“Well, I thought that was a successful party, right?” Mark Middleton reached around Maisie’s waist and gave her a squeeze. She froze, then wiggled away.
“Yeah, I think everyone had fun.”
He tried for a side hug again.
“Mark, can I just finish cleaning up before you start pawing at me?” She bent over to grab a napkin off the floor.
He stopped completely. “Pawing at you?”
She stood up, her face guilty. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“How did you mean it then, Maisie?”
“I just…” she gestured at the game table, covered with beer bottles. “I just want to finish at least picking up all the bottles and head to bed, I’m beat.”
Mark squeezed his lips together. “Fine. I’ll get going on the dishes.” She heard him stomping up the stairs from the basement, where they kept their large collections of games.
“Shit.” She squeezed her eyes closed and breathed for a second. It seemed like their easy rapport was completely gone, and she wasn’t sure how to get it back. Or even if she wanted to. She loved him but love wasn’t always enough.
Back before the pandemic, they would throw parties and play games most weeks, with their DND group meeting at their house every Thursday and board games and weird themed movie nights on the weekends, but the pandemic had of course put an abrupt stop to all that.
They had been suddenly, completely, shut up with only each other. Sure, the DND games started up again over Zoom after a few weeks, and that was still going, over Zoom, but it wasn’t the same.
Now, with the pandemic slowly getting to be in the rearview mirror, they were only having game night maybe once a month, if that. Maisie didn’t have the energy to plan anymore. She was tired.
In the before times, Mark had been in charge of food and drinks, and Maisie had been in charge of scheduling and people wrangling and inviting.
She sighed and brought the bag of empty bottles and cans up to the recycling bin, then hopped into the shower.
After she got out and climbed into bed, Mark got up out of bed and stalked down the hall to the kitchen. Thirty seconds later, he was climbing back into bed.
“Maisie, I told you I was doing dishes, why did you have to take a shower?”
“Oh.” She paused and looked at him. It seemed like she couldn’t do anything right anymore, but then again, neither could he. “I didn’t think.”
“Yeah. Goodnight.” He turned off his bedside light and flipped away from her. He could hardly remember how happy he had been as the party had concluded. He had no idea why Maisie was so moody, didn’t she enjoy the party as well?
Maisie finished braiding her long dark blonde hair and flipped over as well, getting her phone out to scroll.
“Really? I thought you were tired.”
“Fine.” She got up and left the room.
The next day, they got up and did their customary grocery shop, both of them subdued and moody. “Do we have enough granola for your breakfast?”
She gave him a tight-lipped smile. “I’ll go grab another bag.”
Five minutes later, Mark realized she hadn’t come to find him again with her granola. He pulled out his cell phone. “I’m in the frozen vegetable aisle.”
A few minutes later, he texted again: “Ice cream?”
And a few minutes after that, he pulled out his phone again. “By the sparkling water.”
She found him again shortly after that, her hands full of granola and cat treats and shampoo.
“Maisie, what on earth happened to you?”
She shrugged. “I guess I got distracted by face wash.”
“Did you even grab some?”
“No, I gave up.” She gave him a tired half-smile.
He started to open his mouth to ask a follow-up question, then just shrugged as they got into the checkout line.
Once they got home, they moved like a well-oiled machine, Maisie bringing the groceries into the house while Mark put them away. Mark then started pulling out the ingredients for the lunch he brought into work four days a week, putting his headphones in and queueing up a podcast.
An hour or so later, he put his to-go containers into the fridge and looked around. Usually, Maisie would be in and out of the kitchen while he worked, grabbing a glass of water, touching his butt (which he pretended to hate) when he didn’t have a knife in his hand. A little concerned, he headed down the hall and poked his head into the bedroom, to see her curled up taking a nap, their orange cat Toby curled up by her knees. He shrugged and went back into the living room and started playing a video game, their black cat Sam riding shotgun on the arm of the easy chair.
Mark and Maisie had met during their first week of classes at University of Wisconsin at Madison. They had sat next to each other coincidentally in their Spanish 201 class. Mark had gotten into class a little early that morning, and was reading a thick book while waiting for everyone else to show up. He looked up, noticing the room had filled up, right as a short blonde girl wearing jeans and a t-shirt with Bucky Badger on it dropped her backpack on the table next to him.
“Hey.” She gave him a tight smile, sitting down.
“Hi,” he said in turn, nodding back, before returning to his book for about a minute before the professor came in and started talking in rapid-fire Spanish, handing out the syllabus. After a minute, she told them to introduce themselves to the person sitting next to them, so he turned to her and said, “Hola.”
“Hola,” she responded, then leaned in to speak quietly. “I’ll be honest, I haven’t heard anyone speaking Spanish since last spring, and I only caught about every other word she said. Me llamo Maisie, como estas?”
“Mi nombre es Mark, estoy cansado, y tu?” He smiled brightly, and Maisie liked the way his eyes crinkled at the edges.
“Estoy cansada tambien. What are you reading?” She reached over to flip his book right side up as the Spanish professor pointed at her and loudly intoned, “EN ESPANOL, POR FAVOR.”
After class ended, she asked him how he was liking A Feast for Crows. “I read the first three books of the series over the summer but I think I’m going to wait until that comes out in paperback so that it matches my other books.”
He grinned. “I tried to wait but gave in. So it won’t match, so what. You can borrow it when I’m done.”
She grinned back, looking him up and down. He was not very tall, though still a half-foot taller than her 5’2, with dark brown hair and blue eyes, and an amazing smile and strong arms and, she noticed as he turned to grab his backpack from the back of his chair, a cute butt.
The next week, the book was sitting on the table in what had become her spot when she came in. A month after that, she took both the book and him home over Thanksgiving.
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