dialogue.
"I was just about to reply," he said, placing the lettuce in the shopping cart.
She responded with a look somewhere between disbelief and annoyance. "Right, well it would be too late. You're getting peach."
"Nice," he responded.
"I know what you're thinking," she said. "Just don't." She looked into the cart to find what he had selected for ingredients, then shook her head as she added her own to the pile. "This is looking like a boring salad. Where's the fruit?"
"In the cobbler?" John answered with a smile.
"God, you're the worst," she responded. "I'm pulling out all the stops here and you're going to make the world's most boring salad."
"All the stops, huh?" he asked, to which she responded with only a glare. "Alright, we'll add some fruit, I don't know, nuts? Does that sound interesting enough to pair with mac and cheese?"
Carrie rolled her eyes. "Whatever," she said. "You know Chloe is going to work her cute little ass off to make the best mac and cheese you've ever had."
"Yeah," John conceded, "she's a real sweetheart."
"When she's not using a flimsy pretense to drag you to her parents' house," Carrie said.
It was John's turn to give Carrie a look, which evidently worked, as she quickly added. "Which I'm sure was great. I mean, you were probably a stupid asshole and that's why you're home early, despite whatever she said to be nice, but I'm sure she was fine. Not like my bitch sister-in-law."
She looked just about to launch into another tirade, so John cut her off. "Oh, yeah, she was fine. Actually..." he wasn't really sure where the sentence should go or if the produce aisle was the optimal place to finish it, though, so is words hung for just long enough for Carrie to interrupt.
"Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm a bitch, I can't shut up about it," she said. A nearby mom, otherwise busy trying to keep her toddler's hands off the grapes, shot the two of them a look which John mostly and Carrie entirely ignored. "But she is seriously such a cunt. Plus I had to take the fucking bus. Do you have any idea..."
"No," John replied, placing a hand on the small of her back and guiding her away from the small child and its visibly annoyed mother, and towards the checkout. "Why don't you tell me about it?"
***
"And that was just the fucking bus there."
Somehow the litany of grievances Carrie had against the city, public transportation and her fellow humans had managed to eat up enough time that not only had they driven home before she had finished recounting them, although this had, in fairness, involved another round of complaints about her "dumb bitch sister-in-law," most of which John had already heard, but they'd even largely finished the cooking even as Carrie ended her rant with a frustrated growl.
"Yeah, sorry," John said. He sliced an apple in half, enjoying the pleasant sound of the knife sliding through it and thudding against the cutting board. He looked over to the counter, where Carrie was searching through a drawer. "Maybe I should have pretended to be your boyfriend instead of Chloe's."
She looked up from the drawer. "Yeah?" she asked.
Her eyes seemed to be looking right through him, so he went back to the apple before responding. "I mean, less driving for me. No bus for you, you know." He chopped through the apple once, then once more while the silence hung in the air.
"So you and Chloe..." she began.
He tried to force his head back around to meet her eyes but could not.
"...didn't have a great time, I guess?" After another pause, she added. "Well, I mean, I warned your stupid ass. I told you 'you're going to get your stupid heart broken again.' That's what I said, but you just had to do it, you had to go and be the noble guy and..."
"I," John cut her off, then immediately stopped. He sighed, then turned to look at her. She was leaning against the counter. "I mean, we, Chloe and I..."
For whatever reason, as his words failed him, his eyes made their way from hers down to her hands, which were gripping the edge of the counter. The normally pleasant yellow-tan color of her skin had grown white around her knuckles as she clutched at it. "I mean, I wanted to tell you," he tried again, unable to bring his eyes away from those hands.
"You don't have to tell me anything," she cut him off, giving his eyes permission to move back up to meet hers. Her lip jittered a few times before any more words came out. "I told you, I'm not your oracle into other girls. Don't tell me if she said something, if she did something, she touched your hand or she smiled at you a little too long and you felt something, don't tell me any of that shit. I don't want to..." she swallowed, "I can't hear that shit."
He opened his etiler escort mouth to speak but nothing came out and she turned around, once more focusing on the drawer. There followed an increasingly loud clattering of utensils banging against one another. "Where's your fucking can opener?" she complained.
