There's something about the way Max slams the pan against the burner—flames shooting like ribbons around it as she cranks the heat higher and higher.
"Is that really necessary?" Warren wants to ask her, but there's something about the way she grips the spatula, stabbing the bacon as she shuffles it around the pan.
There's something about the way she spins to meet him with shadows that fall and twist upon her face. He thinks this will be a morning where she yells into the fluorescents of the kitchen ceiling above her all the things that are going wrong today.
But instead, she droops forward, all of her fight in the bacon burning behind her, the cat knocking over the trash can, and the twins ripping a pillowcase stuffed with treasures between them.
"Hey," he says, tugging the spatula from her hand. Her weapon gone, she brandishes her index finger instead, waving it in his face as if she's already lost.
"You're late for work," she interrupts and she pushes him gently. She hunts for the spatula to flip the bacon, her eyes sliding past it in his hand, and flips the range off instead.
"Let's go out for breakfast," he says, eying the pile of dishes in the sink, the running dishwasher, the rogue ketchup packet smeared on the wall between them.
He has a meeting in two hours and Max's mom is coming later that morning. He knows she flips out if the house isn't clean, but he wants to hit pause on everything, even for five minutes.
"No, no," Max says, dunking her hands in the soapy dish water. She'd tried to yank the bacon free with her bare hands. "Not today." She hands him the sponge and nearly puts the bacon into the sink before he reaches over and corrects the mistake.
When he slips into the morning traffic rush, his tie undone around his neck, he wonders how his life has turned into a jigsaw puzzle turned on its side. There are holes where there should be none. A job where he shuffles paperwork that has nothing to do with science just so it will pay for diapers. A college degree that means as much as the color of his eyes. A wife who stands in front of a three-way mirror and it's no guarantee which reflection she'll wake up as. A pair of dimpled toddlers that shook up the monotony of his life so badly, he can't remember what it was like before.
Now he is black and white, gray between the lines. He's ink and paper, steel-toed shoes, reheated coffee, and burnt bacon.
When lunch time rolls around, he tries to slip out and gets caught up in telephone calls. He orders lunch to be delivered to Max and calls her the second his hands are untied.
"There's a green bean in my pocket," she informs him.
"A practical place for it," he agrees.
"Do you want to go out for dinner tonight?"
"Yeah, sure." He doesn't mention the chicken she'd pulled out that morning to thaw out.
"Good, because I really don't want to cook." She forgets to say goodbye when she hangs up.
There was a time when he'd send a love you text afterwards, but her phone is probably already buried under something and it doesn't matter anyway.
It's enough, he thinks, when they inch their way into each other's arms at two a.m., a horror flick flashing on the laptop between them. Even as Max nods off five minutes into it only to scream awake at the first loud sound that occurs. Even as she buries her face in the pillow to keep from waking the twins and ends up falling back asleep.
It's enough when he kisses her hair sleepily, more of it between his lips than he'd like, and finding stray pieces on him several days later—inside his shirt, wrapped around his toe, in his coffee.
It's enough when he's got her pinned to the bedroom door, one of her legs hiked around his waist as he tells her that he's going to knock her up again.
She freezes, statuesque in front of him, then shoves him towards the bed, her eyes like flames crackling before him, and tells him that no, she's going to knock him up.
It's always just enough, this something.
There's something about the way Warren's tie drapes across his collar—order through the disorder that makes Max want to grab it and wring him by his scrawny neck with it.
"Why can't you just tie the damn thing?" she wants to say, but there's something about the way he rests his arms on either side of her as she fiddles with the stove top, wanting the bacon to cook, wanting the whole damn house to burn down if it means the cat will stop knocking the trash can over.
There's something about the way he smiles—halting and stable like a fence caged around her and she wants to rattle the metal bars. And then the corner of his mouth twitches, enough that falls back into it, enough her own lips slip into a smile. She plucks the bacon from the pan with scorched fingers, hissing as she nearly dumps it all in the sink—fingers, bacon, screaming toddlers. She kisses them absently as they scramble past her.
He's got ketchup on the back of his shirt and she swipes at it with a greasy sponge but it doesn't matter because, regardless, he will shrug a jacket over it as he leaves.
When she's holed up in the bathroom, her mom sorting through her laundry (even though Max thought she hid it well enough), she drinks her coffee. It's cold, even after reheating it twice, but it reminds her of days when she'd just hit go, load up her camera with film, and fall back into the wind.
Now, she spends her days peeling vegetables from her pockets and reminding Warren not to go to work on Sundays. And then, when he stands on the porch in his goddamn tie and boxers, holding his keys and half-shaven stubble made by sleep deprivation, she guides him back to bed, his eyes sliding closed against her kisses.
This is not how she imagined living out the rest of her twenties—married, children, lunch delivered to her because she forgot to eat breakfast and Warren knew she would. It had snuck up on her like a flash of dry lightning.
But it's enough when he brings her ice cream after work because they'd had to cancel their date, swiping a smudge onto her nose only to kiss it off.
It's enough when he combs her hair in the morning because she's too tired to do it herself, slipping his fingers in afterwards to angle her head up for a kiss.
It's enough, she thinks, when his hand crawls into her shirt, unfazed by the stripe of stretch marks like claws struck against her stomach as he kisses her neck. Her hands are entwined around his waist as he grinds against her. She's reminded of their last night of college, when they got into this mess to begin with. Even now, as he groans into the crook of her neck all of the places of his favorite freckles (this knuckle, the side of her nose, above the bow of her mouth), she feels like a live wire under his touch.
It's always just enough, this something.