Bastian nods.
“Sorry,” she says. “But you know how busy I am.”
“Yeah, no problem.”
She goes to the sitting room to gather her things. Bastian returns to his coffee, looks down into his cup, now almost empty save for a layer of earthy liquid and some stray granules.
Rebecca has been working hard lately. The auction house has a big sale coming up and they have to get everything ready to exhibit the antiques—they have to take high-resolution photographs and write accurate descriptions of the items. If they get anything wrong they could be sued, so they must check and double check every sentence.
Rebecca leaves soon afterwards. She calls out to him from the hall to tell him she’s leaving and to say goodbye, but she doesn’t come through to see him. He thinks about getting up to wave her off but doesn’t. Then he gets out his phone. He considers checking if Milo or Alexander are free, but then he thinks of Glenda.
Bastian and Glenda have seen each other a number of times over the last few months. They were never really friends at uni, only knowing each other a little through Laura, but after bumping into Glenda in the club, Bastian had got back in touch. After exchanging a few messages, and realizing they worked a couple of streets away from each other, they decided to get dinner together one night at a pizza place that had recently opened.
The restaurant had been busy and the waiter grimaced when they said they hadn’t booked, but he managed to squeeze them in at the back.
Early on in the night, Glenda asked Bastian about Rebecca, and he felt himself blush. Glenda looked confused. Bastian tried to say something non-committal to move the conversation on. He told her Rebecca was well and then mentioned that she’d been busy at work, and was having to stay late several evenings a week.
‘Where does she work?’
Bastian told her, and Glenda seemed interested. “Oh yeah, I know someone else who works there. They say the auctions can be really exciting, even though they don’t personally have any stake in it. As in, they’re not the ones doing the buying, and they’re only tangentially doing the selling, but they get really swept up in it all. Like, you’ve just dropped a cool mil on a two-hundred-year-old bookcase. Bam.” She smacked the table with her hand.
“I don’t think Rebecca has much involvement in the auctions. She mainly works with clients to verify what they’ve got. To check if it’s real or fake.”
The pizza arrived, and the waiter fussed a bit with black pepper and Glenda wanted chili oil in addition to jalapeños. The waiter raised his eyebrows but did as she asked. There were a few minutes of silence as they concentrated on their food and then Glenda said, “You two must have been together for quite a while now. Apart from the gap in the middle.”
Bastian finished chewing his mouthful of pizza and swallowed. He placed his knife and fork on his plate and used the paper napkin to wipe his mouth. He needed to achieve a level of composure before having this conversation with Glenda.
“Speaking of the gap in the middle,” she continued, “I was chatting to Laura the other day.”
“Really?” Bastian had tried to sound casual.
“Yeah, you didn’t come up though.” She said this as if he had asked, which he hadn’t.
“I didn’t think I would have come up.”
“You would have done about a year ago, though.”
“Really?” This time he couldn’t sound casual.
“Oh yeah. She took a bit of time to get over you.”
Glenda looked up from her plate and watched for Bastian’s reaction. He had no idea how his face looked to her, but he could feel his heartrate quicken, and he became aware that he was blinking more than usual. He hadn’t expected Laura to have taken any time at all to get over him. He had no idea that, on her part, there had been anything to get over. He was only partially, and latterly, aware that his own feelings for her had been strong, and that still wasn’t a fact he felt able to think about for longer than five seconds, let alone articulate. He had always thought of her as almost impervious to any kind of vulnerability.
He thought about confiding in Glenda. He thought about revealing that he had been thinking about her friend a lot. He considered trying to explain to her the various ways in which aspects of Laura had been creeping into his daily routine. When he brushed his teeth he thought about how she had stood next to him and brushed hers. He thought about the peculiar intensity of her expression as she scrubbed. He still owned a white cotton T-shirt she had worn a couple of times, plain except for a small black logo on the right sleeve. He could remember her in it, sitting by his open window on hot afternoons. It hadn’t been a problem before, but since the evening he’d bumped into Glenda, he couldn’t look at it without being reminded of Laura. He had to ball it up and stuff it at the bottom of his wardrobe, as if hiding contraband.
In lieu of any explicit statement about the time he spent with her, or the time he’s spent thinking about her since, he had asked Glenda how Laura was doing.
“She’s well. She hates her job though.”
“Where does she work?”
“At some kind of charity. They treat her like shit but are constantly going on about how grateful she should be for working in such a friendly environment, and how they’re doing a really good thing by paying her a salary rather than getting her to give her time for free. She wants to leave as soon as she can.”
“What does she want to do?”
“I don’t think she’s fussy. I think in an ideal world she’d be working for some great political campaign with someone amazing she really believes in. But how on earth is she
