And so the hours passed.
Considering the fact that Nick had never done ‘normal’ in his entire life, I have to say that he took to it quite beautifully. While I retrieved his computer to finish my shopping, he flipped on the television, and under my guidance, began an old school Netflix fest. After taking a full twenty minutes to read the descriptions of every show, he settled—rather ironically—upon Stranger Things, and it wasn’t long before I abandoned my shopping entirely to watch.
“I still don’t understand,” I murmured a few episodes later.
By now, the sun was hanging low in the sky, but we had yet to move even an inch from our original positions. Truth be told, we had yet to blink.
The buzzer rang. I buzzed the pizza guy in and opened the door. I didn’t want to miss a minute so I ran back to the TV set.
“Why doesn’t she just tear the whole house down, if he’s in the walls?”
Nick hushed me without ever breaking his gaze.
“Because the walls are only a single portal. If she destroys that, then he has no way of contacting her and all those Christmas lights were for nothing.”
I sat for a minute, considering this.
“Yeah, but why doesn’t she just—”
“No, I thought of that. But it would require a comb, remember?”
“Oh. Right.” I chewed my lip for a second, thinking. “But what if she just—”
“No more idea, okay sweetheart?”
“But they’re good ideas, Nick!”
“Yeah?” He raised his eyebrows defiantly. “Like when you told Barb to go outside and wait by the pool? That turned out to be a great idea!”
I threw up my hands.
“How was I supposed to know the thing was waiting for her—”
A throat cleared softly behind us, and we whipped around to see the most bashful pizza delivery man in the entire city. He grimaced apologetically at startling us, then gestured to the frozen characters on the screen.
“Episode six?”
We nodded silently.
“Yeah—me and my girlfriend started fighting around that point too.” He held out the box with a good-natured smile. “Large pepperoni? Extra cheese?”
For a second, the two of us simply stared. Half horrified at the atrocities we’d just witnessed on screen, and half stunned senseless at the man’s automatic assumption.
Girlfriend. Boyfriend. Couple’s television fight.
There was nothing remotely normal about those words when applied to us, and yet somehow, that happened to be exactly what we were doing.
Maybe this was turning out to be a normal day after all?
As I glanced nervously down at the sofa, Nick sprang to his feet to pay for the pizza. He left a rather outrageously large tip, and the guy left with a grin. A grin that I saw mirrored on Nick’s face as he set the pizza on a coffee table and sat back down beside me.
A grin that abruptly made me suspicious.
“Did you pay that guy to say that?” I asked suddenly.
Nick’s head jerked up in surprise. “What?”
“Oh come on.” I folded my arms across my chest with a grin, tossing my dark waves of hair back behind me. “Like it would be a stretch to assume you’d coached the pizza guy? Like you haven’t gleefully manipulated situations before just to fuck with me?”
I expected a triumphant confession, but Nick just threw back his head with a laugh.
“You—Wilder—are entirely too suspicious, you know that?”
My eyes narrowed as he grabbed a slice of pizza. “That isn’t exactly a denial...”
He laughed again and took a bite, before pulling off another piece for me.
“No—alright—I swear. He was just a random pizza guy.”
I studied him for a moment, a very long moment indeed, before taking the slice with a reluctant smile. I had to admit, when the guy first said it, Nick had looked as surprised as I was.
But he certainly didn’t look that way now. In fact, he looked rather pleased.
“What are you grinning about?” I asked as he turned back to the screen.
He flashed me a dimpled smile, before lifting my feet and laying them across his lap. I looked on in shock as he ate his pizza with one hand, and rubbed my ankles with another.
“Oh, nothing.”
Nicholas Hunter was giving me a foot massage. What the fuck was happening?!
“Come on,” I demanded, propping myself up on my elbows. “Tell me.”
He glanced at me again, before leaning back with an innocent shrug.
“This is just nice, you know?”
I followed his gaze around the domestic little scene, before returning with a question.
“What’s nice?”
His lips curved up as he picked up the remote and pressed play.
“...normal.”