"It should be in there," John answered.
"Well it's fucking not," she snapped back at him, once more rattling the utensils.
He left the knife he had been handling on the cutting board and stepped over behind her. He placed a hand on her wrist, stopping her wild and pointless shifting of the utensils in the drawer. "Here," he said, pulling the drawer open slightly more and in the process pushing her back against himself. "It's here." He pulled the can opener out of its hiding place above the other utensils and offered it to her.
She looked into his eyes for a moment, her eyelids quivering, then snatched the can opener from his hand, pushing her ass back against him hard enough that she almost knocked him over. "Thanks," she said, "I don't know why the fuck it was back there." She grabbed the can of peaches she had left on the counter and fumblingly set the can opener into place on it. "I don't know how you find shit in this kitchen, nothing is ever where it should be."
He shook his head, chuckling to himself at this, "I know it lacks the feminine touch." He returned to finishing up the salad. "Or feminine organizational principles, I guess." He finished cutting the apple into thin slices that he guessed approximated bite-size and then began distributing them onto the salad. "But you know, it's usually just me and I know where to find everything I need."
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He turned once again to find Carrie, holding a now empty can as a blob of peaches and their attendant slime oozed its way to slowly filling the crust she had earlier prepared. "Yeah?" she asked. "And what is it you need?"
"Uh..." John tried and failed to parse the question.
The empty can rattled as she chucked it into the sink. "You know," she said, staring right into his soul, "sometimes the thing you need is right under your nose the whole time."
"Like with the can opener?" he asked.
Her face curled up into its typical half-amused, half-angry-that-it-is-amused scowl. "Yeah, asshole," she said. She grabbed the now evidently ready for baking cobbler. "Like the can opener." She marched it over to the oven, almost threw it inside, and closed the oven door slightly too quickly, then moved briskly out the kitchen door to the living room.
"Where are you going?" he asked before following her out to the living room.
"To get drunk," she answered, already searching through the bottles of wine in the box she had left on his living room floor.
John leaned against the door frame that separated the kitchen from the living room. "Didn't want to wait for Chloe before we break into the wine?"
She looked up from the box to squint at him. "Are you afraid I'm going to drink it all before she gets here or something?"
"No," John answered, "I just..." he shook his head to make up for the lack of an ending to the sentence.
"Then maybe shut the fuck up," Carrie snapped at him, yanking a bottle out of the box. "There will be more than enough wine to get Chloe's lightweight ass drunk enough that even your stupid ass can get her to blow you for old times' sake if that's what you're worried about."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," John said.
"What?" she snapped as she stormed past him, brushing him aside as she made her way back to the still open drawer. She started once again banging the silverware this way and that. "That's what you wanted to tell me, right? That you fucked Chloe? That you did such a good job of playing the boyfriend that she let you put your dick into her as a reward? God fucking damn it, where is that fucking corkscrew?"
"It should be in there," John responded.
"It should be, it should be," she repeated, "Well it's fucking not! All I want is a fucking corkscrew so I can open my fucking wine and all you can do is stand there and say 'it should be in there'. You're just so fucking...ah! Why do I even..." She looked up toward the ceiling as if it held the answer to whatever question she had been unable to finish, sucking on her lips as tears pooled in her eyes.
He ran to her and took her in his arms, lifting her slightly off the floor in the process. Her arms held him fast and she buried her face into his neck. "God I'm such a stupid bitch," she said.
"No, you're not," he replied. "I'm the one who..."
She pulled back from the hug to look into his eyes, tears having left tracks running down from her own.
"Oh, hey, here's the corkscrew," he said. "It's that thing you said about right under your nose. You should take your own advice. You're pretty smart, actually."
And then she started to laugh. He had to take a step back to see it with his own eyes but she was, in fact, laughing, as she wiped away a tear. He was fairly certain, even, that it was genuine and not maniacal laughter, although a part of him was bit worried he had just told her where to find a very sharp implement. "Damn it, John," she said.
"Sorry, I know I'm kind of an asshole, but..." he started before she cut him off with a simple shake of her head.