Yep, I’d definitely made the right decision taking this outside. It wasn’t as if Theo would be standing outside my door with a glass pressed to it, but it would’ve felt weird talking about him when there was a distinct possibility he’d be so close by.
‘It wasn’t a come-on,’ I protested, ‘and I didn’t “fall for it”. I just . . . accepted his generous invitation.’
Zoë scoffed loudly, pulling her blood-red beanie more firmly down over her sleek bob. ‘So, go on then, talk me through it. You wander over in your pyjamas?’
‘And my poncho.’
She stopped dead, her camel-coloured boots sliding slightly on the leaf-littered path, her beautiful face pained. ‘Oh, Gio, no! We’ve talked about this. That monstrosity is not for public consumption!’
‘How rude,’ I said in mock offence, ‘I made that with my very own hands.’
‘That is blatantly obvious.’
I allowed that that was the truth and we set off walking again.
‘I’m still not getting this, though,’ she said after we’d gone a few steps. ‘Are you seriously telling me you go over to your incredibly sexy neighbour’s place every midnight wearing your lumpy blanket thing and then just read a book about jet engines? That sounds–’ she paused again, apparently trying to find the right words, and then finished, ‘–incredibly pointless.’
‘The book’s actually very interesting and I’m learning a lot,’ I said piously, shoving my hands deeper into the pockets of my oversized royal blue coat. ‘For example, do you know how fast the SR-71 Blackbird went? Stupid fast.’
‘Yes, I can see it’s very educational,’ she said sarcastically. ‘Is “stupid fast” a technical term or–’
I laughed and gave her shoulder a push. ‘Rack off.’
She rebalanced herself and sighed, as if working up to something. She pursed her lips. ‘If you’re that upset about Dec, and I don’t think you should be, but if you are, and you’re waking up at night and needing someone to talk to, or whatever . . .’
My heart swelled with love for my emotionally stunted friend and her attempt to look out for me, but I did her the favour of not getting too soppy and just said, ‘It’s not like that. If it was, you’d be the one I’d call.’
She looked unconvinced. ‘So what exactly are you getting out of this weird midnight deal with the Nod Next-Door?’
I thought about it for a long moment, breathing in the fresh, early spring air and choosing to look at the first green shoots budding on the trees we passed, rather than the shopping cart lying abandoned in the shallow water.
‘Peace,’ I said in the end. ‘It’s like a balance between being by myself and having someone with me. I sit on the couch and he sits at his desk and it’s . . . I don’t know, it makes my brain stop going over and over everything with Dec.’
‘Right.’ Zoë was obviously over feeling sorry for me about what’d happened at the AHC party the previous week, because she cast me a sidelong look. ‘You know what that sounds like, though, yeah? It’s a restyled version of when Aggie passed away and Dec sat outside your door so you wouldn’t be alone.’
I stumbled on nothing, still somehow surprised by my friend’s directness even after years of experience.
‘What’s that shrink term? Transference?’ She reached out a hand to make sure I wasn’t about to go toppling off the bank into the creek, but didn’t back off as she posed the question I could tell she’d been dying to ask ever since I’d told her where I’d spent the last few witching hours. ‘Are you sure you aren’t just using the Nod Next-Door to fill the Dec-shaped hole in your life?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said slowly, trying to do the right thing by my friend and give her suggestion serious thought, even though instinct told me to reject it outright. Dec and Theo resided in completely separate corners of my brain: one I’d only started speaking to a week ago and barely knew; the other was practically my soul mate. There was no competition.
I tried to explain the difference. ‘I’m always “on” with Dec, he puts me on my A game, whereas I don’t even have a Z game around Theo. I’ve come out of every single interaction with him looking like a complete idiot.’
‘So it’s just an “any port in a storm” thing?’
I felt a twinge in my stomach at dismissing Theo after he’d been so decent to me, but Zoë was staring at me in that special ‘looks like a Disney Princess, could actually work for an inquisitorial squad’ way of hers, so I forced myself to say, offhand, ‘Maybe.’ Although I couldn’t stop myself adding, ‘But his port is a particularly good one; very tidy.’
