“Come on. I’ll drive you over.”
“Are you sure? I can just walk over. It’s not that far.” It was that far, and she was wrung out, but she didn’t want to be a nuisance.
“Nah, I’ll take you. It’s all good.”
A niggling thought leapt to the forefront of Jules’s mind. “Hold on, she said I needed to bring two pieces of photo ID, right? I’ve got my Colorado driver’s licence, but my passport is in my carry-on.” She looked between Ash and Matt.
Ash waved her off. “I’m sure it will be fine.” Ash seemed far more optimistic than she was.
“Yeah, that’s just common sense, right?” added Matt.
Jules nodded, not wholly convinced.
“Did you want to shower first, though?” asked Ash.
Jules looked down at her wrinkled tank and her dull, grey, post-flight skin. She must have looked terrible—she felt terrible.
“You look fine,” added Ash. “I just know that whenever I travel, the first thing I want to do when I arrive is shower.”
Jules would have killed to stay in the apartment and shower—and rest—but she also knew she wouldn’t be able to rest properly until she had her carry-on safely in hand.
“Let’s go,” she sighed.
“Back in a bit,” said Matt, leading the way out of the apartment.
It turned out that the errand took a quite a lot longer than “a bit”.
*
Several hours later, Jules was back at the apartment, showered and fed—four pieces of toast with peanut butter—and semi-reclined on Ash and Chloe’s couch, trying to keep her eyes open. Her fatigue probably wasn’t helped by the wine Ash had insisted on opening. It was delicious, though.
“I still can’t believe I left my bag on that bus,” she moaned. “What an idiot.”
“You’re being too hard on yourself. You’d just flown long-haul. No one is in their right mind after getting off a plane from across the world. I never am.”
“Seriously, though, when I realised it was a catch-22, I nearly lost it. They can only open a bag with the permission of the owner, but they couldn’t confirm my identity as the owner to their satisfaction without opening the bag.” She knew she was labouring the point. She’d given Ash the digest version as soon as Matt had dropped her back at the apartment, but she couldn’t help dwelling on the “what if” of losing her passport.
She needed sleep.
“I seriously can’t believe they didn’t just give it to you. I mean, were there dozens of hysterical women calling up about a lost bag with that exact description?”
Jules’s eyebrows shot up on the word “hysterical” and she looked pointedly at Ash, a smile tugging at her mouth. Ash caught the look. “Well, not hysterical exactly. Um, concerned, upset, worried.”
“Anyway, common sense finally prevailed after the supervisor called his supervisor at home, and she gave him permission. The passport was bad enough, but that’s the bag with all the presents in it.”
“You brought presents?” The smile broke across Jules’s face.
“Of course. It’s Christmas.”
Ash grinned. “I love presents.”
“Chloe mentioned that,” she teased. “Actually, I should put them under the tree,” she added. It was a nice thought, but her body refused to budge. Instead, she glanced at the Christmas tree.
She’d only noticed it after she’d returned with her carry-on. It was beautiful, but it would be Jules’s first Christmas with a fake tree. And it wasn’t even fake, as in, “I’m pretending to be a fir tree.” It was made from silver and white tinsel and decorated with blue ornaments—only blue. Even the Christmas lights were blue.
“So, what did you bring for Matt?” Jules couldn’t decide if Ash had emphasised “Matt” on purpose. Was she getting at something?
“You’ll see,” she deflected. “I don’t want to spoil the surprise.”
“But how did you know?”
“What gifts to get?”
“Yeah.”
“Chloe told me who was coming on Christmas Day and I ran some ideas past her and, of course, I know you, so …”
“Seriously, no hints?”
“No!” She laughed. “Chloe said you would ask.”
“Oh, really?”
“Uh-huh. She also told me where she hid her present to you, so you wouldn’t find it before Christmas and peek.”
Ash’s mouth popped open, hung there for a moment, then snapped shut. She lifted her chin and, saying nothing, topped up their wine glasses.
“Well, it’s very nice of you to bring presents for all of us. You didn’t need to.”
Jules shrugged. “You’d have done the same.”
“Matt’s a good guy, by the way.” It was an extremely unsubtle change of topic—so Ash had been hinting at something earlier.
Jules pretended she didn’t get it. “He is. He did not need to do all that for me today. I mean, at that point when the supervisor said no to me retrieving my own bag … let’s just say, I was not my best self. I nearly gave up. But Matt was great—awesome, actually. It was his idea to escalate the whole thing.”
Matt was a good guy and an extremely good-looking guy. She wondered if he and Chloe had ever … She let the thought trail off as she sipped her wine.
“He had a rough time a little while back but, you know, he’s probably ready …” Ash left the rest of the thought unsaid.
Regardless of Ash’s intentions, Jules wasn’t up for contemplating Matt’s readiness for a romantic entanglement. “Ash, this wine is great, but I am beyond exhausted. I think I’m going to have to call it a night.”
“No worries. You did well. Look, it’s nearly eight o’clock.”
Jules glanced at the large clock on the wall in the kitchen. “They say it’s the best way, right? Staying up as long as you can to get on the right time?”
“Yeah. I always try to do that when I fly back to Melbs from overseas.” Jules took her unfinished wine to the kitchen. “I’m glad you like the wine, by the way. We’re having it at Christmas. Matt made it.”
“He made it?”
“Yeah. He didn’t tell you he was a winemaker?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Yeah, he’s kind of a big deal in the wine world. He won a ‘winemaker of the
