‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Rose asked, stroking Luce’s hair.
‘Not really. I’ve been on the phone to my mum all day, I think she’s going to pick me up this weekend. I want to go home for a while.’
Rose always envied people who could ‘go home’. Unlike Rose, Luce’s home was not a two-bedroom flat in Clapham, where wine bottles doubled up as candlesticks and the radiator was always lined with knickers. Luce’s home was a countryside pile, where cashmere blankets were folded onto sofas and bottomless PG Tips lived in a silver polished pot labelled ‘Tea’.
‘Going home sounds like a good idea,’ said Rose.
Luce snuffled, wiping her eyes. ‘Distract me. What happened with Milo Jax?’
‘Oh, nothing. He was a bit annoying.’
‘How come?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Let me make you some pasta.’
‘You’re being weird.’
‘I’m just hungry,’ she replied, walking to the kitchen.
Rose poured an entire box of penne pasta into a saucepan and filled it with boiling water from the kettle. She reached for a jar of tomato sauce and placed it beside the pot. Her phone had no notifications, showing just the time and her background: a stock image of Budapest she mistakenly thought she’d taken herself, then decided to keep it because it made her laugh when she realised she hadn’t.
She opened Instagram. Her finger automatically slid left and tapped on the conversation at the top of her DMs. Her message to Milo had the word ‘Seen’ beneath it. ‘Fuck,’ she whispered to herself. There was no way of knowing when he had read the message. It could have been hours, minutes or seconds ago. For all she knew, he could be staring at the exact same screen as she was right now. If it had been hours, then the ‘Seen’ was confirmation that Milo had chosen to ignore her message. That he was just going to read it, knowing full well Rose would see he’d read it, and not reply. That would be a power play, wouldn’t it? Or would it just mean that he was too busy? Or that he had opened her message whilst in bed with a supermodel – and possibly also Polly Jenkins – and they had laughed about that silly little PR girl with the frizzy hair who kept following Milo around all night. That wasn’t what had happened. Rose knew that. But Milo would frame it that way to make the supermodel laugh before she gave him another blow job.
She paused for a moment of rational thought. Why would Milo open her message while in bed with a supermodel? And were his messages actually opened by him, or a member of his team?
A sharp pang of heat hit her right foot.
‘Shit!’ she yelped.
The water had boiled over and was now frothing all over the kitchen counter, where it had dripped onto the floor and over Rose’s toes.
‘You okay?’ shouted Luce.
‘Yeah, all good. Sorry.’
There was now water spilling over her phone screen.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ she muttered, grabbing a tea towel that had some patchy red wine stains on it to wipe the screen, shaking the phone until drips of water started to come out from the bottom.
The theme tune of America’s Next Top Model was now blaring loudly into the kitchen.
She managed to unlock her phone, bringing the conversation with Milo back onto the screen. Underneath where it had said ‘Seen’ was now the word ‘Typing …’.
Rose watched it silently and was certain no one had ever been this still. Her breath was neither rising nor falling because she wasn’t actually breathing at all. Then the word disappeared. Now, her message was just ‘Seen’ again. She let out a sigh and laughed at herself. When she looked back over at her screen, ‘Typing …’ had returned. Seconds later, it was gone again.
The agony was too much. Rose put her phone on flight mode and shut it away in the cutlery drawer with a loud thud.
She put both hands on the kitchen counter to steady herself, closed her eyes, and tried to inhale and exhale. Inhale and exhale. Inhale and exhale.
Rose and Luce ate their pasta side by side on the sofa, watching a twenty-three-year-old model from Texas crying because all her hair had been chopped off.
‘She really does look so much better now,’ said Luce.
‘Yeah, must be hard to have no choice in the matter though.’
‘I don’t know. I’d love someone to just tell me what I need to do in order to be beautiful.’
‘I guess that would be nice.’
‘Yeah, like, hey if you wear these clothes, change your hair to this colour and use this exact shade of lipstick, everyone will find you irresistible.’
‘Most people already find you irresistible, Luce.’
‘Oh, sod off.’
It was true. Luce always had someone after her even when they were at school together. And when she was in a relationship there was always a long line of men and women waiting for news of her to be single again. She would date both, often at the same time, but so far her only serious relationships had been with men.
‘What if someone told you that the thing that would make you irresistible was going bald and gaining two dress sizes?’ asked Rose, digging out a particularly cheesy piece of pasta from her bowl.
‘Well, they wouldn’t say that, would they?’
‘But what if they did?’
‘Maybe I’ll get a fringe.’
‘It would suit you.’
‘Yeah, I think so,’ Luce replied. ‘I just want someone to tell me what I need to do to nail life. Like, not just about how I look. But how I should do everything. What I should eat. Who I should date. How I should dress. It would be such a load off.’
