RomCom Cliché

Chapter Twenty-Four

A position opened up at the District Attorney's Office at the start of April and Rebecca took the job with the grim resignation of someone who knew her talent would be wasted there, and would have been better used as the District Attorney. Still, it gave her a sense of purpose she'd been missing out on over the last few months.

Rebecca wasn't very good sitting at home, perfecting recipes and deliberating over whether to retile the guest bathroom and if she should add some native plants to the verdant greenness of the neatly tended garden.

Freen was ecstatic when Rebecca told her on the first Friday of the month, over a dinner of Chinese food and the expensive wine she'd brought with her from home in a half-hearted celebration.

It was brought up nonchalantly as they curled up on the small sofa and watched one of the older seasons of Love Island. Rebecca wasn't quite as thrilled by the offer of employment, especially after the initial silence on their end when she'd applied, but it was what she'd been hoping for and knew she couldn't be too picky.

It wasn't about the money either, of course, and she'd applied with the view of it being a stepping stone of a sort, her predatory gaze locked onto her new boss's position with the arrogant conviction that she would be District Attorney in the next year or so. She'd just have to bide her time for the elections.

"This is great!" Freen enthused, straightening as her fork lowered back down to the plate, a bright look of relief and happiness cohabiting on her face at the news.

"It's alright," Rebecca shrugged, "it's better than nothing, and, hey, it's not a call centre for free legal advice."

"It's better than alright. This is what you wanted! You'll be a shoo-in for the DA now; they literally won't be able to give the job to anyone else when they see how good you are."

Rebecca snorted and gave her a tender look of love, her lips twitching as she reached for her wine, "it... doesn't really work like that. And they're not too happy about my impending lawsuit for malpractice, but beggars can't be choosers. They know me and I know them, so we all know I'm desperate for any decent position and I'm better than they could've hoped for, even with Dawson's smear campaign."

Leaning over to kiss her, Freen dropped her forehead onto Rebecca's shoulder. "It'll all work out."

Not entirely convinced, Rebecca was relatively quiet and brooding for the rest of the night, staring up at the ceiling as Freen slept beside her, her breaths deep and even in the quiet stillness of the room.

She fell asleep after that, rolling over to wrap her arm around Freen and sleeping peacefully until dawn.

Rebecca always woke first and cranked open the stiff kitchen window to let in the early morning warm wind blowing in from the harbour, the overwhelming sounds of traffic such a novel thing to her as it drifted inside.

She made herself coffee and loaded the dishwasher with the dirty plates Freen hadn't gotten to yesterday, took the trash down to the awful-smelling dumpsters in the garbage room and meticulously cleaned the kitchen and whipped up a Blueberry pancake batter and let it chill in the fridge, ready for when Freen woke up.

She would've vacuumed too but she didn't want to wake her girlfriend, but Rebecca enjoyed the rare chance to indulge herself in the peaceful rote of housecleaning.

Emerging from her room past nine, Freen yawned widely and smoothed down her bird's nest hair, her glasses held in one fist as she rubbed her eyes and then slid them on.

Rebecca had finished her second coffee already and gone through a series of stretches on Freen's yoga mat, seeing as her strict schedule had a knack for falling apart when it came to spending more time with Freen, and she was starkly more conscious than her counterpart.