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“You’ll be glad to know I maintained my cool admirably.” It was true enough, considering she’d teetered on the brink of major humiliation.
“Well done.” Polly uncorked a bottle of white wine at the kitchen bench, poured them both a glass and sprawled back in her chair. “So, when are you going to let him talk you into it?”
“I’m—he’s not. I may have mentioned in passing I was going to the art gallery on Sunday and he said he’d like to come, but—”
“I rest my case: he’s desperate. And you’re still hopelessly smitten. That’s why there needs to be a revision of the plan.”
“What sort of revision?”
Polly grabbed a pad of paper that happened to be on a pile in the middle of the table along with some shopping dockets, a dying pot plant and a couple of Alice’s hair scrunchies.
“Okay. This is how it works.” She scribbled something on a page, tore it off and handed it to Alice.
Alice
––––– + amazeballs sex = true love
Aaron
Alice frowned. “Is this a joke?”
Polly picked up her glass of wine and took an enthusiastic gulp. “If you take on this girlfriend gig, the game changes.”
“Hardly. It’s no different from all the other times I’ve bailed him out,” Alice remarked glumly, but her eyes were drawn to the wordsamazeballs sexlike iron filings to a magnet.
“Yes, it is. It makes for a completely different dynamic.” As a social worker, Polly spent vast swathes of her day doing family counselling at the hospital she worked at, which meant she threw out words likedynamic, symbioticandco-dependenceas if they were pronouns.
Alice shrugged helplessly. “Nothing will change the fact that the person I want doesn’t want me back.”
“In all fairness, you’ve never rigorously tested the hypothesis.”
“Five years feels like a pretty thorough experiment to me.”
“Yeah, right. With you playing the little sister he never had; giving him a listening ear for all his girlfriend problems, sofa to crash on, hangover brekky to cook—get the picture?”
“I’m just not his type. You know as well as I do Aaron goes for blondes with legs up to their earlobes and big—” Alice gave a wave at the region of her chest. “Not small brunettes who wear glasses and have no—”
‘Tits,” said Polly matter-of-factly. “You’ve got great tits, but you choose to hide them under T-shirts that readI prefer my book boyfriend.”
“I only ever wear that one to bed,” Alice rebutted indignantly.
Polly sighed heavily. “Face it, Munchkin. You’ve friend-zoned yourself so spectacularly you don’t know how to get out of it. Here’s the perfect opportunity to show Aaron a whole lot more than just your mind, and you’re working yourself up to a panic attack.”
Sure enough, Alice’s palms were clammy and her heart was pounding.
She hadn’t felt like this since university, when she’d had to regularly shove her head between her legs to stop from hyperventilating before lectures.
“I—no—oh, no—I wouldn’t know where to begin. And then what if something does happen and… oh god, how would we look each other in the eyes the next day?” She gulped in a breath. “Nope. I’m really happy with the status quo.”
“Intense sexual frustration, you mean?”
Yowch. Polly always went for the jugular. Or, in this instance, somewhere else a fair bit lower.
“Let me explain before you freak out.” Polly scooted her chair over to Alice’s, put down her glass and circled their names with her pen. “Alice over Aaron, that’s a given. Unless you prefer Aaron over Alice, but really, missionary position is soyesterday.”
Alice winced. She’d got used to Polly’s detailed descriptions of her own sex life, but when it came to references to her own more or less non-existent one, they made her want to squirm.
Polly’s pen hovered overamazeballs sex. “You two have had this weird, sexually charged friendship since uni.”
