Natalie looked at him. What now? This whole experience was turning into a nightmare. A wet, drizzly nightmare. The fog had turned into a misty drizzle around noon of the previous day. And by nightfall, it was actual rain, beating down on the cabin roof, making the space seem smaller and smaller, scraping the protective coating off their nerves until they were raw.

They had both tried hard. But the little irritations were building into big ones. Howie had fallen asleep the day before and hadn't wakened until after one o'clock. Natalie had worked hard, taking advantage of the time. When he woke up, he was pissed. He was supposed to get the afternoons. And by the time he'd made lunch and eaten it, it was almost two o'clock. He knew it was ridiculous to think that she should have wakened him, but he still felt cheated. This put him in a bad frame of mind and the work didn't go well for him that afternoon.

Natalie had laid in her bed and tried to nap. But it was difficult. If he had been playing songs on the guitar, it wouldn't have bothered her. But the same damn line over and over again...it was like fingernails on the blackboard to her and she had trouble falling asleep. Just before she drifted off, she had a vision of where she could place a particular clue in her story and when she woke up, she really wanted to get back to her computer. But she knew she couldn't. And she resented it.

They had made dinner together again but conversation was desultory. By tacit agreement, they had said goodnight and gone to bed early to read. The next day would be better. The rain would stop.

But it didn't. It got worse. Neither of them slept well and they were both cranky when they got up. The outside world was a curtain of rain. They tried to accommodate each other's presence but it wasn't easy.

Natalie was a slob, thought Howie. She never hung the towel up in the bathroom. She left her tea mug on the table even when she was finished work. She never took it back to the kitchen. And the damn printer box was still sitting by the front door where she had dropped it two days ago! The styrofoam packing sat lopsided in the box and the instructions were on the floor beside it. Was the thing going to sit there for the whole month?! And why in all of this did he find himself constantly apologizing to her? His initial determination had evaporated in a haze of nerve-wracking little incidents. He found himself saying 'sorry' a lot. He thought it was better than saying what he really felt.

Natalie wished Howie weren't so damned nice about everything. She had a real hate building for the whole situation and it infuriated her that he was so polite. He wouldn't make a decision about anything - what they would eat or when. He always said, "whatever you like." He apologized for everything. He must have said 'sorry' fifty times. He was so neat he made her want to scream. Whenever he took a break, he straightened all his papers into a pile, even if he was just going to the bathroom. And he tidied up after her too, but not without a little martyr sigh that she wasn't doing it herself. And he hummed. He hummed all the time. She wanted to staple his lips together.

It was five o'clock on Thursday. They were preparing dinner. It was getting earlier every day, Natalie thought. If the rain keeps up, we'll eat three meals a day before noon and retire to separate bedrooms by one o'clock. And the kitchen had gone from cozy to claustrophobic. Each of them would have cheerfully made dinner alone if only the other would get the hell out of the way. But neither of them would suggest it.

"What do you mean 'so far behind'?" she asked. She looked up from the fridge. She held up potatoes and carrots.

He nodded at her choice of vegetables and reached into the cupboard for oil and vinegar. He was making the marinade for the chicken. "Well, you type like the wind, and you seem to know exactly what you want to write...so I'm just curious as to why you're so close to a deadline. It seems like you wouldn't have any trouble with things like that."

She made a face. "I had to take some time out of my work so my life could fall apart."

"Oh," he said. "Sorry. Didn't mean to pry." He carefully added spices to the marinade.

"No, it's okay," she said, thinking that he had one, maybe two more 'sorry's to go before she killed him. "I'm getting over it. Affairs of the heart and all that."

"He broke up with you?" he said, nodding sagely. He brushed the marinade over the chicken breasts.

"No, actually, I broke up with him. I objected to his wife." Natalie did not want to be painted as the poor, little dumpee. She began peeling the vegetables and dropping them into a pot of water.

The disapproval that radiated from him was palpable. "You went out with a married man?"

"Well, I didn't know he was married at the time," she said bitterly. "It didn't come up in our conversations."

"How did you find out?" he asked, hoping she wouldn't bite his head off. But it was the first time all day they'd managed to have a conversation longer than one sentence each and he wanted to keep it going.

"The usual. A friend wised me up." She rinsed the vegetables and drained them. She looked thoughtful for a moment, and then continued, "I should have known. All the talk about how hard he worked weekends, evenings...even Thanksgiving. How stupid could I be to think that a banker would have to work Thanksgiving!?"

Pretty stupid, thought Howie, and then wondered if he'd said that out loud. If he had, he was a dead man, he knew that.

Natalie seemed to be talking to herself. "That's love for you. It makes you willing to overlook stuff. It makes you blind."