‘Hmm.’
I knew that ‘hmm’. It was the noise my friend made when she was letting something go . . . for the time being.
‘You know what, though?’ I said brightly, keen to move the conversation on before I accidentally let slip that there was something about Theo’s calm, solid demeanour that had, on occasion, turned me to jelly. ‘Those evenings with Theo aren’t actually the weirdest interaction I’ve had this week.’
‘No?’ she asked sceptically.
‘Nope.’ I tugged the collar of my coat more tightly around my throat. ‘I had lunch with Vanessa yesterday.’
‘Vanessa the supermodel intensely keen to be your new best friend? How could I forget? How did it go?’
‘Strangely.’
I explained how Vanessa and I had met up at The Brother again and she’d given the sculpture another long, hard look before ushering me into the poshest café in town. It was one of those hipster ones that serves everything ‘deconstructed’ and judges every decision you make as if they’d deliberately placed traps in their menu.
‘And, don’t get me wrong, it was a good lunch, a really good lunch,’ I gushed, feeling a little glow just thinking about it. ‘I had the spring vegetable risotto and I don’t know who their supplier is but I want to find out because I get that it is spring, but those vegetables tasted like the kind of spring you’d expect to find in a Beatrix Potter book. Like, any of the bunnies nibbling on those vegetables would’ve been wearing frilly bonnets, and–’
‘Okay, I get it,’ Zoë interrupted, ‘you enjoyed your soggy rice and vegetable dish. Skip to the part where the lunch made sense.’
I shook my head. ‘I can’t, because it never did. I mean, at first I thought she was giving me an update on my celebrity turn at AHC, because she started off by telling me that gossip still abounds at work; that Theo has been ignoring it and Dec’s been laughing it off.’
Zoë scowled. ‘I bet he’s been doing that fake, hearty laugh,’ she said dourly and I couldn’t disagree.
Hating the feeling of knowing what Dec was probably doing without the ability to confirm it or hear about what had been going on in his own words, I hurried on. ‘But then Vanessa started asking me all about what Dec was like when he was younger.’
As much as Zoë insisted relations between her and Dec were dead, she remained just as protective of his past as she’d always been, so I was unsurprised when she looked at me sharply and demanded, ‘You didn’t tell her?’
‘Course I didn’t!’ I retorted. ‘Not anything serious, anyway. I just said that he’d always been smart and driven. Oh, and I told her the story about how he’d pushed for that breakfast club at school and made sure everyone got a chance to start the day off with a full stomach.’
‘The surest way to make sure you fell in love with him,’ Zoë remarked dryly. ‘So she was collecting information on Dec?’
‘Maybe?’ I said, unsure. ‘But if she was, she was collecting it on Theo and me as well, because her interrogation moved onto us before too long, even though I kept telling her I don’t really know him.’ Which had felt a bit like a betrayal after the past few nights spent so comfortably in his company, although I wouldn’t be telling Zoë that.
I pulled a leaf off a branch hanging over the path and began to shred it. ‘Basically, for an hour she acted like any conversation I’d ever had with Dec or Theo was the most fa
scinating thing she’d ever heard and then left.’
Zoë pursed her expertly painted lips. ‘Weird.’
‘So weird.’
‘So have you got a fan, or has Dec? Or is she after getting back with the Nod Next-Door and wants to make sure you’re not competition?’
I threw my hands up, pieces of the ripped leaf fluttering down around us. ‘I have no idea! Still, I got the impression I didn’t exactly give her the answers she wanted, so that may be the end of it.’
And I wouldn’t have minded if it was, to be honest. Vanessa had been charming and flattering that first night I’d met her, but her keen interest in Dec, Theo and me had made me uncomfortable at our lunch and I wasn’t exactly going to be pining for her if I didn’t hear from her again.
We walked on, the cool air making my nose and ears tingle, but not unpleasantly. What was going to be unpleasant was Zoë’s reaction to my next topic of conversation, but I had to ask.
‘Have you heard from Dec?’ I winced in anticipation of her no doubt caustic response, but added, ‘Do you know how he’s going?’
