style="font-size:15px;"> It was embarrassing, having to go out into the kitchen when there was a 99.9 per cent chance there’d be a half-naked girl in there who always looked too good for that time of the morning. And generally with a smile that even lemon-scented Jif and the scratchy side of the kitchen sponge wouldn’t be able to wipe off her face.
I just didn’t feel comfortable.
After weeks and weeks of this, I started to get a bit shitty. I was sick and tired of being a prisoner in my own room every weekend morning. And things had heated up. Girls came over during the week. And when, one Saturday, a few of my CDs went missing, I moved up from shitty to simply furious. I didn’t talk to Jas for the rest of the week and decided that if things kept up like this he was out.
But things didn’t stay like that at all. Because after that Saturday the girl thing stopped just as abruptly as it had started. Jas didn’t go out with the friends from uni any more, either. The friends I’d never met.
During the week that it all came to a halt Jas took me out for dinner and apologised awkwardly. He said he’d been stressed, that he’d gone a bit crazy, hadn’t known what he was doing, but now knew he’d been acting like an idiot. He promised it wouldn’t happen again.
I didn’t know where to look. I mumbled something in reply and that was that. After that evening we didn’t talk about it again. And a few weeks later things returned to almost normal between us.
For a while, anyway. Because as time passed I started to realise something about myself. A thing that came as a bit of a shock.
I knew I’d overreacted a touch about Jas having all the girls over—and I’d felt as guilty as hell when I’d found the ‘missing’ CDs under my bed a few weeks after Jas had hit the emergency stop button on the chick conveyer belt. In fact, I’d worried and fretted and carried on about the girl thing so much I was behind on my sculpting. Uni was suffering too. I’d already had one extension on an assignment I couldn’t seem to get started, and it didn’t look like as if it was going to be handed in any time soon. I’d simply spent hour after hour during those weeks sitting in the boat shed doing nothing. Staring at the walls. Staring at the floor. Staring at the ceiling.
And I was still doing it. The staring thing. Especially if I could hear the piano.
It wasn’t just that, either. There was the weekend thing too. The thing where I’d wake up at five-thirty or so every Saturday and Sunday morning like clockwork and lie there, wondering if there was a girl in Jas’s room. Praying that there wouldn’t be and being overjoyed when it was true.
I kept on like this for months.
And by the end of the year, just a few weeks before we were due to move out, I was so far behind on my work I realised I was never going to catch up in time to hold my exhibition. Not that I even wanted to any more. Because I’d been slowly realising that there was something wrong with it all. Something not quite right.
I couldn’t relate to what I was doing, where I was going with my sculpture—couldn’t get involved. Up at the apartment I’d hear Jas working away, completely absorbed in his songwriting, frustrating me with every note he played on the piano. I would have given anything, anything to be able to block out the world around me like Jas and my mother seemed to be able to do for hours at a time.
Things had only got worse on the uni front as well. I’d received a conceded pass on my assignment, and was now trying to convince myself that the saying ‘third time lucky’ might just be true, because it certainly didn’t seem as if I was going to pass on this, my second, attempt. It was the worst of times. And then, as if all of the above wasn’t enough to be getting on with, I worked something out.
I’d been sitting there in the boat shed, doing little or nothing as per usual—unless you could call kicking around the bits of scrap metal on the floor doing something—when it came to me. I could hear Jas playing and singing. A new piece I hadn’t heard before, or couldn’t remember. It was perfect, whatever it was, and I knew he must have written it himself. It suited his voice, which I noticed instantly, because a lot of things other people wrote didn’t. He had a strange voice, low and raspy. Very distinctive.
Halfway through his song I became startled and coughed. I’d forgotten something. To breathe, in fact. And I needed to desperately. I felt something strange and brought one hand up to my chest. My heart was going thumpa-thumpa-thump. That’s when it came to me.
I was completely, desperately, totally, devotedly, idiotically in love with Jasper Ash.
I was in love with Jas.
Why I hadn’t realised it before was beyond me. It was so obvious.
The feelings I’d found so hard to control when he’d had girl after girl over for the night. The waking up early every weekend morning. The sitting and listening when I should have been working. The…oh, everything.
It was cringeworthy.
So that’s what I did. I sat for a bit longer. But this time, instead of staring at the walls, staring at the floor, staring at the ceiling, I cringed. Long and hard. And when I was done I wondered just what I was going to do about this. This…love thing. The L thing. It didn’t take me long to realise there wasn’t much I could do.
It was pointless.
In two weeks’ time, Jas and I would be packing our belongings into boxes. In three weeks’ time we’d be moving out. Jas to Sydney and me to my mother’s place in Byron Bay. And there wasn’t any way I could change that. Not my plans anyway, because my mother needed me. She was sick. And I was going to go and look after her.
There wasn’t any way Jas could change his plans to move to Sydney either, because he’d made this great contact. Some guy in the music industry who might be able to get him started in the business. So that was that. To say anything now would be pointless.
Futile.
Basically, an all-round waste of time.
Chapter Three
So, I shut up about it. I hid my feelings.
Oh, probably not very well. I have to say that much. I was probably as transparent as the thinnest of thin rice paper. I probably mooned around the apartment like a lovesick cow. But Jas didn’t seem to notice, or if he did he didn’t say anything, and things continued as usual.
Until our third last day together.
We’d been fairly busy up until then. Of course everyone in the building had to leave, so we’d spent the last few weeks running around and helping out with the odd spot of packing. Wrapping up endless china cups and knickknacks for the arthritic Miss Tenningtons—why old ladies always seem to own about a hundred china cups and saucers in rose patterns that never match is beyond me—and waving people off as their families came and transported them to, usually, nursing homes.
By our third last day together, our third last day in the apartment, just about everyone we were close to had gone. There was only a handful of people left in the entire building. It was quiet. Too quiet. Even the building seemed to know it was coming to the end of its days, because the day before the lift had stuck between floors—thankfully, there was no one in it—and had refused to budge for twelve hours. It had taken five workmen to get it started again.
It was almost midnight when I got home on that third