"I guess it hurt when he went back to his wife," said Howie softly. He reached around her and picked up the pot of vegetables. He began placing them carefully around the chicken pieces and basting them with marinade.

"No," said Natalie. "He wanted to leave her and marry me. I said no, but he left her anyway."

"Why didn't you marry him if he was willing to do that?"

"Because a man who cheats on his wife will cheat on his wife," she said.

He thought about that for a moment. He nodded. "Yeah, you're right. Good for you."

Don't patronize me, thought Natalie and then wondered if she'd said that out loud. She hoped not; he was getting testier by the second.

"How...um...did it...um...disrupt you...stop you from working? I mean, if you were the one that ended it?" Howie opened the oven door and put the dinner in.

"Just because I ended it didn't mean that it didn't hurt. And that I didn't feel betrayed and used and..." She paused. It would be better not to start down that road, she thought, not in the frame of mind they were in at the moment. "I had to do the whole recovery thing anyway," she said airily, and then answered his questioning look with, "You know...spend some days in my robe and slippers, living on Haagen-Dazs." She pulled plates out of the cupboard.

He nodded. "Cookies and Cream or Rocky Road?"

"Chocolate Raspberry Torte," she replied, moving over to the table with napkins and cutlery. "It will be quite awhile before I'll be able to face another bowl of that."

They made it through dinner without offending each other, but it was a brief lull in a difficult day. They did the dishes, both hoping the other would turn in early. Howie disappeared into the bathroom and came back to find the printer chugging away.

"I'm just printing my pages from earlier," said Natalie.

Howie thought the noise would never stop. And each printed page made him more resentful because it was output that she had managed to accomplish that he had not. Because he hadn't done squat in the last couple of days except make himself crazy that he couldn't get anything done. And whenever he thought he was close, something happened to break his concentration. He picked up his guitar and played with a song. It was a different one from the one that had been torturing him all day. Torturing them both. Natalie thought that his choice of a different song had just saved his life.

The printer finally wheezed to a halt. Natalie gathered up the pages and started reversing the order.

"You know you can get the printer to print them that way...last page first," said Howie, not looking up from his music. Why the hell couldn't she figure that out?

It was a good thing he didn't look up. The look she bestowed on him would have frightened him. "It's a little ritual I have," she answered tartly. "I count the pages as I reverse them." It centred her mind for the next phase of her work.

"I thought that's why you numbered them," said Howie.

"I told you it was a ritual. Kind of like...um..." She paused. "Kind of like straightening every damn piece of paper fifteen times before you start working on them."

This time Howie did look up. They glared at each other for a few seconds. He broke first and went back to strumming the guitar.and humming. Natalie sat in the chair and draped her legs over the end. She picked up her highlighter and began editing her work. Howie set down the guitar and picked up a pencil. He started furiously making notations on a piece of sheet music. Finally, some inspiration had struck. He closed his eyes and hummed the song, visualizing it. Then he opened his eyes and wrote down the notes. He moved the pencil through the air like a baton solidifying the music in his mind.

Scree, scree, scree...the highlighter squeaked down the page. Howie tried desperately to ignore it. He scribbled down notes on the staff and hummed the tune.

Scree...

"Stop that for a minute," he said brusquely, holding up a hand. She did and they sat there, frozen in a tableau, her highlighter poised over her words, his pencil racing to nail down the music before it disappeared.

"Why don't you use a tape recorder?" she asked, snapping the gossamer strand of music.

"Why don't you get a new highlighter?" he snapped. He realized he was being nasty. "Sorry."

"You are the sorriest man I've ever met," she said. And then they were into it.

"Well, excuse me for being polite."

"Polite?! You're so far beyond polite...you're into sycophantic...you're obsequious..."

"Oooh, big words. I'm so impressed. Too bad you don't know any short ones...like 'neat' or 'tidy'. How long is that friggin' box going to sit there? Why can't you put it in the closet or something?"

"It's just a box, for God's sake," she said, raising her voice defensively. It angered her that he had a point. "It's not like it has any annoying habits...like humming all the time or..."

He could play this game too. "...or tapping your precious highlighter on your teeth when you're thinking..."

Natalie wanted to step back from the edge, but she couldn't. All the frustration, all the unspoken hurt from Brent welled up and she threw it all over the only available person.

"God, you're such a...a...such a man!" It was the most insulting thing that she could think of.

"A man? Why, yes I am. Is that your problem? That you need a man...one without a wife this time perhaps." He laughed. And the whole situation went nuclear. He hadn't been volunteering himself. He had actually been thinking of Ty Harper, but he didn't get to suggest it.

Natalie leapt to her feet. She threw her pages down on the chair. The highlighter bounced off and rolled across the floor. "You are insufferable. You pompous prig. You...you...I wouldn't go near you if you were the last man on Earth!"

She went into her bedroom and slammed the door.