Job Security 2

Then summer ended and the work went with it. Forty hours a week became thirty. Then twenty. Then ten. We barely made rent. We ate ramen and crackers and lived like monks until Lisa found a job working at a private university and I manged to pick up extra hours guarding construction sites on the graveyard shift.

We saw each other less and less. The money was back, but I was working midnight to nine, and she was working nine to five. When we were together, it was the weekend. We were still living cheap, but we had money. So we bought a lot of liquor, and we threw a lot of parties. 

We had our first real fight at three in the morning on a saturday. I was high and drunk and sitting at the kitchen table smoking. She told me to take it outside so the landlord wouldn't keep our deposit. I was the one who'd paid the deposit and I said that. 

I ended up stubbing the cigarette out on the tabletop to make a point. All I remember about the fight was the sound of it. She locked herself in the bathroom and I punched a hole in the wall and walked outside and got lost until dawn.

I stayed at Joe's place. We made up over text message. When I came home that night she spent it on the couch, watching me patch the hole in the wall. Afterwards I said I was sorry and we got drunk together, alone.

The rest of fall and into winter followed the same pattern. We'd work all week and hardly see one another, then drink all weekend. Sometimes one or the other of us would do or say something and we'd fight about it. I said things I wasn't proud of. She said things that made me see red. I never put another hole in the wall though. I learned after the first time.

Spring, and the work picked up again. We worked together again. The drinking didn't stop. One night after a concert where I'd taken a few hits and she'd picked up a few bruises of her own we spent the night in a park with a bottle, talking and drinking until we both puked to dry heaves and I carried her home while the sun rose and she slept.

Things got better for awhile. We moved to another place, further out but cheaper and nicer. We threw another party the first weekend there and I remember cleaning up afterwards with her, halfway sober in the early morning, unlit cigarette held between my teeth I told her she was beautiful and that I loved her. 

She kissed me and smiled and there was something sad in the way she looked at me. I picked my smoke up from the floor and went out onto the balcony to light it.

She came out a minute later to take a drag. Neither of us said anything.