Page 12 of Repluse

Slipping silently from between them, I’d gone to my own room, showered, dressed in my favourite trackies and hoodie, and made my way out here to the kitchen in search of coffee.

There’s a fancy but complicated-looking coffee machine built into the cabinetry. Thankfully, there’s also a simple pod machine sitting on the side. Simple is what I need this morning, and when I find the pods in the drawer directly below, I go with the highest intensity number.

Caffeine is going to do nothing to calm my brain, but for the day I have ahead of me, I’m going to need the energy. I turn at a noise behind me and watch over my shoulder as Sam walks in still pulling a white tee over his head. A pair of grey trackies sit low on his hips, and his feet are bare.

“Morning, beautiful,” he says as he pulls down his T-shirt and his eyes meet mine. “You good?” He leans in and kisses the top of my head before quickly moving around to the other side of the bench.

“You had enough of us already, Mils?” Frankie calls out before he even enters the room. “You crashed on us last night, then disappeared before we even woke up this morning. If I were an insecure, paranoid man…”

“You, insecure?” I respond as he comes to a halt beside me. I overemphasise my eyeroll.

He smiles and shrugs. “Why you up so early?”

“I have to go see my mum.” I take in both men now around the other side of the bench making coffee. Sam uses the pod machine while Frankie pulls a bag of beans from the fridge and starts doing things I don’t understand with the complicated machine.

“Your mum?” Frankie questions over the sound of the noisy contraption. Although I will admit, the aroma of the freshly ground beans is delicious.

“She’s in a care facility on St Kilda Road. I used visiting her as my excuse for coming into the city for the weekend, remember?”

Sam’s leaning on his elbows, hands wrapped around his cup in front of me. Frankie joins him a moment later but stands upright.

“Why’s she in a facility? Is she elderly?” he asks.

“Not even sixty, but she has early onset dementia.” I pause for a moment, take a sip of my coffee, then continue. “She’s lived a life of excess, and it’s apparently taken a toll.”

“Didn’t she fuck off and leave you all when you were kids?”

“She did. I hadn’t seen or heard from her in years. Then one night, I get a call from my sister—she’s a nurse at the Alfred. A colleague called her to say a patient had been admitted and kept telling them her daughter was called Saskia and was anurse there. Sas went straight to the hospital, and it was Mum. She couldn’t remember her own first name, just her last, but somehow remembered she had four kids: Alexi, Danil, Saskia, and Mila. From what they could work out, she was couch surfing at friends’ places but had no permanent address. She was malnourished, and somebody at some stage had kicked and punched the fuck out of her.”

“Fucking hell,” Sam says with a head shake.

I pause but don’t look at him, instead drawing in a shaky breath as I recall seeing my mother for the very first time in my living memory. She was frail and gaunt, but those grey-blue eyes of hers—so much like my own—were still striking.

“I… I drove down immediately. Got her into a private hospital, had every kind of test done to find out what was going on.” I pause again, a surge of guilt making my stomach churn when I recall how good Logan was at the time, but it’s gone in an instant. “Logan paid for everything: her hospital stay, all of the tests. He insisted we get her into the best care facility when the dementia diagnosis came back.”

There’s silence as I take a moment to swallow down the lump in my throat before I’m able to continue.

“I know she did what she did, but she’s my mum, so I was grateful, so very grateful to him, for financially looking after her… until I realised it was just another thing he has over me now. Another way of keeping me tied to him.”

“Whaddya mean?” Frankie asks, brows pulled down over those gorgeous green eyes of his.

“It’s the first thing he threatens me with if I do something he doesn’t like, and that can be anything. If I wear a dress, a lipstick colour, cook a meal he doesn’t like, he threatens to pull the funding and have her kicked out on the streets.”

“You’re fucking kidding?”

“Wish I fucking was. Not only that, but his family now own the care facility she’s in, and whenever I come down here to visit my mum, he checks with the staff that I’ve been, how long I stayed, did I take her out. Everything about my visit.”

Sam’s still leaning on his elbows, but he’s put his cup down, laced his fingers together, except his index fingers, which are steepled and tapping against his lips as he watches me. I can see his jaw working as he grinds his teeth.

“So, yeah,” I say with a shrug. “Another reason—the main reason in fact—that I stay with him. If it was just me, I’d walk away. I’d have nothing, but I’d survive. There’s just no way I’d ever be able to keep Mum somewhere like where she is now. She can’t walk, can’t feed herself, and she’s mostly non-verbal. She needs twenty-four-seven care. If I leave Logan, I’ll have to work to support myself. That means I won’t be able to look after her. Sas has a family, and she works. She’d do what she could, but it wouldn’t be much, and I have absolutely no idea where my brothers even are. Not that I’d expect any support from them.”

“She had no problem walking away from you,” Frankie reminds me.

“Mate,” Sam responds with a headshake.

“What? She didn’t. Everyone in town knew Mila’s dad liked a beer, but she left her four kids with him and didn’t look back.”

“But I’m not her,” I state. “I know this…” I gesture between them with an upturned palm. “What we’re doing isn’t going to win me any Wife of The Year awards. Like I told you at Scott’s party, this is just me living out my fantasy of being fucked by two men at the same time before I settle down to a life of tedium, very bad sex, and motherhood.”

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