Page 110 of A Home Among the Snow Gums
‘It’smylot.’
He gripped her shoulder. ‘I don’t want to worry about you.’
Now he sounded sincere, not judgemental, which was territory she found a lot harder to navigate.
‘Is there some Tom-related angle to this?’ He said it like he didn’t want to know the answer.
‘Why would there be?’
‘Because you are acting weird and he is acting weird, and Vera keeps asking me if there’s something going on with you and Tom that I need to tell her about.’
Hannah tried for blasé and patted him on the cheek. ‘I’m not weird, you are. And you can tell all the other busybodies to mind their own beeswax, including Vera, who you have my permission to blow kisses at. I’ve got this.’
She so did not have this.
‘I have to inputwhat?’
Kylie took a sip of the wine Hannah had brought. She’d also brought a frozen pizza, a tub of low-fat ice-cream and a packet of jelly snakes. Bribery, for when things got vicious.
‘Likes. Dislikes.’
Dislikes typing her likes and dislikes into a computer program, Hannah typed.
Kylie sighed. ‘Maybe this would be easier if we swapped places. I’ll just type in everything I know about you and you sit behind me to supervise and drink wine.’
‘Okay, okay,’ she grumbled. ‘I like horses and brooding men with lake-blue eyes. I dislike cities and brooding men with lake-blue eyes. How about that?’
‘Hannah, we are here because you want to forget about Tom, remember?’
‘I can take my wine and my pizza home. And my snakes. And my ice-cream.’
‘Fine, whatever,’ Kylie huffed. ‘Okay, back to the screen. Maybe lay off the details about brooding men so you don’t sound like a bunny boiler. For “likes”, people say romantic, broad brush statements, like long walks on the beach, dancing like nobody’s watching.’
‘Ugh. You can’t be serious.’
‘Fine, we’ll leave what you’ve typed. Now, you need to pick a demographic.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, I assume you’re going to tick the male box, but what about the age range?’
‘Mid thirties.’
‘That’s too narrow. This is Hanrahan, Hannah. I mean, seriously, the chances of there being an eligible single bloke within a hundred clicks that you don’t already know is negligible.’
‘How do you know that?’
Kylie touched her hands to her beautifully blow dried and orderly hair, then ran them down her highly coordinated outfit down to her thighs and back up to her immaculately made-up face. ‘Hello,lookat me: I’m a winsome single woman, I own smokin’ hot underwear, but I can’t get a date for love or money. And guess what? I have my own profile on this very same dating app and I have had no joy. Zip, zero, diddly-squat. And can I say I was a lot chattier than you when I did my profile.’
‘Wow. It’s really that hard to find a date?’
‘When you live in a small town it is.’
‘So my revenge plan is doomed to failure.’
‘Oh, honey,’ said Kylie. ‘If only you’d told me that’s what we were doing, I’d have made a playlist with a lot of Tina Turner. And Air Supply. And K-Pop! Is this … do you … now, don’t get angry again, but maybe it’s time that wedidtalk about what happened when you …’
‘Accosted Tom in his bedroom?’
