Page 38 of The Scandal You Started
“Dominic, tea or coffee?” Rayna asked, holding a teabag over the second of the three mugs she’d set on the countertop.
“Tea, please. Instant coffee tastes awful,” he said as he pulled out a stubby white bottle. He studied it carefully before frowning. “Face wash?”
River nodded. “Mm-hmm.”
Dominic grunted and shook his head as he put the bottle down. “Hand wash, body wash, face wash, shampoo—how many different soaps does one person require to keep themselves clean? Surely, one soap is good enough for everything.”
River chuckled. “Yeah, probably. It’s just a way for companies to make more money, I guess.”
“Did you find a pair of chinos?” Rayna asked, putting a spoon of coffee in for herself.
“Yeah, we had a pair of navy-blue ones in the lab wardrobes.” Just as River said it, Dominic pulled the trousers out and let gravity unfold them. “Rayna said you weren’t too fond of jeans.”
“I cannot comprehend why anyone would choose to wear such a coarse and uncomfortable fabric,” was Dominic’s response. “These, however, feel much softer.”
“Well, I brought your wallet too, so you now have some cash and a company credit card for when you go shopping, so you’ll be able to buy whichever trousers you prefer.”
“Credit? As in money credit?” Dominic dug through the bag and pulled out a brown wallet.
“Yeah,” River confirmed. “But it’s all calculated on one card so that you’re not carrying loads of credit notes.” River gestured to the bag. “There’s also a phone in there. And once we take a picture of you on it, we can sort out your identity card, and you’ll pretty much be sorted then.”
“A phone?” Dominic echoed, losing all interest in the wallet, and picked out the last item in the bag. “That is the machine that writes imaginary correspondence, correct?”
“Close enough,” Rayna muttered to herself with a laughing huff. He had a good memory, she’d give him that, even if his descriptions were a bit funny.
“It does more than that, but yeah, that machine,” River said with a grin.
“Note F...two-point-zero smart—phone,” Dominic read off the white box in his hands. “This is for me to use?”
“For the time you’re here, yeah.”
“How does it work?”
“You might want to sit down with River for this, because explaining how to use a phone is going to take a while,” Rayna said just as the kettle went off with a bubbling boil.
That night, while Rayna lay in bed trying to go to sleep, her phone pinged on the bedside cabinet with an incoming message.
She picked up the device and unlocked it. A very slow string of messages popped up in the notification bar.
Dominic:
Goof evrning.
Goid evenkng.
Good evening.
Rayna:
Hi
A minute passed before the next message came through.
Dominic:
Did it work?
Rayna:
