8. The Days Not Friday

Lanie’s cruelty lived in the 'almosts' now. A teacup left just beyond George’s reach as he sat depressed, her hips swaying as she stretched to retrieve it. The rubies glinted, mocking.

“Oops,” she’d purr, bending so the piercing grazed the armrest where he sat. Her voice had shed Georgie like dead skin. “Fetch that, sissy? Unless you prefer, I drip on the upholstery again.”

George’s knuckles whitened around his coffee mug. The demon in his marrow flexed. He could snap her wrist. Unzip her throat. Reduce this gilded prison to splinters and screams.

But then she’d turn, and he’d see it: that flicker beneath her eyeliner, a crack in the ice. 'Need me, it whispered. Hate me harder.... please.'

He let go. He always let go. The mug didn’t shatter; it would never shatter.

“Good girl,” she crooned, patting his cheek. Her thumb lingered, a half-second too long.

Tuesdays were for laundry. George folded towels, methodical, while she paraded past in a robe she had “forgotten” to tie.

“Missed a spot,” she said, dropping a silk camisole at his feet. It reeked of Friday's cologne.

The demon whispered: 'Burn it. Burn her.'

George placed the fabric in the basket instead, breathing deeply until his lungs ached. “Smells like desperation,” he muttered.

Lanie’s laugh was a shiv between the ribs. “Yours or his?”

Thursdays, she oiled the piercing. Spread-eagled on the couch, one leg hooked over the back, she’d hum along to the radio as the rubies caught the afternoon light. Look, her body sang. This is your altar now.

His phantom crotch buzzing from her actions but never beyond that. He’d stare at his hands, calloused from chopping wood she’d never burn.

“Why?”

The question hung, rotting.

Lanie sat up, slick with jojoba oil and apparent spite. “Why not?” She leaned close, her breath citrus and arsenic. Her nail traced his jugular. “—I made you special.”

The demon surged. George gripped the armrest, tendons screaming, until the wood splintered.

Lanie did well trying to hide her flinch, but he noticed... Damn him for always noticing. Her **** smile was a blunt scalpel now. “No place for demons, sissy.”

Sundays, she let him cook. He’d dice onions like they’d offended her, the knife thunk-thunk-thunking in time with her pacing.

“Use the saffron,” she’d say, hip-checking him away from the stove. “The good kind. None of your Kroger bullshit.”

He’d watch her stir the risotto, her movements precise, violent. Once, her sleeve rode up, revealing the scar from Walmart Dionysus. He reached—

She slapped his hand. “Eyes on the pan, sissy.”

But that night, in bed, there she was, curled in his flannel, asleep. The rubies glowed faintly in the dark, softer now.

He didn’t touch her.

The demon never slept; George had to, though.

Lanie’s voice slithered through the dark: “You’d have hated vanilla, y’know. Golf. Grill-outs. Being my Husband.” A pause. “This is better.”

Mornings would come. The coffee would taste of burnt amber and unsaid things.

The house would hold its breath.

So did they.