Air Kisses (15 page)

A text message chimed. I hoped it was Dan saying that he’d decided not to go, and that we should probably head to Mexico together forever. It wasn’t. I read Iz’s text, deflated.

Dec was back?
Dec was back!

Dan’s plane would be in the air by then, so at least I wouldn’t be torturing myself wondering if he’d text. I’d just be rereading the ones he’d already sent.

Chapter Eighteen

When I arrived at Iz’s at ten past seven I was dangerously dependent on fun people to lift my mood, and was trying desperately not to feel nervous about seeing Dec for the first time since we’d kissed. The table wasn’t set, the food was still in grocery bags, and Dec and Iz were drinking beers on the balcony. This was far from ideal. I was ravenous – ready to eat my own appendages – and a scene indicating I was hours away from being fed was not what I wanted to find. I tried not to be snarly.

‘I see dinner is about to be served?’ I said as I opened the sliding door to the balcony. Mission not to be snarly had failed, then.

‘Oh shit, Han’s in a food mood. Quick, Dec, offer your arm.’

‘Hi Han.’ He smiled and my heart melted a little bit. He was a rude shade of health. His skin was tanned, his teeth freakishly white, his hair had grown a little and he had a freshly shaven face: he looked fragrance-advertisement incredible. There was a warmth in his eyes that I’d missed the last time I’d seen him. Maybe he was in love again? Or back with Pia?

He took me inside. ‘You look amazing, Hannah. You been on holiday?’

I blushed and adjusted my hair. ‘Um, nope. But thank you. So, Dec, what brings you back to these parts?’

‘I’ve taken on a pretty huge telco client over here. They’re about to do a stream of massive teen-consumer events, which means I’ll be back and forth for a while, annoying my dear sister and crashing in her spare room to sleep among all of her derelict saucepans… Are you sure you’re not on a detox or something? You’re glowing.’

I blushed again and shook my head.

‘Dec, cut it out, you’re killing her. Now, Han, a beer? Some wine?’

Grateful for the distraction, I turned my attention to Iz. ‘I’m cool for now, actually. Starving, though – can I steal some crackers or something? I’ll find them—’

‘I’ll get you some, you stay here.’

Ah, Dec, ever the gentleman. I watched after him as he walked out of the room.

I wondered if Dec would’ve mentioned the kiss to Iz. I doubted it, but they were exceptionally close.

‘Decka, can you please get on to that linguine you’ve been bragging about all day?’ Iz yelled. ‘Oh shit, what a pig! I didn’t even ask: did you get to say bye to Dan in the end?’

‘Who’s Dan?’ Dec asked as he came back in.

Whoa. Dec didn’t miss a beat.

‘Just a friend. I mean, this guy I—’

‘Han just had an amazing two-week honeymoon with a total stranger. Best sex she’s ever had. Isn’t that right, Han?’

Okay, Dec definitely hadn’t told Iz about us.

‘IZ! Shut up! It wasn’t like that! Dec, your sister is being inappropriate.’

‘Oh, right, sorry: you and Dan played scrabble the whole time. Ha! Don’t play nun with me, baby – you was gettin’ it
onnn
.’

I wanted to maim her. Dec was looking at me with an unreadable expression. I decided to be mature and abort the situation entirely.

‘Iz, you’re a twit. Dec, excuse me while I go to the bathroom.’

I walked through the screen door into the kitchen, and Iz followed me.

‘Iz, I don’t want Dec to think about me doing those things!’

‘Why not? As if he doesn’t know you’re doing them!’

‘I just, it’s just that, well, he’s like a brother to me.’

‘Oh,
really
? That why you still blush around him? After all these years? Do you honestly think I can’t tell when you have a crush? Hannah. Please. Giz the Iz some credit.’

Right on cue, I blushed.

She smiled and shook her head. ‘You’re so obvious. Honestly…’

‘Iz! Shut
up
!’ My voice had an edge to it. She knew better than to keep going. Sadly, she also knew that when I snapped about silly things there was usually some truth behind them.
Whatever
. I had always been awkward around Dec; why was she making a big deal out of it now? I was relieved I’d never told her about Dec; the way she was carrying on now was already too much to handle.

I wondered if Dec had thought of me at all since our drunken bathroom kiss. I decided that he might have for a few intoxicated moments, but then he would have forgotten about it pretty much straightaway. We had been drunk, and even though he’d definitely made the first move, it was nothing I should think too much about. And anyway, I had fresh, delicious memories of Dan to be focusing on. An electric flutter floated through my body at the memory of our final session together that morning.

‘Okay, okay, I’ll stop.’ Iz put her hands up in surrender.

‘
Thank
you. I’ll go to the loo then help you set up the table.’

It wasn’t until I was in the hallway that I heard her say, ‘And I’ll have a little fish to see if Dec was all tortured about the idea of you and Dan just now.’

A stab of irrational rage pierced me: why would she do that? I could kill her! Dec wouldn’t care, and even if he did care, so what? Dan was a completely different species; you couldn’t even compare the two! Dec was the handsome, sensible, settle-down, see-you-at-the-altar type, whereas Dan was the fun, sexy, wild, spontaneous, let’s-do-it-on-the-lounge-room-rug kind of guy that your friends were privately envious of and your family openly feared.

And right now, that suited me perfectly.

Chapter Nineteen

Next to obscenely famous people and general practitioners, I was convinced beauty editors were the busiest people on Earth.