I could tell by the puff of steam in the air that she’d let out a dismissive ‘pah’. ‘I could’ve sworn last time we talked about him I told you I was going to rip him limb from limb.’
Her tone was dark, but there’d also been a slight inflection that made me ask, ‘But?’
She upgraded her ‘pah’ to an all-out groan. ‘But he did call me to ask how you were going,’ she said reluctantly and I grabbed her arm with an excited squeak.
‘He did?’ I asked, feeling like I was right back in high school where my crush had begun. ‘And what did you say?’
‘That you were doing fine.’
I waited to see if she’d add more and, when she didn’t, prompted, ‘And? Did he say anything about a photo of me and Theo going around work? Or about being kicked off his team? Or whether he’s missing me?’
She shot me a sardonic look. ‘You’re really overestimating the depth of this conversation. It more went something like this:
‘“Him: Hi, Beauty.”
‘“Me: Don’t call me that.”
‘“Him, big sigh: I’m just calling to see how Gio’s going.”
‘“Me: Because you suddenly care?”
‘“Him: Give it a rest. Is she doing okay or not?”
‘“Me: She’s doing fine.”
‘“Him: That’s it?”
‘“Me: It’s all you’re getting, yeah.”
‘And then I hung up.’
I wanted to shake her. I’d given up contact with Dec because I had to, and it was maddening to me that Zoë, who was able to communicate with him without any fallout, chose not to. Actively rejected it, in fact.
‘God, you’re infuriating,’ I moaned. ‘You could’ve been a conduit.’
She fixed me with one of her trademark no-nonsense looks. ‘A cheat, you mean,’ she said bluntly, ‘a way to still have contact with him after you swore to me you were going to go cold turkey.’
My fingers fiddled nervously with the lining of my pockets. ‘I just want to make sure he’s okay.’
‘Gio, come on. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he’s a grown-arse man.’
Every now and again, Zoë did this thing where she pretended that the three of us hadn’t spent years living in each other’s pockets, knowing all each other’s secrets and witness to every last heartbreak. Thanks to Aggie’s influence, the three of us spoke and acted differently from our classmates, our goal always to get out of Jarli and make something of ourselves. And that was before you took into account the fact that Zoë and Dec had both grown up with a home life that was dysfunctional at best and downright dangerous at worst.
There were obvious differences in their situations. Dec primarily had to deal with his dad’s fists, while Zoë weathered her mother’s erratic mood swings and paranoia. But they were both protectors, Dec of his mum, Zoë of her younger brothers and sisters, and they’d both fiercely rebuffed anyone who tried to intervene on their behalf.
Was it possible to have a confidante that you never explicitly confided in? If so, that’s what they’d been to each other: understanding each other’s occasional mystery bruise or reluctance to go home in the evenings in a way I’d, thankfully, never really been able to.
Thinking back to those times, I asked, ‘Have you heard anything about his dad?’
Zoë stiffened. ‘No, of course I haven’t. And I don’t reckon Dec would thank you for banging on about his family stuff all the time,’ she added severely. ‘We’re not kids anymore, our parents’ shit isn’t our problem.’
I don’t know who she thought she was kidding. She was making it sound as if she and Dec had just moved out and never looked back. As if I hadn’t watched Dec pretend he was drinking spirits at the AHC party while unwilling to let a drop pass his lips in case it turned him into his father. As if all three of us didn’t practically stalk Zoë’s younger siblings on social media to make sure they were staying out of trouble. As if significant portions of Dec’s and Zoë’s wages each week didn’t go into making sure their parents continued to have roofs over their heads.
To that end, I gave her a pointed look, but didn’t push it. I’d obviously known before I even opened my mouth the response I was going to get.
‘I hope everything’s okay,’ I said in the end and she shrugged as if it wasn’t her problem either way.
‘So what’s the Nod Next-Door’s deep-seated emotional trauma?’ she asked after a few seconds.
‘What?’
‘Well.’ She looked at me slyly. ‘You know that’s your type, and you clearly have a crush on him–’
‘No, I don’t!’ I objected, much too shrilly.
