“So, what’s her name?”
“Uh, Dan...ne?”
“Pastizzis,” Eden repeated. “Anyway, my point is that Psycho must fuck like it’s his job, because she is cock-whipped.”
“Ew, Eden! You’re, like, a mum now…”
“I know.” She wiggled her blonde eyebrows. “And Willow’s my big dick daddy.”
Cheryl snorted. Her friend hadn’t been out in a while and clearly had pent-up party fever. “What are you gonna play?”
They went over the music until football players and their girlfriends started arriving, creating a nice buffer between her and Patrick’s whistle-tone girlfriend. She had a feeling Pastizzis didn’t like her, and she planned on doing what she always did with salty girlfriends— staying the hell away. But Patrick’s new bag clearly didn’t have the same policy. Whenever she and Patrick got talking for more than two seconds, Pastizzis popped out of nowhere, asking questions that meant he had to go somewhere else.
So, it’s going to be like that, she thought. Awesome.
She forced herself to focus on spending girl time with Eden, but her mate was busy behind the decks. She wound up drinking with randoms, occasionally chatting to Mara Hardiman, who was nice but so well-known their conversation was interrupted every nine seconds by people gushing over her.
At ten in the evening, Cheryl went to hunt down another bottle of Pinot and found Patrick and Pastizzis messing with the oven. They slid a tray of pastries in together like the dogs simultaneously eating spaghetti in Lady and The Tramp. Cheryl backed away, but not before she saw Patrick bend down to kiss her. He did it so easily. Like it was nothing. She recoiled like she’d touched an electric fence. Abandoning the wine, she ran back to the living room.
“Where’s the pinot?” Eden demanded.
“I forgot it. Hey, how old is Pastizzis?”
“I think Psycho said she’s in first-year law at Monash… Nineteen?”
Cheryl took the red solo cup from Eden’s hand and drained it. It was straight Sambuca, but that didn’t matter. Nineteen. First-year law. Jesus Christ. She was thirty-one. A social media consultant with a tiny rented apartment, no boyfriend and no degree.
“Didn’t you want to be a lawyer?” Eden asked.
“A prosecutor,” Cheryl said, looking around for more alcohol. “Until I found out all you prosecute are the same nine homeless people whose lives already suck.”
Eden said something she didn’t hear. Who was she, besides some older single woman with no assets and no career? The coolest thing about her was having a DJ and a professional football player for mates. Everything else was just… Nothing. She looked down at her outfit. She’d felt so cute in her faux leather miniskirt and strappy top, but wasn’t she getting too old to dress like this? To act like this?
Shame, the likes of which she hadn’t felt since she was fifteen, swamped her. She pulled out her phone and searched her texts. Desmond—the fifty-two-year-old policy advisor she’d slept with last month—said he’d be in Melbourne. If she was lucky, he’d have his usual suite at the Mercury Grand. Five minutes later he’d confirmed it, and Cheryl booked an Uber.
“I’m gonna head off,” she told Eden. “See you soon.”
Eden’s lower lip popped out. “Dude, don’t go! Stay and eat pastizzis!”
She forced herself to smile. “I think Patrick’s got that covered.”
* * *
Present Day
It was four in the morning and Cheryl was smoking out of her living room window. The night was warm, but she couldn’t afford to run the cooler. She’d stripped to her lace panties, determined to catch every little breeze on her skin. Her neighbours might see, but good for them.
She took a long pull on her Marlboro, watching the end dissolve into nothingness. She’d dreamed of Patrick again. He was behind her, his fist in her hair, his cock in her ass. He’d been fucking her hard, making her feel every inch. “You like that, don’t you, KitKat? You like getting done from the back?”
“Yes,” she’d told him. “Yes.”
“Of course, you do. Now come on my cock, you fucking slut.”
Instead, she’d started awake, so frustrated and lonely she’d cried out loud.
It had been two weeks since she’d seen him. Talked to him. Wrote to him. And despite everything, the loss was getting harder to take, not easier. She hadn’t been able to get back to sleep, so she’d gone to work making tuna casserole and chicken soup, completing pitch proposals, and wiping down her oven. When she’d run out of useful things, she did her nails, micro-needled her skin, and sent a tonne of Facebook Marketplace messages about second-hand couches. The timing of them probably made her look like a murderer, but she’d done it. Now there was truly nothing left to do but smoke and wait for the day to start.
The streets of Footscray were quiet, possums scurried along power lines and distant cars rushed along the main road, heading somewhere else. She felt on the edge of some task that would never be completed. It wasn’t a new feeling. It was as old as the pulse in her wrist.
