The girl who is always smiling, always larger than life, isn’t truly happy.
I have the strongest urge to march over to her house and fix that.
The manuscript in front of me might as well be written in Mandarin.
She’s interrupted my day, and I know I won’t be able to get back on track. All I can think about is her walking around, feeling like something is missing and trying to figure it out. I can sympathise. I haven’t been happy for a long time. I haven’t felt true happiness, ever. There have been good moments, of course, but I’ve never felt content.
Well, I think I was reasonably close when my parents took my sister and me to Disney World when I was six. The point is, Mila and I have more in common than I thought.
I should force myself to focus. The deadline is looming, and Leonard is expecting this back soon. I’m still only halfway.
Dropping the pages on my desk, I grab my mug and get up. Maybe another coffee and a thirty minute break will help get me back on track.
Is she really going to take the bus to uni?
All right, she’s not a child, and the bus is perfectly safe… but my car is safer.
Inhaling deeply, I jab my finger into the button of the coffee machine, and it begins grinding beans. She doesn’t need a babysitter. She’s a grown woman. She turned twenty-one last month. I saw from the window as her friends brought presents.
Jason is right; I need a girlfriend.
He knows exactly how I feel about Mila. He saw her for the first time when we ran into her, Wren, and Indie in a bar. Now I get much less shit about wanting her… or pining for her like a ‘fucking pussy’, as he likes to put it.
The machine pours the perfect mug of coffee, and I take it to the living room.
When my parents moved out, I redecorated. Now there are bookcases everywhere, as well as large lamps made from old telescopes. There’s a TV screen that is probably too big for the room, and soft, brown leather sofas that belong in a man cave where older men sit around smoking cigars.
I sit on the sofa and put the coffee on the coffee table. The legs of it are parts from an old printing press.
Books have been my escape for a very long time now. When I was ten, I found my nan on the floor of her kitchen during a sleepover. She was dead, had been for a while, and that was confirmed by the paramedics when they arrived. I didn’t speak for weeks after that. My uncle brought me a book. An old, battered copy of Lord of the Flies.
I started talking when I finished it. After that, I read everything I could get my hands on. Words are my therapy. I read even harder when history repeated itself.
There’s a knock at my door as I’m about to turn the TV on for some mindless entertainment. That usually restarts my brain, but I have a feeling nothing will do that today. I’ve had too much Mila time.
I open the front door, and Jason throws something at me. I catch it just in time and look down at a black tub of protein powder. “What are you trying to tell me, Jace?”
He walks past, inviting himself in, as always. “I have a spare hour and thought I’d drop in. You finished that manuscript yet?”
We walk into my living room. “Not yet. Why do I need protein powder?”
I exercise most days, at the gym and home. I have a lot of pent up energy more than anything else, but I’m not heavily into fitness and growing muscles.
Jason is a personal trainer at the local gym. It’s actually where we met. He lifts weights and looks like he should be on the front of fitness magazines. He’s the sporty type, and I’m the book type. We don’t have a lot in common, but he’s a good friend.
“You have great shape and definition now, but if you want the girl, we’re going to make her salivate when—”
“Let me stop you right there. It’s almost killed me to get to this point. Mila’s boyfriend doesn’t work out.” That much is clear from seeing him this morning. He’s not overweight, but there was absolutely no definition under his T-shirt.
Jason sighs and takes a swig from something green in his bottle.
Dark skin covers thick muscles. His biceps bulge.
I place the protein on the table, picturing it still sealed in six months’ time, collecting dust. I pick up my coffee.
“What’s going on?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing. How do you live across the road from her and get anything done?”
I sit down and kick my feet up on the table. “Today, I’m not getting anything done.”
“You should give her a job—work experience or something like that. Get to know her and wait until she falls for you. She’s studying English, right? No doubt the nerdy type is for her. You’ll be well in, bro.”
“Thank you for that.”
He drops down on the sofa. “Know what I do when I like a woman?”
“Have sex with her on a treadmill?”
He deadpans. “You should try it.”
Mila on a treadmill. Mila anywhere.
I take a swig of my boiling hot coffee.
“Or don’t, but you’re missing out, mate. When are you next in for a workout?” he asks.
I’ve been going less since I got some equipment at home. Last summer, Mila was out washing her car in a tiny pair of shorts and a hot pink bikini top. Four minutes later, I placed an emergency order with a home gym store.
“Probably at the weekend,” I tell him. “I’ll be working late all week at this rate.”
“After the gym, we should go out and get you laid. You don’t have to live like a monk.”
“I don’t live like a monk.”
Perhaps a part-time monk. I think I’ve had sex four times in the last year. All with women I’ve met on a night out, no names exchanged. Just a quickie at their place.
“You know what happens to an unused dick?”
“I have a feeling I’m about to find out.”
“It dies, bro.”
Throwing my head back, I bark out a laugh. “You graduated from where?”
“All right, I may have exaggerated. My point is, you need to get back on the horse. Ask her out or move on.”
“She has a boyfriend.” Who she is not happy with.
