Precious and Fragile Things Read online

Todd blinked. Then grinned. “You’re such a bitch.”

  Gilly wasn’t insulted this time; he’d sounded almost fond. “It’s called social networking for a reason. To be social. I stay home with my kids all day long. If I didn’t do something online, talk to people, I’d go…”

  “Crazy?” he prompted after half a minute when she stalled.

  “Yes. I’d go crazy.” Gilly fussed with her houses again.

  She thought of the sound of muffled sobs behind a bedroom door and the cloying scent of spilled perfume. The sting of splintered glass in her feet. This, like the mysteries of her bank account, wasn’t something Todd knew or would ever know.

  “Who do you talk to?”

  “Oh…family. People I went to school with or used to work with. I belong to a few groups for things I like.”

  “Like what?”

  Gilly looked at him. “Authors. Television shows. Rock bands. Whatever.”

  Todd snorted and rattled the dice in his palm but didn’t throw them. “Huh. That sounds like a fuckton of boring.”

  “Hey,” Gilly said, annoyed. “You asked, didn’t you? I’m not going to tell you things if you’re going to make fun of me once you know.”

  Too late, she’d admitted she’d tell him things. Todd grinned as Gilly scowled. He handed her the dice.

  “Besides,” she added. “It’s not just the people and the groups. There are games to play. And other things to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh. Take surveys. Are you going to roll those dice or what?”

  He rolled, took his turn. “Surveys for what?”

  She didn’t want to admit her shameful secret, that she whored herself for “seeds” in her favorite Connex game, Farmburg. “Anything.”

  Todd nodded and helped himself to two hundred bucks for passing Go. “Yeah, right. For cash. I had a friend who got a bunch of stuff doing that. Crap, mostly. But some money.”

  “I don’t do it for money.” Though she had heard stories about people who’d won big.

  “The fuck would you do an online survey for, if not money?” Todd looked up at her, brow furrowed.

  Gilly sighed. No reason not to tell him. Stranded in a mountain cabin with a stranger who’d abducted her at knifepoint, after tossing her kids out a vehicle window, she really shouldn’t be worried about telling him she had an addiction to a silly online game. “For seeds.”

  “Huh?” Todd brushed hair from his eyes and tipped his chair back, going to his pocket for a cigarette he stuck in his mouth but didn’t light. “What kind of seeds?”

  “For a game,” she said, and took the dice, rolling. She landed on Boardwalk, as-yet-unowned, and crowed. “Yes! I’m buying it.”

  Todd passed her the card. “So you do surveys for…seeds.”

  Gilly settled her card amongst the others and looked up at him. “Yeah. You need seeds to plant, to get crops. To expand your farm and level up.”

  Todd raised an eyebrow.

  “It’s fun,” Gilly said.

  “Sooo…” Todd drew out the word, long and slow. “How many surveys do you do?”

  “I don’t have a lot of time, you know,” Gilly began defensively, and stopped at another of Todd’s raised-eyebrow looks. “Maybe three or four.”

  “A day?”

  “Yes.”

  Or five. Once a memorable ten while Gandy napped and Arwen had a playdate. Her wrist had begun to ache from scrolling through the choices and the seeds had been spent in fifteen minutes. She’d had to filter out junk mail for the next six weeks.

  “I’ll be damned.” All four legs of Todd’s chair hit the floor. “Surveys are your porn.”

  “Shut up!” Gilly gasped, horrified. “Gross.”

  Todd grinned, unapologetic, and pointed at her. “They are.”

  “You’re disgusting!”

  “Well, yeah, maybe,” Todd said. “But that don’t make me wrong.”

  Gilly lifted her chin and gave him a cool glare. “It’s your turn.”

  They rolled the dice, moved their pieces around the board, collected the paper cash when they passed Go. There was a suspicious absence of Go To Jail cards in this set, but Gilly didn’t question it. She played for keeps, though, trying to strategize while Todd gambled his way around the board picking up properties at random without seeming to care about the cost or location.

  “I’ll trade you the Electric Company for Indiana and Illinois.” Gilly already owned Kentucky and was itching to get hotels on those spots.

  “Nope.”

  “C’mon, Todd. When I land on it, I’ll have to pay you four times the number I roll on the dice.”

  Todd snorted, the unlit cigarette still dangling from his lower lip. “Nope.”

  “Electric Company and Water Works. Ten times the roll of the dice when you own both.”

  “No fucking way, Gilly. I’m dumb but I’m not that dumb.” He made another of those jerking-off gestures. “You’ll put hotels on those bitches and I’ll land on them every fucking time.”

  “You won’t,” she scoffed, though she had to give him grudging admiration for outplaying her. He’d been merrily buying up properties, keeping her from owning more than two per set, therefore making it impossible for her to complete them. “It’s statistically impossible for you to land on it every time.”

  “Yeah, well, you can forget it.” His hair fell over his eye.

  “Fine,” she said. “But I’m buying Park Place and putting hotels up, and you can kiss my ass.”

  “Ooh, scary.”

  She was angrier than she should’ve been about a game and understood it wasn’t that at all. Her cheek hurt when she bit it and hurt worse when she rubbed the sore spot with her tongue over and over to keep from saying something she didn’t mean. But to her surprise, the mantra of Count to ten, Gilly, didn’t start. She didn’t need it. She snorted a little under her breath and looked up to Todd’s curious glance.

  “It’s just a game,” she said.

  He studied her. “Well…yeah.”

  She shrugged. “I mean, it’s just a game.”

  She looked around the room, then got up to go to the window. More snow. She snorted louder this time and pressed her forehead to the glass, relishing the chill.

  Just a game. Slow your roll, Gilly. Chill out.

  “Are we gonna finish the game, or what?”

  She looked over her shoulder. “I guess so. Nothing else to do, right?”

  Todd gave her a strange look and half got to his feet. “Gilly, you’re not gonna freak out on me again, are you? Run out in the snow?”

  She shook her head, took her seat. “No. I’m okay. Let’s play.”

  They did for another few rolls of the dice, before Todd said, “What’s he like?”

  “Who? My husband?”

  “Yeah.”

  She shrugged, concentrating on the board to keep emotion from overtaking her. “He’s a good man. He’s a good dad, fantastic with the kids. I love him very much.”

  “You’re lucky, then. Really fucking lucky.”

  “Yes,” Gilly said. They played in silence for a minute before the words rose to her lips, unbidden and undeniable. She’d never said this aloud before, not even to her girlfriends sitting around a coffee table, bitching about their husbands. “He doesn’t listen to me.”

  The dice, tipped from Todd’s hand, rolled across the board and came to rest. Snake eyes. He didn’t move his piece right away; she felt his eyes on her and didn’t want to meet them, but did.

  “I mean, I think he hears me. He just doesn’t listen.”

  Todd moved his racing car to an open property but didn’t look to see the cost or offer to buy it. He didn’t even glance toward the thin piles of paper money he’d carefully laid out in front of him. He gathered the dice again, rolling them in his palm. They clattered like bones against the board and he moved again, this time to one of his own properties.

  “He’s a good man,” Gilly repeated in a low voice.

&n