Being a beauty writer himself, Gabe knew this, and yet he still gave me grief about it. He said I was a goody-goody, a beauty suck who did everything she was told and went to everything she was invited to, even when it was after hours.

But I was still enjoying all of my outings. Especially if an international make-up artist or hairdresser was in town and I scored freebies. That was tops. I’d recently, to my regular hairdresser Johnson’s disgust, had my hair cut into a beautiful layered dream by the man who cut Scarlett Johansson’s hair (Winner, Best Haircut of My Life). His assistant’s blow-dry,
however? Not so hot. It was way too high on top and flicky at the ends. I looked forty-five at least, and, at the function that followed, Yasmin kept saying, ‘And now to Hannah with the weather.’

These days even my weekends were full of beauty stuff – I had spent all of last Saturday getting my hair ionically straightened at a small Japanese ‘salon’ in the depths of the fish-gutting district of Chinatown. My curls were gone; frizz was a thing of the past. I just had this amazingly straight, shiny hair. And it was flat. Stuck-to-my-head flat. The Japanese girl who owned the salon assured me that it would only be like that while it was setting, which took three whole days, during which I couldn’t wet it, put it up, or even tuck it behind my pretty-big ears.

The first time I washed it I was scared that my hundreds of dollars would all be made worthless by the water, but as soon as I dried my hair, I could see there was no curl; no cowlick; no boof. Just straightness and a totally normal, non-flat texture.

I was overjoyed. I could swim whenever I wanted, not care about rain, always look groomed and not feel like Homeless Holly when my hair wouldn’t play nice on the morning of an important launch.
This would change my life.

Jay thought it was a total waste of a good Saturday’s worth of shopping. She would, with her glossy Italian hair that had never needed to be introduced to a ghd.

Another recent job-related development was that I had put on weight. My tummy was chubby now, whereas before it had been flat, and my bum had jiggles where before there had been close-to-none. It was the new diet, although ‘diet’ was completely the wrong term.

Breakfast was coffee and toast. Mid-morning snacks were launch food – usually a muffin – lunch was merely a nice idea, or else completely over-the-top restaurant food, and dinner was sushi on the way home, porridge with a banana at home, canapés and champagne at a function, or squid and wine with Iz at a bar.

I was doing my best to counter the gentle filling up of my jeans with Bikram yoga classes with Jay at dawn, a pre-work walk a few times a week, and saying ‘No’ to chocolate-dipped strawberries, pastries and cupcakes four times a day. But I had become used to my new life and its side-dish of weight-gain. I still preferred busy over desolate. ‘Busy’ filled the void of ‘empty’ perfectly.

But the thing that consumed me most, and that had me feeling most tender, was Dan’s lack of contact. He had texted a lot – mostly filth – for the first week, and then we’d shared a few epic emails and some Facebook-wall banter, and there had even been a phone call or two, but now it was three weeks since he’d gone, and contact had petered out to a couple of texts a week. And whenever I texted him first, I always felt like I was interrupting him doing something, as his responses were either rushed or missing his old spark. This was precisely why I never texted first: you lost all of your emotional power.

It seemed that as quickly as I had won one round in the game of happy and loved-up Monopoly, I was now owing $40K and on my way to jail. I mentally kicked myself for having thought he would be as adoring via broadband or phone. He was a live-in-the-moment guy, a guy who had to have something directly in front of him (preferably sporting impressive cleavage) to pay it any attention.

In my more Zen moments I tried just to be grateful for the time I’d had with him, but it pissed me off that I had given myself to him so openly – no easy feat for a girl who had just put the last brick in place in her enormous self-preservation fortress – and then, mere weeks later, I represented nothing more than an envelope flashing on his phone that it was apparently too hard to find the time or energy to respond to. Arsehole.

I knew that on some level I was having a kind of emotional regression back to when Jesse and I had split, like all of those abandonment-type feelings had been quietly hiding in my sock drawer until the time was right to hit again.

Sitting at my lounge-room window, smoking (a nod to Forties’ screen sirens, who looked fabulous even when they were feeling murderous, and drank scotch, smoked thin cigarettes and made aggressive phone calls to jilting lovers on clunky black phones), I wondered what would become of me if guys kept toying with my head like this. Was I going to be able to feel ‘normal’ about a guy again anytime soon? Iz had it down pat – she and Kyle were so in love. Which made it a bit hard, seeing them clambering all over each other all the time, and calling each other things like ‘Schnooky’ and ‘Pumpkin-head’. They were even considering living together.

I wondered if I’d get to a point where there would be no weirdness, no freaking out if a guy tried to get close to me or showed signs of retreat. I started to feel angry at Jesse for making me the sort of person who viewed a boyfriend as a threat rather than a pleasure.

That word: boyfriend. It sounded so foreign. I had completely avoided the word, and in fact the entire notion, for almost six months.

Trucker barely scraped a mention, and if he did he was a ‘bit of fun’, or a ‘friend’, while Dan was only ever referred to as a ‘fling’. Dec was, well… Dec was different altogether. It was impossible to repress the guerilla thoughts of him that snuck into my conscious mind every so often, but I had grown used to quickly sweeping them away.

I felt ill at the thought of a new boyfriend. When I tried to imagine getting used to a new person’s habits, or meeting a whole new family, or going on trips with just one person for two whole weeks, my mind just kind of scrunched up and changed the topic.

Oh well.

In the movies the emotionally bruised loser always found love again. Here’s hoping someone was filming.