Page 2 of Choose the Bears

“Daniel…” Jackie growled from over by the service desk, crossing her arms and tapping her feet as she stared us down. “And Imogen?—”

“Is leaving at four today,” Jade said smoothly. “She has an appointment, and she organised the time off with me days ago.”

“Did she now?” Jackie fixed me in her gaze, her eyes narrowing. “Well, it’s not four now, so back to work.”

“Tell me you’ve got a job interview,” Daniel hissed. “Waitressing, cleaning, shaking your arse, anything to get you away from this shithole.”

“I’ve got my own place,” I informed him quietly as we walked over to our checkouts, opening the lanes in time for customers to start racing their trolleys over. “I’m moving out.”

“So, you’re leaving that idiot boyfriend of yours,” he said, stopping to look me up and down with a grin. “Damn, girl, that requires a celebration.”

“Excuse me, is this lane open?” a customer asked him, about to put their groceries on the conveyer belt.

“For you, honey?” Daniel looked the older woman up and down. “Sure. Metamucil.” He picked up an orange container of fibre supplements before scanning it. “Need to keep ourselves regular, huh?”

“Um, yes,” the woman said, flushing slightly before stacking the rest of her groceries on the conveyer belt, but I couldn’t focus on him or her, as I had my own customers to serve. I smiled at the next lot who walked up and then went to work, ringing up their purchases. Every beep of the scanner, every litre of milk or box of cereal, seemed to bring me closer and closer to this.

Freedom.

I looked up and smiled at the couple I was serving as I told them their total, watching them swipe their bank card but not really seeing it. The rest of the day went by in a blur, until four o’clock rolled around.

“Time to go,”Jade announced, putting the red plastic sign on my conveyer belt, announcing this lane was now closed.

“Thanks for this—” I started to say, babbling out the words.

“No, don’t.” Her hands grabbed mine. “You’ve been working towards this for so long, and now…”

Now, I finally got to leave my idiot boyfriend.

He wasn’t even that bad. Mike didn’t beat me or sleep around, but… I hadn’t been happy for ages. Everything in me wanted to get the fuck out of our place, our relationship, but I wasn’t in a financial position to just walk away. Instead, I was forced to just endure him.

Until now.

I grabbed my bag and waved to the others as I swept out the door and into my car.

“There were a lot of applicants,”the property manager said, peering down her nose at me. My pen hovered over the rental agreement. “Many were very strong contenders, but your boss…” She looked up at me meaningfully. “Her reference sealed the deal for me. Don’t make me regret giving you this opportunity.”

To pay top dollar for a little one-bedroom flat in a block of ten, built well before I was even born. A unit with the original 1970s beige-coloured toilet and green and orange kitchen benches, but it would be mine as long as I paid my rent, and so I smiled.

“I won’t, I promise.”

And with that I scrawled my signature on the dotted line, signing my life away for the next six months.

With six months away from Mike, I could claw back some breathing room, avoiding the insanity of our place, of his friends. I’d be able to look past the title of being his girlfriend and find me again. I nodded as I stepped back, accepting the keys to the apartment with a smile before leaving the real estate office.

Everything in me wanted to go straight to the apartment and move in. It was furnished, even if the furniture looked as old as the building itself. I’d have a place to sleep, somewhere toshower and cook, so it was tempting to think about buying all new stuff and never going back to my old home, but if I could’ve afforded that, it never would’ve taken me this long to move out. I’d have kicked Mike to the curb months ago. Instead, I had to do that tonight.

“I really appreciate you giving me this opportunity,” I said, clasping the keys tightly and shooting the agent a nervous smile. “You won’t regret it, I promise.”

I was talking too much, over explaining, but I’d been waiting for this moment for so damn long. My brain, my heart, told me to get out, get the fuck away, while playing a show reel of all the crappy moments from my relationship with Mike over and over in my head—just in case I tried to change my mind. In some ways, that would’ve been easier. Change hurt, people acknowledged that, but it was also really bloody expensive. The bond, the trailer I was going to have to hire to move my stuff because paying for a removalist was too damn expensive, plus all of the stuff I needed to buy to replace what had been broken, damaged, or ruined from being in this relationship. Despite that depressing reality, I was here now, ready to make that move, so I sucked in a breath, then nodded to the agent before making for the door.

I’d hada long time to think about how this would go. Sometimes it was the only thing I had to cling to as I stared down at him in bed. His drunken snores and the sour stench of beer oozing from his pores was enough to make me shrink back. The wild boy I’d fallen for when I was younger was now just… sad. That’s what I felt when I walked in the door of our place.

There was shit everywhere because each time I tried to clean up, Mike made a mess again. I could talk until I was blue in the face about how cleaning up as you went made things so mucheasier, but he’d just nod along or bitch at me for nagging before going back to dropping things whenever he was done with them.

Why the hell would he bother cleaning up after himself if he had me?

I’d already contacted our current landlord, pleading with the property manager to take me off the lease. The fact I wasn’t chasing my half of the bond helped persuade her. The other was the property inspections she’d been forced to do. She’d seen both the mess Mike made and the desperation in my eyes, along with my babbled explanations of all the cleaning I had done and had taken pity on me. Legally, I was no longer connected to my boyfriend in any way.

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