‘Yes, you do,’ she said dismissively. ‘All that twittery “Hey, neighbour” nonsense made that obvious even before you started sleeping over at his place. Gio and Theo, come on, you’ve even got a cutesy rhyming thing going on.’
‘I’m not sleeping–’ I stopped and turned to face her, knowing that it wasn’t a battle worth having. I changed tack. ‘I like Dec, you know that. But, yes, fine, I think Theo’s attractive, you’d have to be blind not to.’ It was a small admission that I instantly regretted, sure that she’d take it and run.
Instead she folded her arms and countered, ‘He’s too pretty.’
I gaped, unable to comprehend how anyone could dismiss Theo’s obvious physical charms. ‘Well, he’s also really steady,’ I said defensively.
‘How thrilling.’
‘Plus super kind.’
‘He sounds like someone who cries when he sees a rainbow.’
‘You’re awful. He’s a lovely, lovely man.’ I saw her sardonic expression and hurried to add, ‘And I enjoy reading about jet engines over at his place, but that’s all.’
‘He’s just attractive and nice and kind?’ She was mocking me, but I seemed to have gotten away with not mentioning the few times Theo had set my heart fluttering, so I nodded.
‘Yes.’
Her gaze slid past my left shoulder and her mouth tightened into a smirk. ‘You know what else he is?’
‘What?’
‘Coming this way.’
‘What?’ I jerked around and saw that, sure enough, the Nod Next-Door was jogging down the path towards us: a muscular blond god in sportswear emerging from the mist.
‘Oh, no,’ I breathed, clutching at her as she started to laugh. ‘Do you think he heard me?’
‘Raving on about how hot and sweet you think he is?’ she whispered back. ‘It’s a distinct possibility.’
‘Stop laughing!’ I shook her arm, but she was undeterred and was still chuckling as Theo drew up alongside us.
*
Theo was seeing his neighbour everywhere, it seemed, their acquaintance expanding dramatically from one-sided hellos in the corridor in just a week.
She was with the beautiful woman he’d seen her with a couple of times before, the one with the dark hair and deep red lipstick
. She should’ve been the more striking of the two – she certainly held herself with the kind of confidence that suggested she was used to being the object of an observer’s attention – but his eyes almost immediately went to Giovanna. Her cheeks and nose were pink with the cold and she had her plump bottom lip caught between her teeth, her expression worried.
Wondering what was up, he pulled the earbuds from his ears and was surprised to see the anxiety clear from her face immediately.
‘You were wearing headphones!’ she exclaimed brightly.
Unsure why that should be such a positive thing, he replied, ‘Yes. Sorry, were you talking to me?’
‘Not to you, no–’ The dark-haired girl broke off with a wince as Giovanna’s hand tightened on her arm, but there was still a glint in her eye as her bubbly friend made hurried introductions.
‘Theo, this is my friend, Zoë. Zoë, this is–’
‘The Nod Next-Door, yeah.’ Zoë made no effort to conceal that she was sizing him up and he looked back at her just as frankly.
She was tall, pale skinned and sharp looking next to the smaller, more rounded Giovanna with her beaming smile. Different as they seemed, though, he could see that they were a unit, Zoë’s stance making it clear she stood for no nonsense when it came to her friend.
He had no doubt Giovanna had told her about their past few evenings and he wondered how she’d described them. It would’ve sounded strange however she worded it, he knew that, it just didn’t feel strange. Having her there with him in his flat wasn’t an intrusion, no matter how much she apologised for it. He maybe even worked better, Giovanna’s warm presence energising him just at the point that he was usually starting to flag.
‘Well, it was nice to meet you.’ He gave her a small nod, but stopped as the two women flashed him identical smirks and he realised he’d just lived up to their nickname for him.
‘I’ll see you later,’ he tried instead, and Giovanna widened her smirk into one of her cheery grins.
‘Yes, you will,’ she confirmed and he jogged past her, trying not to dwell on the realisation that, for that smile alone, he’d hold himself up for inspection by a million Zoës.
Cake at Midnight Page 11
