I would never forget the shock I’d felt when, two weeks after James had left, the bank called about the missed repayment. That same panic had lurked within me ever since I discovered that James’s salary wasn’t coming into our shared account anymore. Not to mention the lingering disbelief that someone I’d loved so wholeheartedly could have done this to me without warning.
My companion stood up and took my glass from my hand. ‘In that case, I’d better buy you another. This one’s looking a bit worse for wear. Gin and tonic, isn’t it?’
He disappeared before I could protest and I leant back against the couch feeling foolish. What an idiot, pouring my heart out to some random guy before I even knew his name. And now he was buying me a drink when he looked no more able to afford it than me.
Meanwhile, my friends were still shimmying away, oblivious to my plight. A couple of years ago I would’ve been up there with them, strutting my stuff, so it wasn’t unreasonable for them to assume it might make me feel better. But all that seemed so far in the past. I’d given up playing the field after the humiliation that had followed my last one-night stand. Shortly after that I’d fallen for the shithead’s best friend and thought I’d settled down for good. Meanwhile, my friends were still happily single. They didn’t care that James had ripped out my still-beating heart and thrown it under a freight train.
They didn’t know the joy of cooking together, the comfort of drifting off to sleep in someone else’s arms, the contentment of just loving and being loved. All the clichés I’d taken for granted with James I now yearned for as I sat alone in the dark, impersonal embrace of a crowd of strangers.
But I wasn’t being fair. When I said they didn’t care, that wasn’t exactly true. They just didn’t understand how it felt to have the love of your life turn out to be a bastard.
A guy wearing a tight white T-shirt and an out-of-fashion Beckham hairstyle gave me the once-over as he strolled past. I glanced down and saw that my top had slipped down to reveal the proud cleavage that only a heavy-duty push-up bra could give me. I groaned. No wonder this guy was buying me a drink. He must have thought I was throwing myself at him.
‘Your drink, ma’am.’
I gave him a half-smile as I took the gin and tonic. He sat down, closer this time, his body turned towards me and his knee touching my thigh. A sage voice somewhere in the back of my head advised me that the last thing I needed was to get involved with someone else. I told it to shut up. Surely there was no harm in chatting to him. And he really was hot.
‘I’m Chris,’ he said.
‘Sarah.’
‘Here’s to drowning sorrows.’ We clinked our glasses together.
‘So what do you do, Sarah?’ he asked after we’d both taken a sip of our drinks.
I hesitated. For years I’d cringed at this banal question, made some flippant comment, tried to avoid further conversation. But the temptation to create a fantastical character for this stranger I’d probably never see again was overwhelming.
‘I’m a journalist.’
It wasn’t exactly a lie. I was a journalism graduate, after all. I did work for a women’s magazine and I did write a column. But the slightly less glamorous truth was that I was a former beauty therapist trying to crack the career I’d wanted after years of study. I’d started working in Mum’s beauty salon in the school holidays when I was seventeen. It was a job that helped me pay my way through uni even after I’d moved out of home. It was never supposed to be a long-term thing. When I graduated and didn’t pick up the lucrative cadetship at one of the major papers I’d naively planned for in my mind, I stubbornly clung to my standards. But then weeks became years, and the positions I applied for moved further and further down the rung. Before I knew it, I was twenty-eight, still working for my mum and no closer to my dream of reporting on women’s rights in some beautiful-and-exciting-but-not-too-dangerous international location. That’s when I decided it was time to make a change.
I got the job at Women’s Choice on the strength of an eight-year-old exposé I’d written back in uni, and so far I hadn’t exactly set the industry on fire. I still submitted the occasional essay to online feminist publications and sometimes they were picked up, but never with sufficient regularity to result in an actual job. And my boss refused to give me anything more meaty than my weekly beauty column.
It’s not that I couldn’t write. I just knew nothing about celebrities. While Women’s Choice did run the occasional gutsy investigative story, its main focus was celebrity scandal and gossip. I didn’t know who was hot and who was not. I didn’t know who was having an affair with whom, or whose marriage was on the rocks. In order to advance to investigative stories, I was expected to do my time on the fluff. But my ignorance of the world of the beautiful people was holding me back.
Great career move, Sarah. I’d progressed from waxing hoo-hahs to writing about waxing them.
Chris was looking at me, and I realised he’d asked me a question.
‘Sorry, what?’
‘I just asked whether you like your job.’
I shrugged. ‘It pays the bills. Well, it did anyway.’
When James and I had combined our incomes, it’d seemed like an impossible amount of money. James was a petroleum engineer and casually brought home more than double my wage. It had felt surreal to move to the inner Melbourne suburb where I’d never imagined being able to live; to buy furniture and decorations and hang bright prints on the walls; to play house. I’d got comfortable…
