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‘I hate you.’ Tori pulls her doona back and shuffles over so Cat can climb onto the bed and sit beside her.
‘Hate you too. Can you hang up your phone? The feedback is getting ridiculous.’
Jules clears her throat. She loves her friends and ordinarily she finds amusement in their bickering, but her stress levels need attending to.
‘I had sex with Cameron.’
There’s total silence, aside from her own voice echoing back to her before Tori hangs up her phone.
‘Can you—Sorry.’ Cat moves her head closer to her phone. ‘I think we misheard.’
‘I had sex with Cameron.’
Cat breaks into a grin. ‘What! You what!’
Cat’s steady-hand phone holding technique becomes more like a shaky-cam as Tori bounces on the bed beside her, cheering. Apparently, hearing about Jules’s sexploits is as good as caffeine to wake a person up.
‘Good on you,’ Tori says, literally applauding her.
‘Is it? Is it good?’ Jules scrambles up into a sitting position. ‘We wrote that list out so I could build a proper relationship in proper increments with Cameron and I skipped straight to step four somehow and I’m starting to freak out. The whole point of writing the steps out in that order is because I didn’t want this to just be a conference fling—no offense, Tor—and now it’s clearly a conference fling with no long-term potential.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Cat says. ‘You can get to an emotional relationship through a sexual one.’
‘No I meant, like, we literally verbally agreed it was a conference fling with a very definite end date.’
Tori throws her hands up. ‘Why the hell would you agree to that?’
‘I don’t know! I was flustered. He was half-naked at the time and I was horny and stressing that we had no clear structure to our engagement and also, I may have, accidentally,’ Jules starts slipping back down into a recline, dragging the sheet over her head, ‘told him in the car ride over that I was interested in one,’ she finishes in a whisper.
Tori’s head drops to her chest. ‘Woman.’
‘You know how I get with silence and the filling in of it when I’m nervous.’
‘You couldn’t have filled it in with talk about the conference?’ Tori’s face is all pinched up, visibly pained. ‘Or the weather?’
‘Again. I’ll refer you to me and silences and nervous rambling without proper forethought.’
Cat drums her fingers on her collarbone. ‘You know,’ she says slowly, staring off beyond the screen, ‘this doesn’t seem like as much of a problem as it could be.’
‘How?’
Cat’s focus shifts back to the camera. ‘Have you considered he agreed to a fling expressly because that’s what you told him you wanted? Maybe he’s doing it to please you.’
‘That’s ridiculous. How did you reach that conclusion?’
‘Well, because if it isn’t that, then it’s quite lecherous of him to proposition a co-worker, or take advantage of your desire for sex.’
Tori shudders. ‘Yikes. That’s so true.’
‘He wouldn’t do that,’ Jules says firmly.
‘So if it’s not that …’ Cat starts the sentence for Jules.
Jules emerges from her sheet cocoon. ‘You’re saying he knows I want a fling, and he likes me so he wants to give me what I want?’
‘Your banter is good enough over the phone that you’ve been crushing on him for months,’ Tori says. ‘Who’s to say he’s not feeling the same way?’
‘And see, now we’re back to ‘I should have stuck to the pre-planned steps’ which literally included me trying to figure out if we had emotional chemistry. Now I’m not going to be able to tell if it’s just sexual.’
