Page 78 of Begin Again Again

“Look at that smile,” she told Angus. “That’s what wanting to fuck someone senseless looks like, Angie.”

“He asked me how I slept,” Beth said, unable to help herself.

“Nice.”

“I’m going to ask him out.”

“Mmhmm.”

Beth banged out a message and didn’t even wait the requisite fifteen minutes before sending.

“What did you say?” Lara asked.

Beth unlocked her phone. “‘I didn’t sleep and that’s kind of your fault, Mr Thomas.’”

“Cute.”

“Then I asked if he wanted to go to the beach.”

“Nice. Straightforward.” Lara laid the now drowsy Angus into his bassinet. “Work for a bit, then we’ll do your resume?”

Beth, still feeling as though she’d snorted something expensive, agreed.

Three hours later she wasn’t so peppy. She’d just finished her work; Lara had sent her updated resume to ESD and Byron still hadn’t replied. Beth avoided looking at her phone and audibly speculated about whether he’d gotten her text, but it felt like Lara could read her mind and knew how anxious she was getting. And maybe she was imagining it, but she seemed glad she’d gotten rejected. Maybe she should have been more agreeable about Nathan’s imaginary sex appeal. Beth volunteered to get them roast pork rolls for lunch. She left her phone at home and when she returned, the imaginary stand-off seemed to have worked. Byron had replied.

Sorry, I’m flat out today. Maybe another time.

He didn’t even put a question mark on it, like he was actually asking. Beth had been expecting a knockback—no one who wanted to go to the beach waited three hours to say so, but it still stung like a fistful of pins. There was no follow up—no request for a different date.

“Not what you wanted?” Lara asked, watching her closely.

Beth shoved her phone into her jeans and handed her a Bánh mì. “It’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, he’ll be back.” She smiled at her friend. “Why don’twego to the beach? With Angus?”

Lara’s face lit up. “Seriously?”

“Yeah, why not? Let’s get out of the house and have some fun.”

Lara jumped to her feet and started collecting baby gear at the speed of light. When she wasn’t looking, Beth reopened the text chain and deleted her conversation with Byron. She might regret it later when she had nothing to focus her burning unaddressed needs on. But doing it made her feel better. Safer.

Later at the beach, she looked out at the waves and thought of Byron. She still didn’t know how long he’d played football or why he stopped. He might have failed to launch too, a young edition to the ‘under thirty and anti-thriving club.’ She could have looked it up or asked Lara, but she silently decided not to. Unless he reached out to her, she was going to let whatever happened between them go.

* * *

The next week dragged like a dead body through sand. Beth worked as much as her job allowed. She wrote her entire podcast treatment. She got a Brazilian, threaded her eyebrows and dyed her lashes. She re-debated lip injections. She tried not to picture Byron out drinking with Derek Hardiman. Tried not to picture the kinds of places an AFL superstar and his hot buddy would be able to get into or the kinds of girls who might be hitting on them. She added daily yoga to her running routine, she shelled out for microdermabrasion and a mani-pedi. She lasered her underarms and lower legs and finally got the skin tag on her right shoulder burned off. She sat on the edge of the tub dry-brushing her entire body every night. She thought of caged birds anxiously picking out their feathers and vowed to redirect her jittery energy to the podcast. Mostly she tried not to check her phone a million times a day, waiting for messages that didn’t come.

Christmas was closing in fast and Beth agreed, not without reservation, to spend it with Lara’s family.

“There’s no chance they’ll open the New Zealand bubble before Christmas,” Lara reminded her. “And even if they do, you’ll have to quarantine, and you can’t take three weeks off work.”

Beth was glad she wouldn’t be spending Christmas with her family, but trading her folks for Lara’s wasn’t much of a deal. By all accounts, Lara’s dad drank too much, and her mum called daily to ask if she could move into Beth’s room and look after Angus.

“What should I do with Beth?” Lara once asked on the phone.

“Tell her to stop freeloading and move out! She’s a big girl.”

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