"I'm telling you Jess, I have an ulcer, right HERE, with your name tattooed across it!"
Nick and Jess had been fighting a lot lately. Just about stupid things. The correct pronunciation of "facade". Whether or not eggs really have to be refrigerated. Bob Dylan.
Actually, to be more accurate, Nick had been fighting a lot lately. Jess had mostly just been cocking her head at him in befuddlement, or, more infuriatingly, just smiling with secret affection at his irrational grumpiness.
Yes, living with her was definitely giving him a festering ulcer.
"It's going to start bleeding any day now...I can feel it...and when it does..." he snapped his fingers and thrust one in her face, "...THAT'S the day the gloves come off!"
"The gloves." she stated flatly.
"THE GLOVES, Jess."
"You're wearing gloves."
"You've NEVER SEEN ME WITHOUT THEM." This was supposed to sound threatening and intimidating and dangerous, as if he had dark depths of personality that she had yet to glimpse.
Instead she wrinkled her forehead in confusion, and pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose with one finger, totally throwing the flow of the argument off course as she puzzled, "See, I've never really understood that metaphor. You have been wearing boxing gloves, but what you really want to do is bare-knuckle fist fight me? Is that the gist of it?"
"What? no! It's an expression, Jess..." An expression he was suddenly not so clear on the meaning of, himself, and he stumbled over explaining, "I think it's referring more to kid gloves...you know...handling something carefully, with kid gloves..."
"Now you're wearing a child's mittens? Really Nick, you're losing me here..."
All he could do was stare at her with seething wordlessness. How do you carry on a perfectly rational irrational fight with someone who turns it into a discussion of entomology?
He held his hands up in the air as he backed away before he really lost it on her. "You're amazing. Just amazing." Retreating to his room, he punctuated the warbled "THAAANK YOUUU!" that followed him down the hall, with a slam so hard his door popped back open again and had to be re-slammed.
The second one was for the "what the hell is up with him these days?" looks that he knew his roommates were all currently exchanging.
