She turned, trying to look absorbed in her phone. “Um, maybe. Hang on.”
She messaged Klaus.
The weather’s really bad tonight. I might not make it into the city.
The talking dots popped up at once.
No! Please, Cheryl, I need your gorgeous punani!
She stared at the text. She reread it. She mouthed the word ‘punani,’ and then the stupidity hit her in full force. She screamed with laughter.
“What?” Patrick jumped up from the couch. “What’s happened?”
She was laughing too hard to talk. She doubled over, almost banging her head on the kitchen counter. The phrase ‘your gorgeous punani!’ played around and around in her head like an insane carousel ride. It was the exclamation mark that really did it. The sincerity of it all.
Patrick started laughing because she was laughing. “The fuck is wrong with you?”
“Nothing,” she gasped. “Just… a meme. Let’s… get… dinner.”
He beamed at her. “Really?”
“Yeah…” She waved her hands in front of her streaming eyes. “Just let me get changed and we can go.”
“Sure.”
She headed to her bedroom, still giggling hysterically. She supposed she should thank Klaus for making her decision so easy. A personal rule was one thing. Messaging the word ‘punani’ to someone was another. She pulled off her cable knit jumper and bra, scanning her clothes rack for her pink jumpsuit. She could hear Patrick moving around her kitchen, picking up his keys. Would he ever say ‘punani?’
Never. He’d rather die. Patrick would say pussy. She shivered a little at the word and remembered how hard his stomach felt. Like sun-warmed concrete.
‘You’ve got the sweetest little pussy, KitKat. Turn around so I can fuck it nice and slow.’
Cheryl looked down to find she was squeezing her own tits. Blushing furiously, she let go. Maybe she should have met up with Klaus, she obviously needed to get laid. Still, the ‘punani’ thing… Grinning, she dressed, pushing aside any and all thoughts of Patrick and what he might call her vagina.
* * *
Present Day
It was six in the morning and Tullamarine airport was relatively empty. There were a few clusters of families and a few giggling school groups, but mostly just lone individuals with earbuds slowly moving through customs with travel pillows already around their necks.
The longest line in the place was for Morgan’s Coffee, and as she waited, Cheryl thought about her dad. She always did when she was at Tullamarine.
Born in Kórinthos, raised in London, everything she knew about her father she knew from the internet. Her mum had always been vague on the details, although that was probably because she’d spent most of their six-month affair drinking tsipouro and boning to Sade’s Diamond Life album.
Cheryl imagined Bernard Karalis waiting for his luggage at the baggage carousel back in 1990, tapping his foot and changing his Rolex to local time. Had he been excited? Worried? Or just impatient? He’d been forty-six at the time, a millionaire on his way to being a billionaire with a wife and three daughters in Kensington. And across the city, her mum had just gotten her first job, answering phones at a temp agency. She’d been nineteen, living out of home for the first time and dreaming of falling in love and traveling the world. Soon after, Sharon Walker would be sent to a huge construction project backed by Karalis Finance, and the rest was history.
At least Mum got to do one thing on her list before my dad and her uterus betrayed her.
She wasn’t supposed to be thinking like that. This was a holiday. Her first real holiday in years, and Patrick—
“Hi,” the girl behind the counter said. “What can I get you?”
Cheryl focused on the coffee menu. The prices were insane, and the flavours were scary. When did macadamia milk become a thing? She settled on two regular-ass lattes and paid with the twenty Patrick had given her.
“I can pay for coffee,” she’d protested.
In response, he’d slid the note into her cleavage. “That would violate our agreement, wouldn’t it, KitKat?”
The day after he’d made her breakfast, she’d gone back to his place with a dossier full of reasons why she couldn’t go to Wellington with him. Well thought out, reasonable reasons…
