It promised to be a very interesting talk tomorrow.
Amy
London
Amy was so fucking hungover it wasn’t funny.
Cocktails, wine, tequila shots… and that was just what she could remember.
She’d stayed at Naomi’s house share in Clapham, top to toe in her bed while Lara slept on the sofa, and she’d had nowhere near enough sleep nor had she drunk anything like enough water before going to bed.
God, last night,she thought,I got a little crazy. Getting a woman’s phone number in the cocktail bar was one thing, and she wasn’t entirely sure whether she’d get in touch with her or not (Keira? Was that her name?Amy struggled to recall) although she vaguely remembered thinking she was cute. But then what she’d done in the club after, or more specifically thebathroom of the club with a complete stranger…that wasn’t me, or of course it was me but not my style.
She’d even woken up that morning worried that she’d made a move on Naomi in the night… utterly ridiculous, of course, but a sure sign of where her head was at.
Yesterday had been insane. What had started as a normal Saturday of James going out to play rugby and Amy meeting Sarah for lunch had descended into, well, Amy somehow now effectively single, coming out to her two best friends and the night that followed.
She checked her phone again. 10.04am. Naomi was in the shower, Lara had gone back to her place to vegetate, and Amy was in limbo… James would be back at their flat, and Amy couldn’t face seeing him quite yet, not until she felt a little more human.Their flat. The place they’d been for a few years now, that she’d made nice, where all her stuff was.The enormity of the day before hit her hard… no moreour flat, who stayed and who went still to be worked out, and she’d need somewhere to live potentially.
Amy took a deep breath and lay back down on the bed, trying to ignore the nausea and the headache throbbing away behind her eyes.
Messages first, triage the problems.
She picked up her phone again and forced herself to stop ignoring the messages waiting for her: from James, from Sarah, from Luisa.
First, James:
Hope you’re ok. We need to talk, sure you agree. Call me when you can?
Simple, and entirely accurate because God did they need to talk. They’d talked for a few hours yesterday when she’d told him that she thought she was a lesbian and they’d covered a lot of ground, but yes they needed to talk and straighten things out. If for no other reason, Amy realised, than she owed it to him… walking in on your long term girlfriend in bed with her female boss couldn’t have been easy for him, although his relative equanimity yesterday had been telling given his own infidelities in the not too distant past.
She’d call him as soon as she’d showered, Amy decided. A shower always cleared her head and she’d need a clear head for whatever was to come.
Next, Sarah. Amy felt something inside her tighten at the thought of Sarah that morning… because Sarah was complicated. She’d started to fall for Sarah, properly fall for her, not the half-real relationship they’d had for the past few months, a relationship predicated on Sarah’s professional help in exchange for, frankly, sex with Amy. Fantastic, incredible, life changing sex, granted, but transactional nonetheless.
Sarah had that same arrangement with other women too, her mentoring scheme, but at some point in the last few weeks it had changed between them… whether in LA where in Sarah’s hotel room Sarah had switched from a dominant to submissive role for the first time in her life, or since they’d been back in London and discovered a simplicity in something authentically equal she didn’t know. All that Amy did know is they’d caught feelings for each other and it had all come to a head yesterday, after lunch, back at Amy and James’s flat.
Her message was simple:
Hi Amy, checking you’re ok. I suspect I’m not top of the list for this, but let me know when you can talk x
Yeah, they needed to talk, that was for sure. But Sarah could wait… ultimately she bore as much responsibility as Amy for the mess she found herself in that morning, in fact Amy was surprised to realise that she felt a little anger towards her alongside the other feelings, and any conversation they were going to have necessarily sat behind James.
Then, that brought her to Luisa… Luisa who was five thousand miles away and utterly oblivious to the carnage in Amy’s personal life over the last twenty four hours. Luisa had sent her a message just about when Amy’s world was exploding around her and she hadn’t had time to reply:
Hey gorgeous, morning from LA. Hope you slept well. How’s your day so far? xx
With Luisa, it was easy. Everything about Luisa felt so fun and light, they’d only known each other for a few weeks but it was as if they were best friends who’d never known the other existed. With Luisa there was no hidden complexity, at least not yet. Doing the mental calculations, she worked out that Luisa was probably asleep by now, unless the premiere she was going to last night had gone on particularly late, but wanted to send her something to wake up to at least… she felt a little bad that she’d not replied to Luisa last night but her head hadn’t been in the right place.
She tried three different replies, none sounding quite right to her hungover brain, then settled on:
Sorry for radio silence today. It’s been completely insane here. Long story that I’ll tell you about when we talk. Hope the party was fun. Can we talk tomorrow? I miss you xx
To her surprise she got a reply quickly:
Just got back. Party was good but movie was bad. Of course we can talk tomorrow, call me whenever. Everything ok? xx
Amy smiled.Luisa’s great,she thought, looking forward even more than she had been to seeing her again in LA at the end of the week. She felt a little pang, wishing she was closer, but then that was the compromise with the two women who’d come crashing into her life: one was single five thousand miles away, the other was close but married with kids.Why can I never do things the easy way?
