slumber talk

4: Three Is More Than A Crowd

It was a sweet and perfect way to celebrate turning 23. But soon enough the bubble had to break, and life had to pick up where it had suspended over the weekend.

Tiffs went back to Cambridge early Monday morning - it was raining, and morbidly cold, enough so that both me and Tiffs were shivering when she was wrapped in three layers and I in my tattered dressing gown. Jeremy drove the distance over at 6:00am to give her a final lift in the C-Class, so in the haze of his fog lights and under the mechanical purr of the engine, Tiffs bid me goodbye. The rain trickled across the town skyline in a soft despondence, the same way her tears soaked my collar before she ditched my embrace for the cradle of her luxury ride. It hadn't stopped raining since.

That, I believe, was the only reason I put up with the nonsense that continued to fill my inbox each day. Our intermittent conversation and inventory checks of clothes and things she'd left behind were now being consumed by forecasts and planet positions and various taste and style quizzes, information she claimed was 'imperative', so that she could see how true to my diagnostics I was and research the heck out of the 're-birth' I was undergoing now that we were mid-November. I'd settled for doing a cursory skim of all her links once I sat down at my laptop at the end of the day, a mug of steaming cocoa or ginger tea in hand and soft blueish RnB playing from the stereo by my bedside. Some of it was interesting, I'd give her that. The rest of it I'd attribute to the insatiable, unstoppable nerd living inside of her and dormant control freak genes.

A break from this schedule was disrupted by a knock on my door come Wednesday afternoon. It was my day off, and I was marking the occasion by lying flat on my back across my unmade bed and coaxing the toxins out of a period zit with a Korean face mask.

"Ada?"

I wasn't able to answer, but that didn't seem to faze her. After a few seconds the door was creaking at its hinges across the carpet and a wash of bright industrial light taking over my cave.

"Why are you always in the dark?"

Then she gasped, loudly, as she saw my face. "What has HAPPENED to you?!!"

"It's a face mask, Mum." I tore off the sheet with my hand and gestured irritably at my oily skin. "It's for the pimple on my cheek."

"Oh." She blinked blankly in a failed recovery and tried vacantly to find it. "Where?"

I pointed more narrowly at the spot on my jowl. "See?"

Stepping forward and peering closer, she seemed to frown in consternation as she examined the puffiness. I got a hmmph and a nod in reply.

"That's pretty bad."

"I know."

"No – I didn't mean it like that."

"I know. Don't worry."

"Okay."

Her hands grasped the back of my swivelling chair as she backed away and leant against it in her work skirt, crossing her long legs at the ankles. There was a brief exhale before she started talking again.

"I need you down for dinner tonight."

"Alright."

I only realised the silence was dissatisfaction, not the usual awkwardness, when I saw her chewing her lip. She was doing it in the same way I did; shredding the corner cushioning with an incisor, rolling it between her teeth like a joint. Her brows were furrowed to a fault.

"What's wrong?" I poised the question as I shuffled up on the bed, preparing myself for some unsavoury snag on my defences.

She sighed, still tugging at her lip, before freeing it with a grimace. "It's Tony," she said. "He – well, he's a very family-centred man. He wants to have dinner with us – and meet you, specifically, before we –" she swallowed, throatily "– take things further."