Tomas settled back on the couch, tv remote balanced precariously on rim of a bowl of chips. He shifted and the black device plummeted into his lap, but the chips didn’t. With a smile he set down his soda, freeing his hand to power on the TV. He didn’t get the chance.
“Want to go shopping with me?” Laura said from behind him.
He turned to look. She was wearing a black dress with her hair up in a bun. Her face looked Neutrogena scrubbed. Red hoop earrings dangled from each ear. She was smiling. He said, “I mean, if you want me to, I guess.”
“You don’t have to.” The smile straightened into more of a line.
“I don’t.”
“I mean if you don’t want to go shopping, it is perfectly fine. I can go by myself.”
Tomas started to speak but managed to stop himself. In truth, she sent him out for things all the time. He shopped alone far more than he shopped with her. It wasn’t a thing he thought about very often, but now in the midsts of an ask he started to wonder what he was supposed to say. Then he said, “What am I supposed to say here?”
“Just say how you feel.”
Tomas paused again, masking his growing confusion with a bite of a chip. This was beginning to take on the appearance of a trap. He found this strange, because Laura wasn’t the trapping type, yet there he was settling in to watch TV and there she was preparing to leave… with him. He said, “I’m in. Let’s go shopping.”
“Only if you want to.”
Now it was definitely a trap.