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“Why would you say that? He’s—”
“Lovely. I know. But lovely isn’t enough, Tee.”
“You could fall in love with lovely.” It should be more than enough. Why wasn’t it enough? “I did once.”
Eyes back on her phone, Evie said, “That wasn’t love. That was being nineteen and new at everything and finding someone great to share that with.”
Lightning bolt to the head. Understanding floods into the cracks. But you couldn’t fall in love in a weekend, could you?
“You know, for someone who Tweets and Instas for a living, you are exceptionally wise,” Teela said.
“That’s how I can tweet and Insta for a living, you corporate savage.” Evie said, adding a shower of hearts to a photo of one of her brothers holding a guitar and posting it.
Teela took the last coconut prawn. “I’m not in love with Haydn, it’s just that—”
“Oh for fuck’s sake.” Evie said. Did she want the last prawn, it’d been sitting here for ages? “You daydream about him all the time.” Ah, not about the prawn. “You make yourself come in the shower with his voice in your head. You talked about him for days when he spoke at the UN about his aid anti-piracy project. You secretly watched the Academy Awards and you were upset for him when he didn’t win.”
“He was robbed.”
“Pharrell Jefferson’s performance was outstanding. Haydn was gracious and genuine about his win. You could see how excited he was for Pharrell, and that’s why you’re in love with him.”
If Evie had wanted that last prawn, she’d have wrestled for it. There was no point in Teela pretending she wasn’t in love with Haydn. “I don’t even know what it means to be in love with someone who isn’t real.”
“How much more real do you want him to be? He’s larger-than-life real.”
“He was real to me for a weekend. He’s not now. He’s not someone I can call or message or have a relationship with.” She pointed at a near-empty food container. “That cold bok choy is real. The prawn tails. The ice cream in the freezer. I can touch them, smell them, cry all over them. Haydn Delany is pixels on a screen. He might as well be a figment of my imagination.”
“You start messaging a bunch of bok choy, we have a problem.”
Teela sighed. “You know what I mean.”
Evie sighed back in perfect imitation plus some. “All I hear are rationalizations.”
“I don’t imagine his voice in my head in the shower. He is not worth a slipping accident.”
Evie wagged her brows. “Just the bedroom then?”
Not getting into that.
“It doesn’t matter if I did have a way to communicate with him. He doesn’t want what I want. I want a relationship with someone who isn’t threatened by my ambition. Something beyond the physical and bigger than friendship. I want to be in love and loved in return. I want a commitment and maybe one day a family. There is nothing on that list of things that Haydn wants and plenty of things in his life I don’t, like long-range camera lenses and needing disguises and the fame game. Plus the whole we don’t live in the same hemispheres thing is a total drag.”
“It’s a lot.” Evie said, going to the kitchen for the ice cream.
“Maybe now that I’ve admitted I’m in love with someone who won’t ever love me back, I can stop torturing myself and just grieve, eat more bok choy and move on.”
From the kitchen Evie waved a serving spoon, “Good luck with that.”
If she wasn’t serving dessert it would’ve been much easier to kick her out.
It wasn’t luck Teela needed, it was time. Once enough time had passed, she’d stop feeling as if she’d lost something important that she couldn’t ever find again.
At the fourteen-week mark, Sophie stopped making sad cow eyes at her. It seemed like a turning point, because if Sophie had given up on Teela living some modern fairytale then things were back to normal.
Until they weren’t.
Friday afternoon, ten minutes before she was due to interview a candidate for a marketing position, Sophie appeared in the doorway of Teela’s newly renovated office, eyes big as golf balls, mouth open in a silent scream.
“Are you okay?” Teela said.
