Page 65 of After the Siren
He couldn’t decide if it was a blessing or a curse that Priya was in Melbourne for a trial. On the one hand, she was his best friend and he wanted to talk to her very badly. On the other hand, she was very thorough in her cross-examination.
He didn’t think he was going to hold up in the witness box.
Priya had requested they go somewhere ‘as Melbourne as possible’, so he’d gotten some advice from Paddy and now they were in a second-floor bar just off Sydney Road that didn’t have a name, just a give-way sticker on a purple door. The furniture was mismatched, the lighting was soft and there was a neon sign over the bar that saidfuck transphobes.
Priya was delighted. She made the bar look like it had been decorated specifically to provide contrast to her patent-leather loafers and pussybow blouse. They ordered strawberry daiquiris, to the visible distress of the ambiguously gendered and extremely attractive bartender. The bartender looked even more upset when Theo asked for his to be virgin.
‘Debrief daiquiris,’ Priya explained, leaning on the bar and smiling at the bartender. ‘They’re traditional.’
The bartender smiled back. ‘Can’t mess with tradition.’
‘Shameless flirt,’ Theo told her as they made their way from the bar to find a table.
‘Always,’ she said.
It was the sort of place where you were basically sitting with the people on either side of you unless you managed to snag one of the two booths, both of which had reserved signs on them. Priya doubled back to chat to the bartender and returned to shepherd Theo towards one of the booths.
‘Do I want to know?’ he asked.
She grinned. ‘I’m just charming. Besides, we have things to talk about, and we can’t talk about them if Karen and Jan over there are sitting on your lap.’ She inclined her head towards two middle-aged women who looked like they weren’t sure how they’d ended up in a bar like this.
They sat down and she pushed the complimentary bowl of wasabi peas across the table towards him. At least, he assumed they were wasabi peas. They were the right colour, but something was off about the shape.
‘So, what’s up?’ Priya asked.
‘Who says something’s up?’
She arched an eyebrow. ‘That’s what you’re going with?’
No. He wasn’t. He waited until the straw was in her mouth, then said, ‘I had sex with Jake.’
Priya froze, her lips still wrapped around the straw. Theo watched the level of the daiquiri drop. Then drop more. Then more.
It took her less than ten seconds to finish the whole thing. She raised her head once she was done and pushed the glass away. Theo recognised her expression, because he’d seen it many times before. Not usually directed at him. With a couple of notable exceptions, he wasn’t the one in their group of friends who made terrible choices.
Priya retrieved the bowl of alleged wasabi peas. ‘Right, first thing’s first, are you okay?’
‘Why wouldn’t I be okay?’
‘I don’t know, because you slept with someone you couldn’t stand a few weeks ago?’ She popped a pea into her mouth, crunched it, then winced. ‘What is this?’
Theo tried one. It definitely wasn’t a wasabi pea, but it wasn’t unpleasant. ‘I have no idea.’ He took a handful. He needed to fuel. ‘And I don’t hate him. We’ve been hanging out. You know that.’
‘You definitely hated him three months ago.’ She leaned forward across the table. ‘I say this with love, but have you lost your entire mind?’
‘Probably.’ Theo prodded at one of the maraschino cherries in his daiquiri, trying to skewer it. Maraschino cherries did not belong in a strawberry daiquiri, but they were tasty.
‘At least you’re self-aware. So, what happened?’
Theo gave her a precis – the game, the win, the party, the couch. He got to the kissing part before she interrupted.
‘Were you drunk?’ Theo could hear in her voice that she was about to declare war on Jake Cunningham and all his demesnes.
‘No! Well, we both were, a bit, and when we kissed, yes, but he ... he realised and then he, uh ...’ Theo was assaulted by a vivid image of Jake, his lips kiss-swollen and his hair rumpled from Theo’s fingers, saying, ‘If you behave I’ll blow you in the morning.’ And then a sort of highlight reel of Jake doing just that.
‘I don’t want to know what you’re thinking about,’ Priya said.
‘Noted. I stayed the night, and then in the morning we, you know.’ He raised his hands to gesture and realised there was no appropriate gesture.