“So? Look, I’m not saying you try it on while she’s attached, but at least tell her that you like her and let her figure out what she wants to do from there.”
I shake my head. “We don’t know each other at all.”
“We spent a night with her and her hot as fuck friends. You could feel the sexual tension between you both. Even I had a hard-on.”
“That’s great.”
I’m purposefully omitting the story of this morning. He can get somewhat obsessed with Mila and me. It’s because he has no idea what it’s like to refrain from having sex with someone you like.
“If you’re not going to go there, maybe I could…” He stops dead, chuckling at the death glare I’m giving him. “I thought not, Reid. Seriously, you can’t have a word with the boss and get her some work experience? Unis are fucking hot on that. You could have her in your office, and then have her in your office.” He wiggles his black eyebrows, as if I didn’t get what he meant the first time.
“When do you need to be back at work?”
“Let’s go out and have some lunch. I’ll treat you since you’re still cut up over the girl you barely speak to.”
“I’m not answering my door to you again.”
“Come on, don’t be a baby.” Jason is on his feet and waiting.
“Fine.” I put my coffee down, and I stand. “Let’s go and eat.”
Getting out of the house is probably a good idea.
Jason waits outside while I lock up. I’m just about to turn when he says something that makes my stomach sink.
“Mila, hey.”
“Hi, erm, Reid’s friend.”
Grinning as I turn around, I jab him in the arm with my elbow.
“Ouch, girl. It hurts when you forget a man’s name,” Jason says.
Mila is crossing the road without fucking looking. It’s a quiet street, and you would hear a car, but you still look.
“Remind me,” she says.
“Jason. You were drunk and ranting about Abba the last and only time I saw you.”
“You have a better memory for names than I do. That night was, like, six months ago.”
Seven.
“You heading to the bus station?” I ask, trying to ignore the way my body is thrown into a furnace around her.
“Every two hours, the bastards come. Can you believe that? I know we’re a small town but come on. Now I’m going to have to go shopping before my lecture, where I’ll spend too much money and end up eating noodles for the rest of the month.”
Jason frowns.
“You live with your parents.”
“Well, I can’t afford to move out with all the shopping I have to do.”
“You’ve taken the bus once.”
“Okay, whose side are you on, Reid?”
Laughing, I raise my palms. “Fine. Damn bus companies to Hell.”
Jason watches us with as much interest as his beloved England football matches. He’s going to talk a lot as soon as she’s gone, but I can’t help myself.
“That’s the kind of support I was looking for. What are you two doing? Don’t you have jobs to do?” She looks at Jason. “Or steroids to take.”
I cover my mouth, chuckling while his jaw falls open.
“Steroids.” He coughs like she’s sworn at him. “This body is a temple. I work out for at least two hours a day.”
She turns up her nose. “You should get a girlfriend.”
“I was just saying the same to Reid.”
I’ve never thought much about committing murder before now. Mila’s amber eyes slide to me, but she doesn’t say anything.
“Well, this has been great but I need to catch a bus… and probably herpes.”
“We’ll drive you,” Jason says.
I clench my hands beside my thighs.
“Where are you two going?”
“To get lunch. We can grab something in town.”
“Don’t you have to be back at the gym in forty-five minutes?” I ask. What the hell is he doing?
“Ah, shit. Okay, I’ll head back there now, and you take Mila.”
That’s what he’s doing.
She shakes her head. “It’s okay, Reid. I’m fine getting the bus.”
“No, come on. We wouldn’t want you getting herpes now, would we?”
“Are you sure?”
The only thing I’m sure of right now is that I hate Jason. “Yeah, it’s fine. I need to grab a new notebook, anyway.”
Jason rolls his eyes. “See you later, ladies.”
“Enjoy watching egotistical men sweat and grunt,” she replies.
He laughs as he gets into his car and leaves.
“He’s a joy.”
“I don’t like him, really.” I open the passenger door and chuck my chin, suggesting she gets in.
“What a gentleman.”
I close the door and walk around the front with lead in my chest. I’m twenty-four years old. I should have better control over myself when it comes to Mila. That’s the only part of me that hasn’t moved on from my teen years: my need for her.
I get in and start the engine.
“Are you going to be a boy racer again?”
I raise an eyebrow. “Again? Have I been one before?”
“This morning. You drive fast.”
“I just don’t dawdle, and I slowed when you complained. I’ll get you to uni safely.”
“Good. I’m not ready to die.”
“Neither am I. How will you get home?”
She laughs. “You’re very concerned with my movements.”
“Just trying not to be an arsehole.”
“Does that usually take much effort?”
I take my foot off the accelerator a touch since I’m being judged by the woman who bought a bright yellow Beetle.
“Oh, yeah. The editor gig is just a smokescreen. I’m really a drugs and arms dealer with a woman waiting for me in every postcode.”
We join the motorway, and I feel her eyes on me.
“I should have guessed. No one is that perfect.”
My heart slams against my chest. “Mila, I’m not perfect.”
I can’t even ask out the girl I’m in love with because I’m too scared of something happening to her.