She was pretty much done with him. He had been wearing on her nerves for the past three hours, and things were not improving by any stretch of the imagination. Back and forth, back and forth. She watched him pacing with only a vague sense of amusement buried deep beneath her layers of frustration. He would start at one wall, and march to the other like he was in a Big Fucking Hurry™ (the mental capitalization was all hers, but the specific stride and pace belonged to Mister Fussy-Britches himself), only to spin on one heel and repeat the process in the other direction.
The pacing wouldn’t have been so bad, but the muttering made everything so much worse. Words of anger, words of accusation, words of self-righteousness and blame spilled from his lips in a voice too quiet to hear clearly but too loud to ignore. She found that no amount of thinking, hoping or praying could distract her from this endless loop of The Greatest Hits from the Most Important Man in the World. This was the soundtrack of fucking insanity. She wished he were dead.
When he strode up to her and announced that he needed to go outside for a cigarette (as if he expected her to care, or even commiserate), her response was a far-too-enthusiastic, “Of course you do.” This raised his eyebrow, of course. She was struck by how he could remain so completely oblivious to her obvious disinterest for hours on end, but pick up on a single subtle hostile note in her tone. Perhaps he was an idiot savant of social interaction. Or, perhaps, he was simply an idiot. She breathed a sigh of relief when he finally stepped out of the room to feed his addiction.
She had no idea what was happening in the Emergency Room, and prayed that the injuries her sister had sustained in the car crash weren’t too serious. She could leave that in the hands of the doctors and nurses, though. What she couldn’t fathom, however, was this: “Why the fuck did she marry that man?” She didn’t bother to look up at him when he walked back in, the bitter odor of nicotine lingering in the air around him.