“What are you thinking about?”

I turned my head to Daniel. He was staring right at me and who knows for how long.

“Thinking about the day we met, actually,” I answered.

“Yeah? What grabbed you?”

I turned on my side, facing him. “Why did you hire me?”

He turned on his side too, and inched his way over the white sheets until we were a few inches apart. “You know, you always ask me that.”

“And you never answer.”

He chuckled. “You already know the answer. You just want me to say it.”

“You liked what you saw.”

“Yeah. And?”

“And I didn’t look like her one bit.”

He nodded. “Precisely.”

“I notice you can talk about it more lately.”

“You make it easier.” He lightly stroked my bare arm as his eyes went about my face. I remember before it would have been impossible having him say more than two words about the woman he’d given his heart to. It took me over a year just to get her name out of his lips. Sandra it was, and she’d stomped on his heart by betraying their love in the worst way imaginable. I figured she cheated and that’s what the ultimate betrayal was, but he was yet to tell me the exact reason.

We respected each other’s privacy, which is why this arrangement worked so well for us. We’d been sleeping together for two years. In the beginning, it was occasionally. We weren’t fully into it, and only when the itch got too bad we sought each other out. But lately, the holes we thought would be closing were only getting bigger. The past six months we were seeing each other three nights a week… minimum.

But still. That line was drawn deep in the sand between us. We didn’t want a relationship. Relationships were doomed. We just needed that contact, the slightest reminder of what it would be like to feel complete again. Every time we fucked, it made me forget, for even the briefest of moments, Jaxon Barlow.

Having dreamt him, I pushed away from Daniel and decided to have an early morning shower. I wanted to preserve that dream, not taint it by forgetting him in the arms of Daniel. Some pains are worth enduring, I realized.

He wasn’t in the bedroom after I was out. I heard his voice coming from the kitchen, and then Lexi’s laughter. I quickly changed and joined them. Daniel was standing beside coffee machine, and it was brewing. Lexi was sitting at the kitchen table, wearing the same club clothes as last night; her eyes were puffy, her face plagued by exhaustion, and a bottle of wine wrapped in her manicured hand.

“Trying to beat a hangover with alcohol, huh?” I remarked with a roll of my eyes. “A bit counter-productive, don’t you think?”

“Eh, fuck you. I do what I want.” Even her voice sounded slurred.

“When did you get home?”

“Caught her through the door just as I left the bedroom,” Daniel said, smiling at Lexi with a shake of his head. “She was telling me all about her little fling with some Russian kingpin.”

Lexi eagerly filled me in about her sexual encounter with the Russian accented businessman, openly using words that defined it like “huge cock” and “wet pussy” in front of an amused Daniel, while I stared wide eyed at her openness. She just got looser as time passed.

“Moving on,” I said the second she finished draining every colour from my face and forever scorching my brain with images that I might not ever move on from, “you’ve still got a shit load of boxes to unpack. We’ve been in this apartment three weeks and I still can’t walk around without bumping into your shit.”

I loved Lexi, and was used to the fact she wasn’t a pack rat like me and left her stuff everywhere, but we’d agreed that getting a bigger apartment would mean changing those habits. So far, I hadn’t seen much change in her. I wished she was just as dedicated at home as she was at work.

“Yeah, yeah,” she grumbled, lacking charisma from before. “By the way, your new phone’s come in the mail yesterday. It’s on top of the television stand. Forgot to tell you last night. Sorry.”

Finally! I jumped out of my chair and raced to the living room, dodging boxes and jumping over some of Lexi’s random shit on the floor. When I saw the small, taped brown box on the television stand, I felt immense relief.

I’d been without the phone for three weeks, literally the day we moved into the apartment it fell four stories off the balcony when I was propping it up on the ledge so I could bring in the balcony table. I’d knocked it off with the swipe of my shoulder. My poor, beautiful android fell to its death bringing down every contact and photo I’d stored into that phone to its grave. I still had my phone number chip, so it wasn’t all that bad.

As Daniel and Lexi chatted, I opened the box and pulled out my white, identical cell phone to my last. As I charged it, I turned it on and went through the usual instalment steps before putting in my number.

“What did you want to do today?” Daniel asked me sweetly as he walked into the living room. He sat down on the black leather couch and watched me cross legged on the hardwood floor with the phone to my face.

“What did you have in mind?” I asked.

“We could hit the movie store and have a day of relaxation again.”

I frowned. “As long as you’re not going to force me to watch legal documentaries, then sure.”

He chuckled. “What’s wrong with the legal documentaries we watch? You’ve never complained about them before.”

“I complain about them every single time you pop one in, but you distract me by ordering pizza and then throwing a bowl of chocolates in my face. That has to stop too, you know. My ass is going to explode.”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

After I’d uploaded every update and put my number in, it took barely a minute before it began beeping relentlessly. Surprised, I stared down at the screen and at the ten voicemails I’d accumulated in the last three weeks.

I abandoned the rest of the instalments and hurriedly accessed my voicemails. I’d never received such an accumulation before. I wasn’t a popular girl, didn’t know a lot of people, and certainly never just handed out my number. So whatever this was, my gut was telling me it was bad.

All blood drained from my face when the first voicemail came through.

“This is Father Mark from Gosnells. I need to talk to Sara Nolan. It is imperative she call me as soon as possible. There is news I’m afraid she needs to hear.”