Page 28 of The Missus
Alanna settled into her seat, clicked her pen, and began to make notes. There was a lot to unpack here.
***
Alanna needed to go home and sit in the bath for a long, long time. Three clients today and then a meeting with her supervisor. She was dog tired. As she got out of the elevator, she saw Benjamin coming out of his place. She decided to walk right past without acknowledging him. Every time she spoke to him, it turned into an event.
She was almost past him and she thought he was going to let it go, but as they levelled, he asked, ‘How’s it going?’
‘Wonderful,’ she lied automatically. Shit. She’d engaged.
‘Good. I’m glad. I’m doing well, too.’
Alanna could see that there was something he wanted her to know, but she didn’t play along, just kept walking.
She let herself in to find Keira scowling at her laptop on the couch. ‘What’s the word for when you laugh but you’re not really laughing? Like a joyless, mirthless kind of thing?’
‘Sneering?’ Alanna offered.
Keira cocked her head. ‘Not quite. Fucking words. I hate them sometimes.’
‘Weird career choice, then.’
‘You don’t write because you’re indifferent to words,’ Keira told her. ‘You do it because you have a sick, co-dependent relationship with them that causes you to rage and delight all the livelong day.’
‘That makes sense, somehow,’ Alanna said, throwing her bag over her shoulder and sitting on the chair opposite Keira’s couch. Keira had her feet up on the coffee table, and although that wasn’t Alanna’s style, seeing it contrasted wonderfully with the inhabitant of the apartment across the hall. They were total opposites, Keira and Benjamin. Benjamin cared obsessively about things. With the apparent exception of language, Keira cared little about anything.
Alanna wondered if Keira got up one day and found Alanna dead in her bed, would she care all that much? Initially, she’d probably be shocked, but once the dust had settled, would she get over it pretty quick? Would she begin to flick through Tinder, looking for her next conquest while they wheeled Alanna’s body out?
Though she sometimes thought about what she’d overheard Keira telling her mother. That she should be proud of Alanna because of her career choice. Alanna had felt oddly moved by that. She didn’t know whether Keira really felt that way or if she just wanted to get under her mother’s skin. Sandra Lennox (formerlyHunter; formerlyKumar; formerly Hall)tended to bring that out in people.
It shouldn’t have mattered enormously if Keira thought well of her. But Alanna was realising that she wanted Keira to like her, because she liked Keira. She was exciting and funny and smart. It would have been good to count her as a friend. Alanna supposed that, by every metric of that term, Keirawasone. She’d saved her bacon more than once. But it was like that thing she said about attachments. Did Keira simply miss the part of her brain that did that? It wasn’t unusual, though people like that tended to come along with a set of dark traits that Keira didn’t appear to possess. So what was it?
How tempting it was to try and pin it down, really get to the core of Keira Evans. But Alanna fought that instinct, because Keira had asked her to. ‘Don’t ever shrink me.’ Alanna wanted to respect that.
‘Are you out tonight?’ Alanna asked.
‘I’m not sure yet,’ Keira shrugged.
‘You haven’t pinned it down?’
‘I haven’t even matched with anyone yet.’
Alanna checked her watch. ‘It’s already teatime and you haven’t matched with anyone, but you still think there’s a chance you’ll be on a date tonight? I have to say, Iloveyour confidence.’
‘It’s not confidence, it’s experience. I’ve done it many times. Here, look.’ Keira got out her phone. ‘You can watch me do it in real-time.’
Alanna was intrigued. An opportunity to watch the maestro at work? Who could refuse?
She got up off her seat and joined Keira on the couch. Keira opened an app and up popped the first picture. ‘OK, so we’ve got Sam here.’ Sam had picked a close-up selfie as her main pic, her face filling the screen. She was blonde, pretty, twenty-seven.
Alanna regarded Sam. ‘So what do you think about—’
Keira had already swiped left. ‘That’s a no.’
Alanna was astounded. ‘What? Why?’
‘She had a look in her eye, and I didn’t like it.’
‘What look?’
