‘Hello.’
‘Where are you?’ Erin exclaimed. ‘Didn’t you get my messages and other calls?’
‘Where areyou?’ Orla answered, playing for time as she eased herself off the bed, tucking her phone between shoulder and ear and searching for her clothes.
‘What? Hang on, I askedyouthat question.’
‘I know, but something’s telling me you’re not still in the cinema room with Tommy.’ She pulled on her underwear, then her jeans and picked her jumper off the floor.
‘And something is telling me you’re not in the kitchen, the lounge, the bathroom, our bedroom, or the weird, locked room that Tommy says is a gym thing.’
‘O-K,’ Orla said, foregoing her bra for just the jumper for now.
‘And I know that because I’ve been to all of those rooms and you aren’t in them.’
Think, Orla, think.
‘I’m in the barn,’ Orla said.
‘Oh really,’ Erin answered. ‘That’s crazy.’
‘Why?’ Orla asked, turning to Jacques. He had his eyes closed, beautiful body still nude in the bed.
‘Because I’m in the barn and you are not!’ Erin screeched.
She’d been caught out. But a good journalist never let her integrity be compromised until at least the bitter end. She took a breath. ‘Which barn?’
‘What?’
‘Are you with the chickens and Noble?’
‘Obviously!’
‘Ah, well, I’m in the other barn. Give me a second and I’ll come to you.’
Before Erin could say anything else, Orla ended the call, grabbed her socks and shoes and began putting them on.
‘Do you have another barn?’ Orla asked.
‘What?’ Jacques said.
‘Other than the barn with the chickens and Noble? Do you have any kind of barn-type structure I can pretend I was in?’
He didn’t reply but she could feel he was moving in the bed, perhaps rolling that athletic body upwards…
‘You would rather create an outbuilding than let anyone know you were in my bedroom with me?’
It sounded particularly horrible when he said it like that. But it wasn’t like that. It was simply practical. Erin would think… well, she didn’t really know what Erin would think; it could go one way or the other, from a whole cheer routine of support to a horrified child who had been told Santa wasn’t real. And really Jacques couldn’t want them walking out of here together hand-in-hand when nothing had been spoken about, when they hadn’t even actually gone on the date he had suggested…
‘Do you want Tommy to know we were here together doing… what we did here together?’ Orla asked.
‘I wouldn’t want to tell Tommy the exact full and intricate details of what we did here together but I’m also not going to make up agricultural storage like I’m ashamed of it.’
She tied her laces. ‘I’m not ashamed of it.’
‘Of what?’
‘Of it,’ Orla said. ‘Like you said.’
