‘Hey honeyyy,’ I called out innocently, wandering down my hallway. Anna stuck her head out of a doorway, immediately suspicious.
‘You’re using your suspicious voice,’ she accused, eyes narrowing.
‘I am hurt,’ I gasped, clutching my chest, ‘that the person who I love most in the world—’
‘What do you want?’ she sighed, leaning her forehead against the doorframe.
‘I want to renovate the bathroom,’ I said, quickly. Anna frowned.
‘You want to renovate?’ she said, confused. ‘The bathroom?’
‘That is what I said, yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I just saw something my parents put in that I liked the look of and I thought it would be a cool idea, that’s all.’
I grinned, as innocently as I could muster.
‘Right, right,’ Anna nodded, smiling thinly. ‘We can renovate, sure.’
‘Really?!’
‘But we’re not modifying the bathtub.’
‘Come on!’ I protested. ‘Didn’t it look cool?’
‘The senior-citizen designed bath that your parents just installed?’ she raised an eyebrow at me. ‘No. No it did not.’
‘But it was so easy to get into!’
‘Ours is easy too,’ she rolled her eyes, miming lifting her leg slightly off the ground.
‘We’ll need it one day,’ I countered, trying a different tact.
‘We’re not even thirty-five, we’re not installing a bathtub solution designed to help elderly people. Sydney deserves a better class of hipsters.’
‘But babe!’ I whined, seriously considering dropping to my knees and begging. ‘Don’t you see the potential? Wouldn’t it encourage you to get into the bath more often? You never take baths!’
‘I don’t like baths!’
‘This could be how you learn!’
She looked at me for a minute, clearly thinking something through.
‘What, uh,’ I chuckled nervously after a while, ‘what are you thinking?’
‘I never clean that bathroom again,’ she said. ‘Those are my terms. Give me that and you can have your new bathtub.’
I stood there, pretending like I had to think about it and it wasn’t an absolute bargain of a deal.
‘Okay, I guess that’s fair,’ I sighed, laughing inside.
It wasn’t going to bother me when the bathroom got dirty.